Reply to post: Employee time is expensive

Employee time is expensive

If an average office worker costs a company £50000 per year and even an ordinary IT worker might cost £75000 or more then (say) £200 a year for Office 365 etc. is peanuts.

As long as that employee saves time in any or all of the following ways:

1) Save time not having to convert some document they can't read using an alternative system or finding out something isn't possible (like executing a macro or something) and having to workaround or worse.

2) Save time using a suite of stuff that works together, with Lync, desktop meetings, calendars that integrate and let others access them etc.

3) Save time using software they are used to.

The simple fact is that companies don't specifically like MS, they don't want to give them money all the time and many corporations have the money (e.g. search AAPL, GOOG) to produce systems to replace everything MS does.

I even recall MS being angry years ago because someone said they were a monopoly. Their answer? "We write software - anyone can replace all of our software with a better, competing product and we will be out of business, so we are not a monopoly at all"

Google has attempted to do just that is seems so why don't companies just switch over? Sure there would be pain perhaps but the refrain I hear here all the time is that it is often minimal pain and then it is plain sailing. Why doesn't another company just replace all of the MS stuff with something cheaper and better (or as good)?

If this is true (is everyone lying otherwise?) then these users can all switch and be done with the grief and hassle.

However, it seems that this may not always be the case for all users. Certainly, my personal experience as a technical person using OOO on Ubuntu was beyond dreadful. Firstly, there was no actual support for clever meeting stuff, calendar integration etc. so much more time was spent doing mundane tasks that a good productivity suite like Office could handle easily.

And often, OOO would simply hang and be useless trying to open the simplest documents. Just because Ubuntu never crashed (- certainly the kernel didn't so I could restart the GUI remotely if needed, which it was sometimes -) still meant that I wasted tons of time trying to get a simple document to be readable.

Perhaps it is hard to replace Office/Exchange/Lync/Azure/Windows. if they succeeded, their solution might cost just as much or more (or they loss-lead and lose money hand-over-fist until they bankrupt MS, which is very long time since they have 80 billion dollars in the bank)?

The people here predicting MS's failure have the same wishful-thinking mindset that people predicting Apple's downfall have - and Apple have nothing like the multiple product-service portfolio that MS have.