4 ms·

Let assume that the 100.000 users all use Office for 2 hours a day on average. Now let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over Libre

Let assume that the 100.000 users all use Office for 2 hours a day on average. Now let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice... just one percent, that's 72 seconds a day. 72 seconds spent wondering "how do I make a pivot table in Calc like I do in Excel"? or "How do I make a table of contents in LibreOffice Word"? Now let's assume the average pay for these people is 15 euros/hour. those 72 seconds therefore cost 0.3 euros per employee. Now multiply that by 100.000 users * 270 working days a year and you have 8.1 million. Congratulations, you just lost 6.6 million euros. ... Sorry FOSS/Linux evangelists, but apparently none of you can do math.

candeira 13y ago
Because nobody needs retraining or relearning when moving from one version of MS Office to the next.
harrytuttle 13y ago
Imagine how much those tea breaks must cost them then and going for a piss. BILLIONS I tell you BILLIONS!!! Give them IV drips and buy them diapers quick!
vidarh 13y ago
You are pulling numbers out of your ass and claim we can't do math? Give us some citations to document performance loss, and further citations do document that the performance loss is sufficient enough to reduce the amount of work the staff actually carries out (if they're less productive per unit time spent working, but still completes the same amount of work, then the cost is not borne by the government - it is fairly normal for workload to be quite elastic), and we can talk about your numbers. You also don't account for another factor: Even if there is a loss, it is not given that it is a net negative: License payments to Microsoft leave Valencia, and Spain. Payments to any additional training and support staff or additional assistance for LibreOffice is likely to stay in the local economy, and part of it will find its way straight back in in the form of taxes. It is perfectly possible that they've messed up the numbers, but you've not presented anything resembling a case for that. You might also note from the article that this is not Valencias first large scale migration - they claim to have saved 30 million so far from switching the regions schools to Linux, so chances are they actually have better numbers than the ones you've made up.
- valdiorn 13y ago
  I made these stats up in about 30 seconds. I'm guessing they'r e not that far from the norm. Even if the average use was only 1 hour, or 30 minutes, and the average pay for half of what I assumed, they should still be losing money. I just wanted to point out, people forget these things when they do a cost/benefit estimate.
  - RobAley 13y ago
    But you've made an assumption that they will be more productive in MS Office, with nothing to back that up. I've see users (particularly non-technical, "basic" users) be more productive in LibreOffice. So they may have messed the numbers up and be saving even more than they thought.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    You're full of assumptions and guesses, but little facts, and you're assuming Office is more productive when it could easily be the opposite.
ahoge 13y ago
>let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice That's a pretty big assumption. I've used both products. I didn't notice any noteworthy differences when it came to regular usage. I actually think the new-ish Ribbon UI is extremely confusing and slow to navigate. This certainly isn't like Gimp vs Photoshop.
sampo 13y ago
> let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice If we would assume that the new ribbon-UI of Word is unfamiliar to people, then it actually could be that LibreOffice is easier, more performant, for people accustomed to (old) Word, than Word itself.
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  The ribbon is far more productive as it is at least discoverable without much effort. Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do. To find out you have to play mystery meat with tooltips for ages.
  - RobAley 13y ago
    We have a mix of Windows machines with MS Office and Ubuntu machines with LO here for our admin staff (with each staff member using both for different tasks), and I get far more questions about how to find things in the MS ribbon than I do in the LO menus (and LO tends to be used for more complicated operations, it part of a high-speed scanner / data work-flow system).
  - sampo 13y ago
    > Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do. But one doesn't need to use the toolbar buttons, one can still select things from the menus in the old fashioned way.
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      Can still do that with the ribbon. Press Alt.
      - desas 13y ago
        Most people have no idea that that is possible. To find out you have to play mystery meat with keys for ages.
acheron 13y ago
"How do I make a pivot table in Excel X like I do in Excel X-1?" People will need help adapting to the new software whether it's FOSS or expensively licensed. Unless your suggestion is that they stay on Office 97 indefinitely, those types of training costs will always come up.
Yver 13y ago
It's like saying you wouldn't use cars that run on water because you'd have to change your car fleet. It's an investment. The question is not how much you save this year, it's when will you actually save money.
davidpardo 13y ago
Ok. Let's try some more imaginary maths. If Valencia has five million inhabitants, and one in ten in these, in turn, send one document to the regional government every year, that would be, at a hundred Euro each, about 50M€ going to Microsoft. If the government uses LibreOffice, that's a big saving for the people. On top of that, I guess most of the 100.000 users at the government -doctors, teachers, judges, clerks...- have never used a pivot table, and won't get those extra 72 seconds per day. This ain't Henry Ford's factory and there are much bigger externalities to take care of before this kind of imaginary optimizations.
frobozz 13y ago
Why are you multiplying it by the days in a year? Are you seriously saying that every single user will waste 72 seconds every single day when they use LibreOffice? 1. Regarding productivity tools, people tend to do roughly the same thing at work each day. What they type in might be different, but what they want the software to do doesn't differ that much. 2. People tend to be able to remember things from one day to the next. If I start using a new IDE, I don't have to spend an extra minute every single day for a year looking for the "build" button or shortcut. A user who works out how to format a line as a heading in LibreOffice won't sit around the next day, confused about how to format a line as a heading. 3. Regarding most commonly used functionality, the UI of LibreOffice is pretty intuitive for someone who has used any kind of office productivity software. 4. Regarding rarer functionality (e.g. Pivot tables) I would be surprised if anywhere near 100000 of those 120000 users ever use them. Most people just use a spreadsheet as a place to put tabular data, many don't even do simple calculations like summing with it. Most people just type big globs of text into word processors and do some simple formatting. Those who do use less common functionality tend to have the ability to work it out pretty quickly and either remember it or write it down. As many have already said. The unfamiliarity problem you describe is the same with a new version of MS Office. When I got a new version of MS Office, I spent some time trying to find features that I used a lot before, but once I found them, I was back up to speed. If the timing of the change corresponds to the need to upgrade MS Office (e.g. existing version going out of support), then the disruption would be pretty much the same.

candeira 13y ago

Because nobody needs retraining or relearning when moving from one version of MS Office to the next.

harrytuttle 13y ago

Imagine how much those tea breaks must cost them then and going for a piss. BILLIONS I tell you BILLIONS!!! Give them IV drips and buy them diapers quick!

vidarh 13y ago

You are pulling numbers out of your ass and claim we can't do math? Give us some citations to document performance loss, and further citations do document that the performance loss is sufficient enough to reduce the amount of work the staff actually carries out (if they're less productive per unit time spent working, but still completes the same amount of work, then the cost is not borne by the government - it is fairly normal for workload to be quite elastic), and we can talk about your numbers. You also don't account for another factor: Even if there is a loss, it is not given that it is a net negative: License payments to Microsoft leave Valencia, and Spain. Payments to any additional training and support staff or additional assistance for LibreOffice is likely to stay in the local economy, and part of it will find its way straight back in in the form of taxes. It is perfectly possible that they've messed up the numbers, but you've not presented anything resembling a case for that. You might also note from the article that this is not Valencias first large scale migration - they claim to have saved 30 million so far from switching the regions schools to Linux, so chances are they actually have better numbers than the ones you've made up.

valdiorn 13y ago
I made these stats up in about 30 seconds. I'm guessing they'r e not that far from the norm. Even if the average use was only 1 hour, or 30 minutes, and the average pay for half of what I assumed, they should still be losing money. I just wanted to point out, people forget these things when they do a cost/benefit estimate.
- RobAley 13y ago
  But you've made an assumption that they will be more productive in MS Office, with nothing to back that up. I've see users (particularly non-technical, "basic" users) be more productive in LibreOffice. So they may have messed the numbers up and be saving even more than they thought.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  You're full of assumptions and guesses, but little facts, and you're assuming Office is more productive when it could easily be the opposite.

ahoge 13y ago

>let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice That's a pretty big assumption. I've used both products. I didn't notice any noteworthy differences when it came to regular usage. I actually think the new-ish Ribbon UI is extremely confusing and slow to navigate. This certainly isn't like Gimp vs Photoshop.

sampo 13y ago

> let's assume that MS Word will give you a 1% performance increase over LibreOffice If we would assume that the new ribbon-UI of Word is unfamiliar to people, then it actually could be that LibreOffice is easier, more performant, for people accustomed to (old) Word, than Word itself.

harrytuttle 13y ago
The ribbon is far more productive as it is at least discoverable without much effort. Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do. To find out you have to play mystery meat with tooltips for ages.
- RobAley 13y ago
  We have a mix of Windows machines with MS Office and Ubuntu machines with LO here for our admin staff (with each staff member using both for different tasks), and I get far more questions about how to find things in the MS ribbon than I do in the LO menus (and LO tends to be used for more complicated operations, it part of a high-speed scanner / data work-flow system).
- sampo 13y ago
  > Most people have no idea what the toolbar buttons do. But one doesn't need to use the toolbar buttons, one can still select things from the menus in the old fashioned way.
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    Can still do that with the ribbon. Press Alt.
    - desas 13y ago
      Most people have no idea that that is possible. To find out you have to play mystery meat with keys for ages.

acheron 13y ago

"How do I make a pivot table in Excel X like I do in Excel X-1?" People will need help adapting to the new software whether it's FOSS or expensively licensed. Unless your suggestion is that they stay on Office 97 indefinitely, those types of training costs will always come up.

Yver 13y ago

It's like saying you wouldn't use cars that run on water because you'd have to change your car fleet. It's an investment. The question is not how much you save this year, it's when will you actually save money.

davidpardo 13y ago

Ok. Let's try some more imaginary maths. If Valencia has five million inhabitants, and one in ten in these, in turn, send one document to the regional government every year, that would be, at a hundred Euro each, about 50M€ going to Microsoft. If the government uses LibreOffice, that's a big saving for the people. On top of that, I guess most of the 100.000 users at the government -doctors, teachers, judges, clerks...- have never used a pivot table, and won't get those extra 72 seconds per day. This ain't Henry Ford's factory and there are much bigger externalities to take care of before this kind of imaginary optimizations.

frobozz 13y ago

Why are you multiplying it by the days in a year? Are you seriously saying that every single user will waste 72 seconds every single day when they use LibreOffice? 1. Regarding productivity tools, people tend to do roughly the same thing at work each day. What they type in might be different, but what they want the software to do doesn't differ that much. 2. People tend to be able to remember things from one day to the next. If I start using a new IDE, I don't have to spend an extra minute every single day for a year looking for the "build" button or shortcut. A user who works out how to format a line as a heading in LibreOffice won't sit around the next day, confused about how to format a line as a heading. 3. Regarding most commonly used functionality, the UI of LibreOffice is pretty intuitive for someone who has used any kind of office productivity software. 4. Regarding rarer functionality (e.g. Pivot tables) I would be surprised if anywhere near 100000 of those 120000 users ever use them. Most people just use a spreadsheet as a place to put tabular data, many don't even do simple calculations like summing with it. Most people just type big globs of text into word processors and do some simple formatting. Those who do use less common functionality tend to have the ability to work it out pretty quickly and either remember it or write it down. As many have already said. The unfamiliarity problem you describe is the same with a new version of MS Office. When I got a new version of MS Office, I spent some time trying to find features that I used a lot before, but once I found them, I was back up to speed. If the timing of the change corresponds to the need to upgrade MS Office (e.g. existing version going out of support), then the disruption would be pretty much the same.