Re: R: Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Ideas wanted for "How we're different" part of new LibreOffice website

I really am very pro-FOSS and pro-LO, but I want to interject a wet blanket here regarding 
companies picking up FOSS and migrating to LO.

I think the truth is, LO just isn't ready for that kind of prime-time. I have been using almost 
exclusively FOSS for five years now, even converting a school I do IT work for to FOSS (LO on 
Mint), but on the occasion when I have to go back to some development on MS Excel I feel like I 
just parked a 1981 Pontiac 4-cylindar and got back into a Lincoln. Sure, it's partly long-standing 
familiarity, but a person can spend a day figuring out something in LO BASIC or Python against LO 
and turn around and do it in half an hour with ThisThing.DoThat in VBA or via .NET Framework 
against MS Office. And that "long-standing familiarity" with MS is exactly what 95% (made-up 
number) of corporate techs have.

I've done years of retail sales in electronics, and one lesson I've learned is never to over-sell, 
especially not to businesses. Again, after five years of LO on Linux Mint I would never recommend a 
company go with that sort of software stack. The price of the CALs and software licenses may be 
significant, but it's still small compared to the extra work involved using FOSS.

Given some grant money, in fact, we're basically now moving that school to the Google ecosystem. 
Linux is the opposite of ChromeOS, whatever the technical relationship. Linux is about 
power-to-the-people; ChromeOS is about convenience-and-control. The latter is what 99% (made-up 
number) of companies and institutions want. Now Google is targeting the business space ever more 
with ChromeOS, and it makes sense.

It takes only one thing that doesn't interop, and corporate IT has a bad day, for themselves, and 
because everyone and their dog is showing up asking why they ever went to the "stupid new" software 
in the first place.

In my humble opinion time and effort would be better spent getting technically minded 
(post-secondary) students involved in using and developing LO, recognizing that business 
integration is still a generation away. Again, there may be some narrowly-defined usage cases, or a 
few tech firms that have the local know-how to move to FOSS since everyone uses Linux at home 
anyway, but very sorry to say, I wouldn't want to over-sell LO now and then be cursed because of 
it, even when its time truly comes in 15 years or so.
________________________________
From: Ravi Dwivedi <ravi@ravidwivedi.in>
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2021 4:49 PM
To: James Harking <james.harking@gmail.com>
Cc: TDF Marketing <marketing@global.libreoffice.org>
Subject: Re: R: Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Ideas wanted for "How we're different" part of new 
LibreOffice website

On 31/12/21 4:10 am, James Harking wrote:
> My reason is to promote FLOSS software solutions that can realistically
> compete with Microsoft Office.

Let me put my question in a different way:

Why should a company choose a free software(or FLOSS) over Microsoft
Office?

(Different people can have different motivations/reasons to use and
suggest Free Software and that is why I am asking this)

The next question is: What points do we put when trying to convince
these companies to migrate? And how do we convince them?

--
Ravi Dwivedi
https://ravidwivedi.in/
GPG Keys-> https://ravidwivedi.in/files/ravidwivedi.asc

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