Re: Why Aren't Open Source Tools Being Considered?

[Brian Gordon <elasticsoul2003 -at- yahoo -dot- ca>]

Just discovered a couple of other reasons OS tools are
"not being considered," through no fault of their own.
Keep in mind that I'm at a software startup that uses
all kinds of OS tools for other things, but not for
documentation. They did consider Open Office some time
ago. 

* Many employees use MS Outlook. Outlook is the only
product, apparently, that syncs well with PDAs. 
* OO documents and Outlook do not play nicely
together, at least when the OO doc is saved as a Word
doc. In fact, opening such a doc appears to crash Word
and corrupt all open Word files. (As I recently
discovered, the hard way.) 
* Clients use MS Office. 
* Management uses MS Office, and there's a learning
curve to OO. While developers at this company learn
new stuff all the time - and they hire people with
this attitude - management does not. No further
comment. :-P
* Already paying for an MSDN development license and
support, so the additional cost of a site license for
MS Office was not prohibitive. 

If it is any consolation to OS producers, I do believe
it is inevitable that OS will put a severe dent in MS
market share over the next X years. MS can't compete
with free. :-) It's how they managed to dominate the
market for browsers, after all. 

All the best,
Brian

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