Proper ettiquette for posting messages

Wed Jan 7 19:55:34 UTC 2004

At 11:43 1/7/2004, you wrote:
>And the latest MS Office is $699 + a five-year upgrade contract + who 
>knows what all.  Star Office is about $60, IIRC.

I'm working to have my entire office (all of about 15 people) over to 
StarOffice 7. I think it's $75, but I've been using SO-6.0 for over a year 
now and I am REALLY impressed. No crashes, no bugs, 99% file-format 
compatibility, and lots of neat stuff. Some things are not quite as good as 
MS Office (pivot tables), some things are much better (mail merges).

For 15 people, MS Office = $10,500. Star Office = $1,125. Savings, $9,375 
(89%). With the average price of a new computer being $600 around here, 15 
new computers are $9,000, and $375 left over.

Good deal. Once office productivity software that is sold by the millions 
and has a marginal unit cost of $5, charges me more than the actual 
computer, there's monopoly pricing in effect and I look for a way out. And 
once I have everyone on SO, allowing a few  machines to move to Linux, then 
more, then more, is a gradual process which hopefully will proceed nicely.

-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz
rpaiz at simpaticus.com
http://www.simpaticus.com