Re: [PLUG] A lesson for us all?

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

Pat Regan wrote:

> On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Paul wrote:
>
>  
>
> > What happens to productivity when a new person joins the Company?  The
> > current employees are trained to use OOo, but the new employee is most
> > likely to only know MS Office.  How much loss of productivity is there
> > each time a new employee must be (re)trained?
> >    
>
> The productivity loss is probably similar to an employee who used to use
> Office 97 and is now forced to use Office XP (or the other way around).
> Some people make the transition very smoothly, others not so well...
>
>  

Back in the early '90s we adopted Windows 3.1 mostly to run winword 2.0 
& Omnipage 1.0.  At the time almost all law firms were using DOS and 
WordPerfect 5.1.  Everything went well until my secretary took maternity 
leave.  We ended up hiring a Mac user who understood a mouse and a GUI.

I think that ultimately, over the long term, this is a function of 
market share rather than some intrinsic ease-of-use thing.  Now just 
about all law firms run a flavor of windows and word.  Two things 
happened: 1) the older secretaries who couldn't adapt retired, and 
professional staff -- who had no experience investment in a particular 
technology -- started doing more of their own computer use.  For simple 
things, email replaced the dicatphone; for the more complex tasks, we 
started doing it on the screen ourselves rather than using the notepad.

In my industry, MS bumped WordPerfect by bundling Office with hardware.  
Can this happen with Linux?  Who knows?

A personal gripe re winword vs. swriter:  The winword document object 
model is much more intuitive and predicable.  Section formatting is 
stored in section marks, paragraph formatting in paragraphs.  I can 
predict what is going to happen to a formatted paragraph when I delete 
its paragraph mark.  After two years of working in soffice, I still 
can't predict how a formatted document is going to behave when I go in 
and try to move and change things.  This wastes a lot of time and is one 
of my major gripes.  On the other hand, I love swriter's word completion 
thing.

--

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Art Alexion
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