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Story: Ballmer: Longhorn is 'disruptive - but worth it'

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>>Open Office and Star Office are 90+% compatible with MS Office, just a hell of a lot cheaper! The 10% that isn't compatible is only used by 10% of the users anyway.

WordPerfect Office and Lotus Smart Suite are (or were) 90% compatible and much cheaper, but (almost) no businesses use those either.

MS Office has become a standard - new staff can enter a company and get to grips with email/documents/spreadsheets without needing additional training. The cost of training and supporting users on unfamiliar systems, plus the loss of productivity while they learn is more than the cost of the software.

What do you do with the 10% of users who have lost a vital feature? As this is one of the more obscure features, it is probably one that results in large savings of time. Do you leave them with MS Office and incur the headache of supporting two systems? Or take MS Office away and make them do it the hard way?

I don't think companies want to be seen as 'cheap' on IT (efficient/competitive but not cheap). If anything goes wrong it will be blamed on 'cheapness'. If you can't collaborate with a partner/supplier/customer because you run a 'cheap' office suite, they will regard you as a 'cheap' company.

>>What version of MS Office lets you convert your document to pdf or Flash? What version of Office saves in XML format that can be read by non-Microsoft software?

MS Office may not be better (though it is, and you can easily install a pdf printer drive and convert any office document to pdf) - that is not my point. No matter how much better/cheaper the alternative, business is not going to move away from MS Office. IT departments are loathe enough to roll out new versions of MS Office (in case there are training or compatibility issues), even though they already 'own' them (due to the lisencing changes MS pushed through).

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