Business, Linux, Ethics and Standards - [Was]RE: [Sussex] Yet Ano ther Windows Bug

[Geoff Teale]

Mark wrote:
-----------
> Geoff,
> 
> I've spent the last 5 years of my life working for end user 
> companies dealing
> with suppliers, and you are absolutely right - I would send 
> out information in
> Word / Excel / Powerpoint format, and expect them to be able 
> to read it.

Yup. :)  

> Now I'm on the other side of the fence, and I _am_ that small 
> supplier.

Yes, and while the relative cost to you is much smaller (because you live in
a strong economy) the concerns are just much smaller versions of the same
thing.

> That's why I love OpenOffice.org so much. I was commissioned 
> to evaluate some
> options for Comet for a specific, small project. Their 
> in-house team had done
> some work - In Excel. My detail comparison is in the 
> OpenOffice.org spreadsheet.
> My final summary was writen in the OpenOffice.org 
> presentation tool.... yet when
> I mail it out to them after the presentation, they'll be reading it in
> Powerpoint.

Yes.  OpenOffice.org is very important and good.  But what happens when
you're customers move to Office 11?  90% of users just hit save, they don't
ever consider file format.  So suddenly OpenOffice.org is back playing
cath-up, if you are lucky it might open the files, but the format is
screwed.  How long can you wait for OOo to catch up again?  Better still,
what if you start dealing with a publishing company and they expect you to
deal with files produced by Quark Express?  Then you are stuffed, there is
no OpenSource reader fot that file format.

Of course, as you have said, businesses aren't interested in this at all.  I
was very interested to see how my last company reacted when doing some
business with the Malaysian government.  Malaysia is one of several far
eastern countries that have banned the use of proprietry file formats for
legally significant documentation.  They have realised that there is nothing
to stop companies from stopping support for old file formats - what good is
data if there is no way of interpreting it?  Now my old company had been
drawn into the idea of using excel as a delivery mechanism for long-term
economic analysis data, problem is that's against the law in Malaysia - at
no point could that data be saved exlusively in Excel format.  So where did
that leave us - well, with a lot of work to do in order to secure a
lucrative contract.  Our competitors on the other hand had trusted that
simply allowing their product to export to various file formats (csv, etc..)
would allow users to do what they wished with the data.  We sold that
product on it's tight integration to Excel, they didn't.  They got the South
East Asian market sewn up in a few months, we on the other hand pulled out
and decided to concentrate on the US and Europe.  See footnote [1] for the
final twist in this story.


> It's interesting, though, that I know what Word, Powerpoint 
> and Excel are
> called - but I have NO IDEA what the OpenOffice.org 
> equivalents are... I just
> think of them as "Word, Powerpoint and Excel" :-)

Much the same way that we talk about Hoovering, Sellotape and Xeroxing.  I
know several "mature" secretaries who consistantly tell me they having
problem with Wordperfect when I know for a fact they are running Office 2000
;)   It's also noteable that people get the versions of Office and Windows
confused.  Many people think they are indivisible.  How many people here
have met someone who thinks they are running Windows 97 or Office 98?  BTW,
I have taken to describing vacuum cleaning as Dysoning - language is not
static ;)

Footnote [1]
=============
As a side note, completely unrelated to this discussion, I'd like to say
that we got one final burn on that one.  We we're doing good business right
up to the point the first customer recieved the software.  Trouble was, when
you start pulling things like the total GDP of the USA in the 20th century
adjusted for inflation as @ 31/12/1999 you start dealing with some very
large numbers.  Our competitors delivered these numbers in plain text, we
dumped them straight into Excel.  Now, the total GDP for the USA adjusted
for closing inflation (as it's known) in the 20th Century was:
33,389,290,000,032,007,000,000 cents (finacial information is always
displayed in the smallest whole unit, in the US fractional values also
occur) - thats a lot of money.  Trouble is, if you dump that number into
excel what you get is:  33,389,290,000,032,000,000,000 cents.  OK, so you've
lost US$70,000, as the data was never stored client side prior to going into
Excel this figure was displayed as gospel.  "Big Deal", you might say, whats
$70,000 dollars over 100 years on a figure that is never wholly accurate
anyway.  Well, it's a big enough deal to loose several multimillion dollar
contracts.

I've seen exactly the same more than once in this company as well.  None of
this is really Microsoft's fault.  It's the fault of the developers
involved.  Trouble is, people have this mental block about computers,
anything a computer says is gospel, and this of course, is why we shold have
independent qualifications for programmers and those qualifications should
include a course of Assembly programming and an exam on computer science.
The further away we get from the issues the less we understand them.  It's
fine to use high level languages and tools, they help, but you can't tell
what they are an aren't doing unless you know where to look.

-- 
GJT
Free Software, Free Society. 
http://www.fsf.org   http://www.gnu.org


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