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AA dumps Open Office, buys Microsoft for ‘compatibility’
Sad, but true apparently... Full Computerworld story here if you want more details. But wait! Lets just see how this stacks up...
The article indicates that "the majority of AA staff have used Open Office, with a small number also using the Microsoft product" and yet "compatibilty... within the organisation and with external parties" is an issue? I struggle to see how, if "the majority" are using OO, compatibility within the organisation is a problem... and even when compared with external parties the solution is very straight forward, you just send them an OO cd or point them at OpenOffice.org.
Then we have the perennial "Roadmap" issue. This one is trotted out regularly by vendors with a barrow to push but you notice it's always the vendor that is pushing. Chances of the little old AA of NZ getting a feature change from the vendor? Approximately nil. Following on from that we can add the thought that given "the majority" of users (90% is the generally accepted number) use "a minority" of feature (10% is the generally accepted number here) a roadmap covering more features that people don't use and further reducing the percentage people *do* use seems a bit pointless. Oh, and by the way, OO *does* have a roadmap but they call it projects.
And so to price. 500 seats with home use as a sweetener (and does the users family get to use it as well?). Current prices for MS Office 2007 range between $460 and $630 inc.GST. Lets call it an even $545 for a total of $272,500. That would go a long way to getting a "roadmap" with OpenOffice.org. And guess what... they *STILL* have a compatibility problem as there aren't that many people on MS Office 2007 yet!
And all because a company convicted in the US for monopolistic trade practices won't support an ISO approved document standard. The AA would be the first organisation to bang on about consumer rights if any car manufacturer tried to enforce similar restrictions. And they imply that they are prepared to suffer even more vendor lockin by using the products to directly maintain the websites. The mind fairly boggles at the security implications of this. I have no doubt there is more to the story than has been published but it's clearly gotten "too hard" for the person that signs the cheques.
Never mind. Open Office will still be available no matter how long it takes the AA to realise their mistake.
Learn from the AA
I would suggest that the AA have something to teach us. I agree that the reasons outlines in the article were somewhat dubious, in that compatibility internally should have been a non issue, and that most organisations are already overwhelmed by the features in Office now, much less worry about a future roadmap. Perhaps there are some other reasons? Was this a decision driven from the top by IT masnagement, or was it driven by low user satisfaction? Those are the questions I would like answered.
Unanswered questions
Were staff formally surveyed? How much resource had been invested in training staff in OpenOffice and was there a support package? Was OpenOffice a casualty of the desire to use Sharepoint and the entire Microsoft ecosystem? Did AA get a special discount from Microsoft? It is hard to consider the implications without knowing the answers to these questions.
On a more positive note, the Italian parliament has gone open source. The dominoes continue to fall:
"Novell just announced Europe's largest rollout of Linux desktops with the Italian Parliament. Approximately 3,500 PCs will be migrated to Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, including those belonging to the 630 members of parliament. Not too shabby.
This makes it the second and largest parliament in Europe to choose open source. The French Parliament, with 577 seats, voted last year to have open source installed on all of its 1145 PCs. France decided on Ubuntu this February, and the migration in the Parliament should be under way.
The size of the Italian migration to open source makes it an important case study, said Pietro Folena, member of the Italian Communist party, who earlier this year proposed the switch. "It will present all public offices with best practices."
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9743802-16.html?tag=blog.2
Special Discount? You betcha.
Special discount? You betcha. That'll probably have been the tipping factor for the beancounters who're a) long time MS users, and b) decision makers.
A comment posted to the NZOSS mailing list today makes perfect sense to me; Microsoft Office is almost the antithesis of a standard.
The irony is that as a professional I have rarely need to exchange documents with anyone outside of my own organisation; when I do so, its usually a PDF (as much to prevent editing as anything else.)
So I agree theres a little bit of excuse-making in play here, but sadly I expect that joe-user probably reads the article and agrees, on the 'assumption' that MS Word is the 'standard' document format. And the assumption is technically incorrect, but practically not really that far off the truth - from a Microsoft users viewpoint.
So its about education here; vendor lockin, freedom of choice, portability... Users of OpenOffice have likely been convinced that these are of value. Users of MS Office probably don't know, or don't care.
It all makes sense when you realise that ...
Doug Wilson, Chief Information Officer of The New Zealand Automobile Association Incorporated, has also had senior roles at Microsoft (https://www.tuanz.org.nz/content/1721d307-c87e-4acf-8bcb-a76b62667501.html).
This is not to say that there aren't challenges working with open source (or Microsoft for that matter) but I would be surprised if open source was given a serious chance.