Looking beyond Windows 7 and Office; Pondering the alternatives | Between the Lines | ... - 0 views
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Gary Edwards on 21 Oct 09Gartner Analyst Michael Silver wrote the study, "Windows 7 is all but inevitable". Here is a quote explaining why it's near impossible to migrate away from MSOffice and the MSOffice Productivity Environment: There have been many organizations that have investigated moving off Microsoft Office, usually to a distribution of OpenOffice.org (including the free download, Sun's StarOffice, Novell Edition and IBM Symphony), but relatively few have actually made the migration. Impediments include switching costs, issues with macros, stationery, databases and mail clients. For better or worse, for the past 15 years, organizations have chosen to overprovision and deploy a product that can do everything the most-advanced user requires to every user for the sake of homogeneity. Organizations that want to deploy OpenOffice.org (OO.o) need to come to terms with the fact that some users will still require MS Office and they will be forced to support a mix of products. To Gartner, it makes sense to take advantage of viable perpetual licenses for Microsoft Office for as long as possible. The expensive product you already own will be cheaper than the cheap or "free" product you need to spend money to which to migrate.