Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Novell reaches out to Microsoft Office users
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | It's open season on the Windows/Office desktop again, with Novell the
> | latest trying to lure away customers unhappy with the price Microsoft
> | charges for "bloatware".
This is actually a very important point. Microsoft is trying to push
their corporate customers into making commitments to Exchange, Office,
Visio, and Project that could cost these companies $millions of dollars
per thousand users. In some cases, the cost of upgrades, including
backups, upgrades to software, hardware replacement or upgrade, and
restoration of user information can easily exceed $1000 per user.
And if Microsoft has it's way, there will be another "forced upgrade"
similar to the stunt they pulled with XP, that will be happening in
6-18 months. Again, these will involve huge costs, and because
hardware will probably be replaced completely, the actual and
productivity costs could go as high as $10,000 per PC user.
Novell is wise to start approaching these customers BEFORE they commit
to all of these Microsoft "Lock-in Upgrades" and show them how easily
they can make the transition to a Linux oriented environment. Novell
can still offer Windows XP support through Xen and through VMware and
through Bochs to those customers who have purchased machines with OEM
Windows XP licenses. Novell can also support customers with older
systems such as Windows 2000, and Windows 98.
Unfortunately, Novell can't put that into a national advertizing
compaign because this would involve several trademark issues. Novell
can use the generic term "Windows" without infringing on trademarks,
the same way that Mac does.
Keep in mind that X11 Windows predates Microsoft Windows and those were
predated by emacs windows and smalltalk windows which date back to the
1970s. Microsoft tried to take ownership of the generic term, but the
courts have generally ruled that only the Microsoft specific forms such
as Windows 98 or Windows XP are actually trademarks.
> | [...]
> | According to Novell, SLES Desktop 10 combines low-cost with Windows and
> | Office interoperability, meaning businesses can deploy to selected groups
> | of users without completely ditching Office. Novell's desktop uses
> | OpenOffice 2.0, meaning support for many Visual Basic macros.
> `----
It's ironic that in a previous posting Billwg boasted that Visual Basic
had just had a huge increase in mindshare. What he forgot was that
most of that increase was due to the support for VBA style macros in
OpenOffice.
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/16/novell_desktop_microsoft_office/
Of course, one of the other advantages of OpenOffice is that you can
create "script generated content". For example, you can use PERL
scripts to extract information from content such as HTML documents or
other Open Office documents, and reformat them into OpenOffice XML
documents.
That's a nice, time-saving feature, that can result in a huge boost in
productivity.
One of the things that often gets missed in the "philosophical debates"
of OSS vs proprietary code is the whole realm of productivity. If
routine tasks that normally take hours or days of manual effort can be
automated, this frees those workers to do more creative tasks that will
increase sales, reduce schedules, reduce costs, and ultimately increase
profits.
What kind of REAL WORLD productivity increases is Microsoft actually
offering?
They spread FUD, claiming that *nix is too hard to learn, that it will
cost tens of thousands of dollars to train them, but the Mac OS/X
machines have proven this to be totally false. Linux machines, when
properly installed and configured for "Linux Ready" hardware need
almost no special traning efforts.
Novell is really driving this home.
OEMs are looking at the Mac sales and AfterMarket Linux conversions and
you know they have GOT to be thinking seriously about telling Microsoft
to "Take a Hike" on at least some of their product lines. Based on
current projections and growth rates, the Linux/Unix market is already
bigger than the Microsoft market (about 51% when measuring "Linux
Ready" and Mac sales together),
And Beta releases of Vista don't offer much encouragement.
It was hacked within less than 24 hours of a challenge by Microsoft.
It doesn't have a number of features that Microsoft had promised
because Linux already had them.
It doesn't have near as good performance (this may be partly because
there is debug code in the beta).
It appears that Vista will need huge amounts of memory.
It doesn't look like there will be any significant amount of 3rd party
64 bit applications.
Policy makers from government agencies to corporate boardrooms are now
beginning to require that OSS be given first consideration,
AND that proprietary Microsoft software/documents be used ONLY when the
OSS software is encapable of meeting an actual business REQUIREMENT (as
opposed to some cute game machine oriented whiz-bang which has benefit
to business producivity).
The guys at redmond got so obsessed with building a game machine that
the corporate community and government agencies have prepared
themselves to "pull the plug" on Micrososft's constant demands for $40
billion per year.
Things look very bad for Microsoft.
Things look very good for Mac, Novell/SUSE, Linspire, and any OEM who
starts shipping machines with Linux preinstalled.
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