Re: [PLUG] A lesson for us all?

[Art Alexion <art.alexion@verizon.net>]

Tobias DiPasquale wrote:

> On Oct 27, 2004, at 7:56 PM, W. Chris Shank wrote:
>
> >>  So the real meat of my posting here is how something like this can 
> really hurt any chance Linux has for desktop adoption. The person who 
> set this up obviously meant well but just didn't have the knowledge to 
> execute well. I have to wonder how many other companies have "played" 
> with some half configured Linux and deemed it not enterprise ready?
>
>
> I'll bet a lot. We installed OpenOffice on our CFO's box and he was 
> digging it for a while. But one night, he tried to do something that 
> was a snap in Excel but took him four hours to get right in OOo and 
> that turned him all the way off. To him, free wasn't a good enough 
> reason to switch if he had to give up any kind of functionality and 
> I'll bet a lot of people in the business setting are the same way and 
> I can't always fault their decision. So we switched him back to Excel 
> the next morning.


That isn't a Linux problem, it is one you get doing almost any switch to 
a significantly different piece of software.  I was always a Borland 
QuattroPro (and Paradox) user.  When it looked like Novell and then 
Corel were going to run my beloved spreadsheet and desktop DBMS into the 
ground, I tried Excel and Access.  Things that used to take me 5 minutes 
to do in QuattroPro take me 4 hours of tries before giving up and 
switching back to an old QuattroPro version.  Ironically, I found the 
switch to gnumeric easier than the switch to Excel.  So IMO it is not 
switching to Linux per se that causes these problems in adaptation, but 
switching at all.


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