From Langemark's Cafe and Computerworld: migrating to OpenOffice.org is 90% cheaper than going to Office 12.
"The industry's two major office suites, Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, will soon be releasing new versions. Recent research into these versions by large government departments indicates that for many sites, it is now 10 times cheaper to migrate to the new OpenOffice.org 2.0 than upgrading to Microsoft Office 12."
Plus, how much hassle will Office 12 be? Yikes.
I'm an Open Source fan boy so the thought of folks moving to OpenOffice is just great.
However...
When the happy news linked to above comes from a 7 month old article form an open source service provider published in the Singapor ComputerWorld on-line journal, well, let's just say I'm a bit skeptical.
The Mass reference is also misleading. Mass is looking to move to ODF not necessarily OOo - different beasts.
Also missing are the costs to retrain and migrate all the old stuff into ODF (and for complex MS docs or Excel sheets with macros this is a non-trivial exercise).
I'd love it if Mass pulls this off, but I'm not holding my breath.
Doug
Posted by: Doug | May 10, 2006 at 06:57 PM