Re: Cue all the usual stuff about incompatibility etc
This is the fault of management mostly.
There have been better solutions than VBA + MS Office for over a decade, but short-sighted (and frankly, ignorant) managers haven't prepared their people to use them: mostly because they want to avoid paying for training, and, to a certain degree, empowering employees such that they could find better jobs. Because, after all, that's the number one goal of middle management: keep your employees as locked in as the customers, even if it means that workers are less capable and ultimately won't be able to keep up with the demands of serving customers. Yes, I know it sounds like utter stupidity to anyone who has ever had to actually compete in the marketplace, but that's what's been going on since before many of you were born.
It's a crime, really. Well, not an actual crime. There are big companies out there, really big companies, where the business logic is wrapped up in MS Access forms. Tens of thousands of employees trying to do their month-end rollups using MS Excel front-ends to Access "databases". All because the company put MS Office on their desks 20 years ago and had IT leave the users to their own devices while the tech pros were tasked with the deployment of enterprise middleware systems (which although much needed, are several circles removed from where much of the work gets done).
That's just not right, and I'll guarantee that if anyone ever had the courage to collect real world metrics, could be shown to have cost companies serious profits.
But no one is ever going to run those metrics, because those who would have to direct the effort have too much invested in no one ever knowing the truth about their outright neglect and smoke blowing.
As for replacing MS Office or other commercial solutions like Oracle or even Google, with LibreOffice, I sometimes wonder if the delay in going there didn't have more to do with someone's uncle having made a fortune off those outrageously priced licenses all these years. In most cases of government or corporate waste I usually assume incompetence, but surely at least this time *everyone* knew the public has been getting the shaft for nearly a generation. It seems to me that people who can successfully play the stock market, and amass serious wealth for themselves in doing so, could have figured that out in short order. Maybe what we need is a pile up of more investigative journalism like The Register did here: to force the cockroaches out into the light where they can be properly stomped on, either in public corruption prosecutions or at the polls.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
