| See I never knew about those viewers and instead got a copy of Office. |
How much longer will YOU be using Windows at the office?? • Page 2
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sam_spade 15,745 posts
Seen 1 week ago
Registered 20 years ago -
BartonFink 35,268 posts
Seen 1 month ago
Registered 20 years agosam_spade wrote:
Did you ever bother looking?
See I never knew about those viewers and instead got a copy of Office. -
ssuellid 19,142 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 20 years agoUnless Linux suddenly has commerical apps that are worth switching over to its never going to take over the office .
Even then you have to think how many applications you use everyday at work and how much time/cost its going to take to find an equivalent if possible, then transfer over to it, roll it out, retrain etc etc. The apps are not there to start with. Plus you have to get in new IT staff.
Not likely to happen is it?- apart from the lunatic government fringe evangelists who think 'this is free' without bothering to factor in the real costs.
Plus any commercial Unix apps have always been very expensive to purchase.
The only Linux boxes we had at work were for running CVS. And now that WinCVS has matured they have been dumped and replaced with NT/2k servers
BTW the thread title is a bit loopy now. Lots of companies sharing patents is not good news for the mostly anti software patent Linux peeps. Fuck all to do with when will you switch.
Edited by ssuellid at 19:53:06 10-11-2005 -
Khanivor 44,800 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 20 years agoUniversal standards have been one of the most powerful unseen factors that has made so many nations so wealthy. Tiny things, such as screw threads, that no one gives a moments notice to,. these things can contribute to success just as much as the grand idea or the hard work.
When you have a widget and you know that for pratical purposes, that everyone you give the widget to can use it, then not only can you sell more widgets but more people can benefit and profit from the widget's functions.
Opening everything up could be risky and hamper producitivity and business in general Sticking one to MS isn't worth all that -
itamae 10,213 posts
Seen 1 year ago
Registered 19 years agoRight, I've been playing around with Ubuntu for a while. It's definitely a step forward from the other distros I've tried. But the whole screen was shifted about twenty pixels to the right and I had no idea how to correct that. And Ubuntu didn't like my wireless network card.
Apart from that my first impression is pretty good. Should I ever grow tired of Windows I know where to look for an alternative.gif)
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itamae 10,213 posts
Seen 1 year ago
Registered 19 years agootto wrote:
*shrug* Don't know, I've never had to do it before. I don't think I've ever pushed a button other than the on/off one. Mmh, I wonder where I put that manual...
Re the screen, you couldn't just adjust the monitor...? -
itamae 10,213 posts
Seen 1 year ago
Registered 19 years agoNah, I like the way my TFT displays the 320x200 image. ;-p
What I meant was that I couldn't find an option to shift the image in Ubuntu's screen options, and I can't be arsed to fiddle with my monitor's options menu, which is pretty stylish but also pretty unintuitive.
Edited by itamae at 21:27:06 10-11-2005 -
sam_spade 15,745 posts
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Registered 20 years agoThere will be a screen shift option to let you move the image left, right, up and down. -
BartonFink 35,268 posts
Seen 1 month ago
Registered 20 years agoKhanivor wrote:
Exactly
Opening everything up could be risky and hamper producitivity and business in general Sticking one to MS isn't worth all that
The last job I had trained people to use Lotus Notes (what a piece of shit that is). Thank god I never had to do anything other than work with the databases. Anyhew I remember one company in NI they kitted out with the whole kit and kaboodle. Then they went to train the entire workforce (who had previously been using Outlook) over a period of about 4mths (fairly big company). OMG the uproar over it was unbelievable. Our guys were thinking after a couple of weeks ah there is bound to be a bit of resitance to a new product. Problem was it didn't get better it got worse so bad in fact that after 6mths the company withdrew the contract and went back to using Outlook (they still got paid). This is the type of thing you are up against. -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agomouse wrote:
I love hearing stories like this.
About six months ago, my whole office was Windows PC only. Then I bought an iBook, people ooh'd and aah'd and started taken notice of nice it was. Then we got a new designer, who was asked in his interview what his preferred platform to design on was. "Mac", he said. We said hello to two new PowerMacs.
Fast forward to today, said designer has left and his PowerMac has been adopted by one of the tech guys as his second machine. After two days dicking about with it he's considering purchasing a mini. "It just works" he says, with a big grin on his face. The other developer who had fiddled with my iBook a bit now owns a PowerBook.
There's now four Macs running in the office, and everybody who touches the damn things walks away wanting to work with one. People who aren't designers want one. My point is: something's going to change, because people are clearly looking for a chance to do so.
Oh and thanks for the title change otto... Can't belive the difference it made!??!?!? -
BartonFink 35,268 posts
Seen 1 month ago
Registered 20 years agoNo argument they are lovely machines to looks at and work with. Absolutely brilliant for design and anything vaguely artsy. I heard a statistic yesterday (could be crap) that about 90% of all the creative industries (design, advertising, etc) use them. However that only makes up something like 6% of worldwide industry usage.
I can just imagine the laugh our IT crowd would get if they said 'Now, from now on we are going to use Mac' they would be escorted from the building by men in white coats. Same would apply, to a much lesser extent, to Linux. -
spindizzy 7,755 posts
Seen 4 weeks ago
Registered 17 years agoKhanivor wrote:
Universal standards have been one of the most powerful unseen factors that has made so many nations so wealthy. Tiny things, such as screw threads, that no one gives a moments notice to,. these things can contribute to success just as much as the grand idea or the hard work.
When you have a widget and you know that for pratical purposes, that everyone you give the widget to can use it, then not only can you sell more widgets but more people can benefit and profit from the widget's functions.
Opening everything up could be risky and hamper producitivity and business in general Sticking one to MS isn't worth all that
I don't have the faintest what you're talking about, whether it's patents or file formats, but assuming for a sec that it's that latter .... given that MS apps can't even fucking read data by other MS apps (the problems caused by powerpoint are ridiculous), opening up the file formats would probably be good for everyone in that it would force MS to decide once and for all how the data is supposed to be formatted! Maybe then MS software would be backwards compatible (and we'd have the benefit of competition).
If something isn't done about this, we run the serious risk that documents written now will be very hard to read in the future ... say what you like about pdf, but at least it's a standard! -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoBartonFink wrote:
No argument they are lovely machines to looks at and work with. Absolutely brilliant for design and anything vaguely artsy. I heard a statistic yesterday (could be crap) that about 90% of all the creative industries (design, advertising, etc) use them. However that only makes up something like 6% of worldwide industry usage.
I can just imagine the laugh our IT crowd would get if they said 'Now, from now on we are going to use Mac' they would be escorted from the building by men in white coats. Same would apply, to a much lesser extent, to Linux.
What would your IT crowd say if you told them you was all moving to Unix with a popular and well accepted GUI front-end?
Or if they where told that by hosting all office apps and storage online over the internet they would have virtually no end-user support demands, and the 'office' applicaitons would be platform independant... Meaning everyone could use whatever OS they wanted, and the Office productivity packages would all look the same, to everyone...
They'd also have no worries about storage, DR, compliance, or backups as it's all kept offsite by google.
So lets recap:
Low to zero user support for applicaitons.
Free OS or pay for an OS if you *need* it...
No backend servers for unstructured data (files and documents)
No backend servers for email
No backend disk storage for archives, or backups.
No costs for Office products (word, excel, Outlook etc). No local installations
No costs for many other packages either (Even Photoshop has an 'open source' alternative (gimp: and it's bloody good!).
No tie-in with file format product dependancy (they all use xml standards or PDF, PnP etc).
Your only worry: Keeping that internet connection highly available (and these days, in a large city, it's a piece of cake).
Mega-corps may not like this (at first), small & medium business WILL LOVE IT. -
I for one, welcome our Linux overlords... -
ssuellid 19,142 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 20 years agoCarlo - companies don't just use Office and paint tho. You have the account system, HR holiday and sick system, customer service tracking system, inventory, licensing, programming apps, key entry, CCTV, code repository, test tools, etc etc. Where I work these are all windows based.
Its not free to retrain or replace your IT staff, retrain your users, investigate new apps, port to new apps etc. Simply too expensive to switch - and the apps don't exist on Linux anyway.
On top of this the major proportion of software developers develop for windows - without a market they are not going to switch - without tools they could'nt anyway.
This is speaking from experience btw as an ex unix/linux developer now working on windows apps.
Edited by ssuellid at 10:26:26 11-11-2005 -
ssuellid wrote:
Carlo - companies don't just use Office and paint tho. You have the account system, HR holiday and sick system, customer service tracking system, inventory, licensing, programming apps, key entry, CCTV, code repository, test tools, etc etc. Where I work these are all windows based.
Its not free to retrain or replace your IT staff, retrain your users, investigate new apps, port to new apps etc. Simply too expensive to switch - and the apps don't exist on Linux anyway.
Lets not be forgetting the VOIP software system either....;0) -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoFurbs wrote:
Old-skool way of thinking.
If you told my boss all our records were to be kept offsite and we'd be dependent 100% on another company to sort out a problem due to it being hosted offsite, he'd laugh.
Your boss is a dinosaur.gif)
People were like this about storing their docs 'on a server' ("What? It'll be slower than my local hard drive! I'd lose control of my documents! They might get destroyed!" they'd scream).
Then the servers where taken 'offsite' to more secure and central areas (you seen the growth of 'hosting companies' and how bullet-proof their power, fire prevention, internet links etc are?). SMBs could never be able to provide that kind of environment safety for their data. So they hold it on servers offsite, MUCH better system
20 years on, look at the 'network' and where your data is. it went from your local disk, to the network server, to servers offsite.
This is just the next logical step... -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agossuellid wrote:
Ssuellid, this isn't a cookie-cutting 'one solution for everything' argument. Of course some things are best kept local (databases for example are good candidates).
Carlo - companies don't just use Office and paint tho. You have the account system, HR holiday and sick system, customer service tracking system, inventory, licensing, programming apps, key entry, CCTV, code repository, test tools, etc etc. Where I work these are all windows based.
Its not free to retrain or replace your IT staff, retrain your users, investigate new apps, port to new apps etc. Simply too expensive to switch - and the apps don't exist on Linux anyway.
On top of this the major proportion of software developers develop for windows - without a market they are not going to switch - without tools they could'nt anyway.
This is speaking from experience btw as an ex unix/linux developer now working on windows apps.
Regarding training... Everyone already knows how to use Instant messaging and gmail and google (no-one taught them, they taught themselves)...
Software developers will program for the most common environment.. You virtualise the environment, the developers just program for the virtual machine (sound familiar?) -
Furbs wrote:
Umm, my boss runs one of the largest IT maintenance companies in East Anglia. I'm sure he's pretty in touch with what people want from their IT equipment.
It doesn't necessarily work like that....... -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoFurbs wrote:
Like I said, this model fits a lot better with SMB *at the moment* who can realise real value quickly.
Umm, my boss runs one of the largest IT maintenance companies in East Anglia. I'm sure he's pretty in touch with what people want from their IT equipment.
The mega-corps may suit their present model better. No 'one solution' is available that works for everything/one. -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoFurbs wrote:
You sure about that?
Carlo wrote:
Wrong I'm afraid.
Regarding training... Everyone already knows how to use Instant messaging and gmail and google (no-one taught them, they taught themselves)...
Who taught *ALL* your users Word, and Outlook? -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoFurbs wrote:
So what do you see happening in 5 years time from now?
Carlo wrote:
But isnt that what MS is doing (or trying), hence why its so big as a company?
The mega-corps may suit their present model better. No 'one solution' is available that works for everything/one.
Its the same old thing. 5 years ago we were told Linux was coming and would hurt MS. Maybe it has, but no to any great extent. -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoFurbs wrote:
So if you have to teach them all this on word, why not on OpenOffice Writer? No different? It;'s just YOU need to learn it... and if your tech savvy, you'll pick it up in minutes
Carlo wrote:
I do for alot of them! And I'm no expert. Bearing in mind we're an IT company so most of our users are tech savvy. When I worked at the bank I had to show people where word count was, how to format, search for a word, send to multiple email address', use the calender. And yes, I had to talk someone through installing and setting up Messenger. Frightening really.
Who taught *ALL* your users Word, and Outlook? -
ssuellid 19,142 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 20 years agoCarlo - you misunderstand.
Software developers program on windows for windows because there is a market. Without the applications users are not going to switch to another platform. Developers are not going to switch from developing windows apps to 'portable' apps as there is no market. Plus the cost of switching from one SDK to another - all that retraining.
Plus VM and portable apps were more hype than possible in reality. -
We have enough trouble getting our users to upgrade to the latest versions of our software, never mind switching to a different platform. Even the tiniest switch in software can have massive repercussions and many of them cannot afford to take that risk.
VMs are a great idea in theory, but in reality they are not a silver bullet. Our applications are Java-based and hence should work exactly the same on Windows, Mac and Unix. They don't. Each platform needs some tweaking, some platform-specific fixes, some different bits and pieces here and there. Often you spend as much time trying to get get a new section of code to run properly on the Mac as you do actually writing it.
You also have to bear in mind that many companies have some horrendously old legacy software which they absolutely rely on and cannot possibly switch as it's often custom-produced and hideously expensive to have redeveloped. We have people who are still running stuff under DOS 3.2. -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoFurbs wrote:
Try it out, it's no different.
Carlo wrote:
But why would I want to? I'm happy with Word, it works, I like it. I might pick up the basics, but my Word knowledge is a result of 10 years+ self learning. Sod starting from scratch again.
So if you have to teach them all this on word, why not on OpenOffice Writer? No different? It;'s just YOU need to learn it... and if your tech savvy, you'll pick it up in minutes
Except of course that it''l save your company vast sums of money and you'll be using open standards.
Buying and installing Office is a waste of time and money. Even MS knows and acknowledges this. -
ssuellid 19,142 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 20 years agoCarlo wrote:
Buying and installing Office is a waste of time and money. Even MS knows and acknowledges this.
Thats your opinion tho and frankly I think your are wrong.
I'll quite happily use free software if it better than the alternative - but OpenOffice isn't for me or the wifes business needs. -
Carlo 21,801 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 16 years agoBlerk wrote:
You also have to bear in mind that many companies have some horrendously old legacy software which they absolutely rely on and cannot possibly switch as it's often custom-produced and hideously expensive to have redeveloped. We have people who are still running stuff under DOS 3.2.
Custom-produced and hideously expensive to redevelop.
If only it was built on open standards eh
Closed and proprietry is bad for your business. you get locked in with a vendor who can then charge you whatever they want. -
ssuellid 19,142 posts
Seen 2 days ago
Registered 20 years agoCarlo you are obviously not a developer. -
Carlo wrote:
Blerk wrote:
You also have to bear in mind that many companies have some horrendously old legacy software which they absolutely rely on and cannot possibly switch as it's often custom-produced and hideously expensive to have redeveloped. We have people who are still running stuff under DOS 3.2.
Custom-produced and hideously expensive to redevelop.
If only it was built on open standards eh
Closed and proprietry is bad for your business. you get locked in with a vendor who can then charge you whatever they want.
Yep....which is why peeps should go the route of software business class VOIP systems...
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