♫Tell him “no”, oh-oh-oh, Tell him “no”..♫
Words and music by Travis Pritchett, recorded by Travis & Bob.
A posting on InfoWorld’s web site today reports that British Schools have been advised not to upgrade to Microsoft’s Vista operating system and the Office 2007 productivity suite. The reasons are telling:
“We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit,” it said.
Furthermore, it continues:
“As for Office 2007, “there remains no compelling case for deployment,” the agency said in its full report, published this week.”
InfoWorld states that the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) advised that ‘the added value of Vista’s new features was not sufficient to justify the cost of deployment, while Office 2007 contained no “must-have” features.‘
In a telling move away from proprietary file formats: ‘the agency also recommended setting up desktops to make it easy to use such open-source applications, and advised schools to insist their suppliers deliver office productivity software that can open and save ODF documents, setting it as the default file format.’
This may be an early sign for organizations generally, including law firms, to move toward greater standardization around ODF formats. And if file formats become open and standard, that leads to questions as to why one would need a proprietary word processor, if Open Source software can easily meet the needs of a business organization.
This means that when the automatic request comes to purchase the next upgrade from Microsoft, the answer may be, to tell him no…
This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Adding Value, Issues facing Law Firms, Law Firm Strategy, Technology, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Response to “Tell Him No…”
January 15th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
A wise decision they have made. This was the first version of Windows where Microsoft provided a downgrade path. That’s right, the ability to revert back to Windows XP if you were somehow duped into installing Vista.
In fact, many users have been finding that because of the onerous requirements and new drivers the Linux OS has finally become a viable option for many home users.
What’s the biggest Windows Vista mistake so far? Filtering all the video you watch to protect you from copyright infringement. Unfortunately it’s a guilty-before-proven-innocent strategy and it bogs computers down so much that network speed can be reduced as much as 90% when watching movies!
So much for downloading stuff as you do other tasks. Multitasking is so Windows 95 anyway.
Good to hear that someone else is listening.