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Story: Bursting the proprietary-software bubble

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Another MS Sponsored Story ?

If you read the comment, I quite clearly say that I have not benefited from the sudden upswing in Linux training as, this time, I'm not doing any myself. This comes from colleagues who are now desperately trying to find qualified trainers because they have been inundated with Linux bookings and that this is in sharp contrast to the last recessions, which killed the Linux training market stone dead. I know that because I was there and felt it along with the rest.

This much is a plain fact and is a fundamental difference to the last ones. Something clearly has changed.

The rest is an aggregation of the comments that go along with the stories from those colleagues. The proprietary software their customers are using is coming up for relicensing, so they are looking to drop it this cycle as opposed to next. They either pay for the retraining or they pay the licensing; this time they have gone with retraining, last time it would have been relicensing. The stories vary but they all sound roughly the same when boiled down.

I am surprised that Mr 315483 (or can I call you 3 for short) still believes that supply and demand sets pricing in markets like these. The price is set at a level such that the market is just beginning to howl with pain. There is no alternative source for Microsoft Word, you have to get it from Bill. Your Ford car will run on ESSO petrol this week and BP next week, there is no porting costs, or retraining involved. The price for proprietary software is a perception based thing with the cost of retraining, the amount of data to be reformated and all the other ancilliaries thrown in on one side and the savings on the other. Conventional supply and demand only works in truly free markets. Dropping the price would show weakness and would actually encourage more people that it's day was over and that they were right to think it was "time for a change"(tm).

As for slagging off OpenOffice based on some subjective comparison of the relative prettiness of the UIs; I'm not sure how much the cute appeal of the document editor used by the company boosts the bottom line. In straightened financial times like these, it is bottom line 1st, 2nd and last.

I notice that 3 (if I might be so bold as to use the familiar) said nothing about the stability, features or interoperability of the OOo suite, just that it didn't look like the MS Office suite, which it seems is a problem for him.

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