From: Adam Flinton 

Dave Ings wrote:

> What you say may be true of individuals, or corporations who haven't already
> made Office their standard (which must be all of a couple of dozen world
> wide).
>
> But when you have train x thousand office workers and the IT support staff
> on Office, you tend to look at the TCO of switching, versus the maintaining
> status quo, rather than the incremental licence cost. It's just another
> manifestation of the network effect.
>

Hummmmmm. How many people were happy with the functionality of Smartsuite
& yet who x trained to office? Little to do with functionality &
mostly to do with "industry stds". XML is rapidly becoming the
document std in many many industries & governments & OO ties
directly into that.


> My spouse is I think, more typical than not, of non-technical office workers
> (she is a bank manager). She looses patience in learning any new application
> after about 5 minutes of instruction. To her it's a total bore that gets in
> the way of her real job. Multiply her by a few thousand and you begin to see
> the real world impediments to switching any entrenched piece of corporate
> software.


& Yet the majority used to use Smartsuite (e.g. 123) products or
WordPerfect (e.g. WordPerfect) products & yet have x trained to MS Office.

Adam

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