It opens the door. Is he running ms office on linux? It doesn't appear that he is. Getting the GNU/Linux into the door is the first step. His company realizing the uptime/stability/total cost of ownership savings is the next step.
After that, it's all downhill from there.
There's no urgency, hard sell, or all out lobbying necessary with GNU/Linux anymore. The companies are realizing this more and more on a daily basis. The small and mid size business segments are reflecting this in linux server sales, and the daily announcements of governments foreign and domestic, states and localities are all contributing to the buzz.
High profile switches from ms office and from ms servers and operating systems are piquing the curiousity of business owners in the smb segment, and are making enterprise CIOs think twice on whether they should sign that long term onerous ms contract when their competition and others in their industry segments are making FOSS announcements. Is the CIO going to make a costly mistake in continuing to stubbornly ignore FOSS? Is this going to come back to bite him in the ass later?
The guy's company may feel that office is necessary because of access, and ms will do everything to perpetuate this myth, but at some point in time, the guy or his company will hear of others in their situation or using access for similar purposes who have successfully made the switch. In the meantime, they may have made the migration to the linux operating system. And picked up the necessary support and contacts they need for further migration.
Don't knock ms office on linux. That's how quite a few businesses will begin their migration. And that's how the application developers will realize they should be building for linux, not for emulation on linux.
MS office is very often touted as THE application that holds businesses back. It may be true in a lot of cases, but I'd say there are more specialized applications specific to particular industries that hold the key for the majority of desktops in a business.
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Re:vb and access
Posted by: Fonze on December 18, 2003 07:14 AMAfter that, it's all downhill from there.
There's no urgency, hard sell, or all out lobbying necessary with GNU/Linux anymore. The companies are realizing this more and more on a daily basis. The small and mid size business segments are reflecting this in linux server sales, and the daily announcements of governments foreign and domestic, states and localities are all contributing to the buzz.
High profile switches from ms office and from ms servers and operating systems are piquing the curiousity of business owners in the smb segment, and are making enterprise CIOs think twice on whether they should sign that long term onerous ms contract when their competition and others in their industry segments are making FOSS announcements. Is the CIO going to make a costly mistake in continuing to stubbornly ignore FOSS? Is this going to come back to bite him in the ass later?
The guy's company may feel that office is necessary because of access, and ms will do everything to perpetuate this myth, but at some point in time, the guy or his company will hear of others in their situation or using access for similar purposes who have successfully made the switch. In the meantime, they may have made the migration to the linux operating system. And picked up the necessary support and contacts they need for further migration.
Don't knock ms office on linux. That's how quite a few businesses will begin their migration. And that's how the application developers will realize they should be building for linux, not for emulation on linux.
MS office is very often touted as THE application that holds businesses back. It may be true in a lot of cases, but I'd say there are more specialized applications specific to particular industries that hold the key for the majority of desktops in a business.
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