4 ms·

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working with

by dx034 7y ago

And in the end it's not Windows that governments and companies need, it's Office. Windows is fairly easy to replace for a lot of jobs nowadays. But working without MS Office is extremely difficult. It's basically impossible and certainly not worth it ensuring that all spreadsheets used will still work with alternatives, it also makes communication with other governments or companies much harder. That's where Microsoft makes the money and has its monopoly.

epigramx 7y ago
Google Sheets has a History of your edits and if that's utilized well can make it well superior to MS.
- bmon 7y ago
  I think using gsuite software would defeat the point of switching desktop operating system to avoid being dependant on a single company.
cm2187 7y ago
On the OS not being critical, I think that might be the case in 10 years, but large companies still have loads of internal desktop applications that haven’t moved to the web yet. But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10 times if they were to replace all these excel based processes. And I must say that I haven’t seen any good alternative to Excel for a non programmer to set up a custom set of calculations, or deal with data. I am trying to get more people to learn SQL in my company, which shouldn’t be too difficult. But you are not going to write a company valuation model in SQL. And I had poor results at getting non programmers to pick up coding (I offered 1 week external in class courses, lots of people volunteered but 80% did not really do anything with it).
- exikyut 7y ago
  I wonder what a landscape would look like where the OS isn't critical but everyone's still on Excel. Wine suddenly gets really really good, maybe?
GoblinSlayer 7y ago
It's difficult to work without ms office because the government uses it. That's why ms vigorously opposes all those "X Government Switches To Linux!" efforts, they know where the money come from.

by dx034 7y ago

epigramx 7y ago

Google Sheets has a History of your edits and if that's utilized well can make it well superior to MS.

bmon 7y ago
I think using gsuite software would defeat the point of switching desktop operating system to avoid being dependant on a single company.

cm2187 7y ago

On the OS not being critical, I think that might be the case in 10 years, but large companies still have loads of internal desktop applications that haven’t moved to the web yet. But agree with your point on Office, there are many large organisations which are literally running on Excel, and which IT budget would have to grow 10 times if they were to replace all these excel based processes. And I must say that I haven’t seen any good alternative to Excel for a non programmer to set up a custom set of calculations, or deal with data. I am trying to get more people to learn SQL in my company, which shouldn’t be too difficult. But you are not going to write a company valuation model in SQL. And I had poor results at getting non programmers to pick up coding (I offered 1 week external in class courses, lots of people volunteered but 80% did not really do anything with it).

exikyut 7y ago
I wonder what a landscape would look like where the OS isn't critical but everyone's still on Excel. Wine suddenly gets really really good, maybe?

GoblinSlayer 7y ago

It's difficult to work without ms office because the government uses it. That's why ms vigorously opposes all those "X Government Switches To Linux!" efforts, they know where the money come from.