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To: Kashish King who wrote (4839)	4/30/2000 1:42:00 PM
From: BP Ritchie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5102

re: 'Anybody here actually use Novell's, er, Corel's Office?' I do. I like it better than MS Office, have that too. I bought MS Office to stay 'compatible' with customers ... I bought WP Office to use. WP Office is definitely a much better deal, cheaper, much easier to use, more (and better implemented) features that I actually use, and much less complexity. I would rather not use most of the latest 'features' of MS Office, but occasionally get 'pulled' into it because someone that I work with feels the need to demonstrate their newfound 'technical' prowess by showing that they actually know how to use ALL of the features to create really spiffy looking 'show pieces'. These often quickly atrophy because their creators can't afford the maintenance time to keep them current. Does anybody have a good understanding of why so many people use MS Office instead of WP Office? I've asked dozens of customers ... the most common answer is support cost, they believe (MSFT told them so it must be true) that their Help Desk support needs to become single vendor in order to remain cost effective ... since they already know that they 'must have' Windows their application selection choice is nearly made for them (same scenario for Network servers BTW ... nothing wrong with Novell, but why have two vendors?). I haven't found anyone that has any real numbers from their own experience to validate this decision ... they all quote data that came from their MSFT sales rep. Most of the real users don't care that much, other than file conversion hassles ... and, it's easier for them to share documents in source form when everyone uses the same formats & products (still not 'standardized' even within MS Products). Except for their 'DataBase' ... nearly all seem to know how to use Access, but not any other vendor product. I think both dBase and Paradox are easier and just as effective, but hardly anyone seems to know much about them now. I think this happened because of the MS 'bundling' sales strategy that introduced so many new users to Access as their first experience with a DB product they could actually use before they had actually decided they could get some benefit from a DB product. Wonder if this will change much if MSFT really is broken up?