[Sussex] Life without Microsoft - day 1

[Geoff Teale]

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 10:39, Mark Harrison wrote:
<snippage/>
> In some ways, this is where .NET actually HELPS OOi. Companies are faced
> with a major migration anyway... so the difference in costs of migrating
> from VBA6 to VBA.NET and costs of migrating from VBA6 to OOo's basic/XML
> transforms would need a careful look at. Now _THERE'S_ scope for a white
> paper.

Yeah.  In a way Microsoft's own agenda has made life easier for Linux -
by forcing people down an upgrade path.  Crucially .NET and WinXP are
almost the first products in which Microsoft has actually sacrificed
some major level of backwards compatibility in order to make a better
product.  This leaves a door open - if you have to migrate should you
migrate to a company that are going to force change purely for the sake
of making money or are you going to plunge into the unknown (Open
Source).  Look at what companies like IBM, HP Sun and now Novell are
doing and you'll see that people see significant opportunity at this
juncture.


-- 
GJT 
gteale at cmedltd.com 
-- 
Advice to young men: Be ascetic, and if you can't be ascetic, then at
least be aseptic.