Reply to post: Re: The economics just don't stack up

Oh dear, Microsoft: UK.gov signs deal with LibreOffice

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: The economics just don't stack up

Sorry, but you have the retraining excuse exactly backwards:

Every single release of MS Office came with a dramatic UI change, because that was pretty much the only reason they could get people to upgrade after the game with the file formats was stopped.

This has two consequences:

1 - the cost to upgrade to yet-another-version of MS Office is simply equivalent to that of training for the use of LO. So, in your comparison the one negates the other, cost x exists on either side and cancel each other out.

2 - LO's UI has thankfully not changed significantly over the years. That means that the educational costs are a one-off, versus a recurring charge roughly every 3 years (the MS Office release cycle). What's more, you don't have the resulting productivity hit in the middle where even after training people have to figure out where the f*ck they stuck useful functions this time around. As far as I can tell, there has yet to be an MS Office update that has actually increased productivity in a provable way, something I find ironic because it is the exact basis on which the upgrade spend is often justified.

That is, of course, not taking into account that you have to have to upgrade the OS every 3 years as well, because -by an amazing coincidence- the vendor happens to sell that too.

Further savings are realised as LO versions tend to be file compatible so there is no urgent need to upgrade everything as soon as a new version is released, you can do a rolling upgrade at your leisure and the only costs you'd be looking at are time - I challenge you to find any office worker who can spot the differences between LO 4 and 5 without a lot of searching, especially when it comes to functionality. It gets better with every release, but it doesn't destroy existing functionality in the process like MS Office tends to do.

The only challenge I can find with LO use is Impress. That really needs a lot of work, but I'd model it on Apple's Keynote rather than Powerpoint. Powerpoint suffers badly from featuritus, whereas Keynote promotes simplicity.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon