Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
> Hi Boaz,
> The time is not ripe. Don't waste your energy. Your school principal
> will not know what you are talking about and will dismiss you as a
> hopeless geek.

I am not sure about the time not being ripe.

In the last year, I installed for two non-technical family members a
copy of OpenOffice (one a full fledged Linux, but the other a compromise
Windows+OpenOffice).

They both faced a few hardships when people sent them Microsoft Office
documents and they didn't look exactly as expected, but I was able to
convince them that it was in fact the other person who is behind the
times ;-) And the documents *were* readable, even if didn't look
perfect.

And for users, this is a saving of 500 shekels (last time I checked).
I don't see how this fact can be ignored in Israel after the summer's
protests. This is actually the reason why I installed OpenOffice in
these two cases - it's hard to justify adding 500 shekels to the price
of a computer which cost around 1000 shekels (plus a few hundred more
for the legal Microsoft Windows).

> A slightly more productive line might be to claim that you are no
> longer using desktop computers - only mobile devices, and for these
> you need either PDF or Google docs.

I believe my Android can read Microsoft Office documents out of the
box :( But it's true, with all these non-Microsoft devices around,
Microsoft's stranglehold on the word processor document seems to be
coming to an end.


-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                     Sunday, Feb 5 2012, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |It's fortunate I have bad luck - without
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |it I would have no luck at all!