Re:Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'
by niels_olson on Monday January 26, 2009 @09:20AM
(#450411)
> Microsoft trained and Microsoft loyal sysadmins who are anything but convinced of Linux superiority
True that. That's huge. The biggest sentence in the whole post. That's your thesis, right there. Those are the people who are married to IE and MSFT Office. You can't even get them to install OpenOffice, and if you want to run FF, you better smuggle it in on a thumb drive. And there are a lot of these MSFT trained folks out there. One only needs to make one call to the help desk of any large corporation to find this out. Or try to start a new project.
Yes, there's the blue W and the green X. But for some reason Microsoft decided to take all the familiarity away from people in Office 2007. They have replaced all the menus, dialog boxes, names, icons, etc, with something completely new and unfamiliar.
No, not just different menu items or toolbox buttons, they have replaced these familiar controls themselves with a huge splurge of alien somethings that cover about a quarter of the screen with even more bloat than there was before.
In the next few years, companies will have to answer one question: Does it cost more to retrain our staff in Office 2007 and pay for the new version, or does it cost more to train them in OpenOffice and pay nothing for the software? Some may even ask whether something like google apps isn't sufficient.
The real issues are not familiarity or cost. The real issue is file formats and macros and glue code that companies rely on, and the fact that Microsoft shops have Microsoft trained and Microsoft loyal sysadmins who are anything but convinced of Linux superiority. They're not going to install Linux for you upon request. That's fantasy land.