IBM forcing all employees to stop using MS Office(osnews.com)
osnews.com
IBM forcing all employees to stop using MS Office
http://www.osnews.com/story/22186/IBM_Forcing_All_Employees_to_Stop_Using_Microsoft_Office
34 comments
I recently quit my job at IBM, and there are two more important, albeit unwritten, tenets:
1) Getting manager approval is next to impossible. A friend of mine that's a tech writer was unable to obtain one in the time I was there (approximately a year).
2) The learning curve cost for new users simply exceeds the cost per license. For high-paying employees, a couple hours learning this stuff will cost them a couple hours of productivity. Evidently, large corporations don't function with this in mind.
1) Getting manager approval is next to impossible. A friend of mine that's a tech writer was unable to obtain one in the time I was there (approximately a year).
2) The learning curve cost for new users simply exceeds the cost per license. For high-paying employees, a couple hours learning this stuff will cost them a couple hours of productivity. Evidently, large corporations don't function with this in mind.
I've also done quite a stint at IBM, and I can tell you there is nothing easier than getting approval for a software license. The max it'll take is 1-2 days for basically anything you want. Obviously your tech writer friend wasn't too important if he couldn't even get a license for Office. Also, I had a friend in tech writing, and they didn't use Office; Instead, they used some sort of XML mark-up for designing documents.
To abossy's point, I know the tech writer in question, and remember the struggles she had to get a simple piece of software. I don't think it should matter "how important" she was -- if she needs it to do her job, she should get it. IBM's policy cost them more in her un-productivity than it saved in the license cost.
This is a more accurate description although it's not news as this has been policy for about a year now!
perhaps, but it's about time they dumped M$ considering they acquired lotus in 1995!
All lies.
I work at IBM, and I have heard no such thing.
As for "330,000 use Symphony" - everyone gets a computer with Symphony pre-installed. Nobody I know ever uses it - ever. We all use MS Office, and have not been told to stop.
I work in IBM SWG, we have been asked to use Symphony for our presentations. No one told us to stop using Office.
I can absolutely 100% guarantee even IBM isn't boneheaded enough to tell its accountants to dump Excel!
Why? In my experience, OO Excel has similar capabilities, although OO probably trails in the presentation features to powerpoint.
Because they'll have vast swathes of rather dodgy VBA, some of it probably has been patched and tweaked for 20 years, without which they'll be utterly unable to function, and the risk of porting it straight across is that the SEC comes and craps all over IBM for not keeping its accounts straight.
Does OO Calc have the same tab-return behavior as Excel yet? Last time I tried it, doing data entry was a real PITA.
In Excel, if you're entering data, you press 'tab' to move to the next column, and when you're done with that row, you press Return and it kicks you down and back into the leftmost column. Very handy, since it saves you a mouse movement or many left-arrow presses to get back to the start column. At least the last version of OO Calc I played with didn't mimic this behavior properly---pressing Return just dropped to the next row in the same column, even after entering several columns of data.
Excel may not be the greatest program in the world (let's be honest, it's a bloated monster), but it does a few things right.
In Excel, if you're entering data, you press 'tab' to move to the next column, and when you're done with that row, you press Return and it kicks you down and back into the leftmost column. Very handy, since it saves you a mouse movement or many left-arrow presses to get back to the start column. At least the last version of OO Calc I played with didn't mimic this behavior properly---pressing Return just dropped to the next row in the same column, even after entering several columns of data.
Excel may not be the greatest program in the world (let's be honest, it's a bloated monster), but it does a few things right.
It's OO Calc, not "Excel".
As one who has to deal with incoming (massive) .doc files from customers, partners and consultants, I'll assure everyone that this "stop using MS Office" requirement would be impossible.
I have a recent build of NeoOffice (OO packaged for OS X) on my MBP, and while I'm quite happy using it for casual day-day interaction with small, simpler Word documents (< 100 pages, < 5 Mbytes) - It's nowhere close to prime time for reading in larger, complex Word Documents; for any serious integration with Microsoft, you absolutely, positively, _have_ to have the native applications on your desktop. And even then it's not a slam dunk if someone created with a different version of MS Office on a different platform.
And, given that we all have to deal with those documents occasionally (Unlike me, who has to deal with them every day) - That means Microsoft continues to sell licenses to people who only use their software to deal with the rare Microsoft Document that blows up their copy of OO.
Seriously - Pages on the Macintosh (Awesome), or OO is more than enough for 99% of the worlds document creators - the only reason those 99% _need_ to purchase Microsoft Office anymore is for compatibility.
That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people have a choice, they'll make it.
I have a recent build of NeoOffice (OO packaged for OS X) on my MBP, and while I'm quite happy using it for casual day-day interaction with small, simpler Word documents (< 100 pages, < 5 Mbytes) - It's nowhere close to prime time for reading in larger, complex Word Documents; for any serious integration with Microsoft, you absolutely, positively, _have_ to have the native applications on your desktop. And even then it's not a slam dunk if someone created with a different version of MS Office on a different platform.
And, given that we all have to deal with those documents occasionally (Unlike me, who has to deal with them every day) - That means Microsoft continues to sell licenses to people who only use their software to deal with the rare Microsoft Document that blows up their copy of OO.
Seriously - Pages on the Macintosh (Awesome), or OO is more than enough for 99% of the worlds document creators - the only reason those 99% _need_ to purchase Microsoft Office anymore is for compatibility.
That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people have a choice, they'll make it.
> That's why Microsoft fights standards like ODF tooth and nail - once people have a choice, they'll make it.
Which is why beating them in the standards war is important. The business world can't afford to support monopoly rents at this time. Requiring your vendors to support ODF and open formats is a first step.
Which is why beating them in the standards war is important. The business world can't afford to support monopoly rents at this time. Requiring your vendors to support ODF and open formats is a first step.
The story is a bit misleading. I can't imagine such a requirement to be met in only 10 days for over 330,000 employees.
What is more likely is that one division is being required at this time, and more are to follow. It makes some sense for IBM to have its own office suite from a business perspective. 330,000 licenses to Office surely adds up and its just another cost cutting move for IBM
Edit: They also will most likely not force all client facing employees to switch, as I can foresee compatibility problems.
Edit2: Just checked my machine and I have the full Lotus Symphony suite installed. Don't know when it got there or how, but its there now along with most recent Lotus Notes 8
What is more likely is that one division is being required at this time, and more are to follow. It makes some sense for IBM to have its own office suite from a business perspective. 330,000 licenses to Office surely adds up and its just another cost cutting move for IBM
Edit: They also will most likely not force all client facing employees to switch, as I can foresee compatibility problems.
Edit2: Just checked my machine and I have the full Lotus Symphony suite installed. Don't know when it got there or how, but its there now along with most recent Lotus Notes 8
It is more a political move than a cost cutting strategy. They could get Office from MS for as low as they wanted, if that were the case.
My company just switched to OpenOffice last week. Some people were surprised to see MS Office missing when they came in.
How is it working so far? I use it at home and it's more than powerful enough to meet my modest needs. However, at my work, a lot of legacy applications and templates are base on Excel with macros; I'm not sure what would be involved in converting them all to be compatible with OO Calc.
I already used OpenOffice, so it hasn't affected me. No one else seems to mind it on my floor though, since we're all programmers.
Do you actually use it much? Do you have to open documents written by others, in MS Office?
I work for a small engineering and instrument making company. I suggested trying OpenOffice in a company, it was carefully considered and rejected, and there are reasons for it:
1. Some of the documents we get from partners who write them in MS Word just don't open right. The company can't afford this, period.
2. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have compound filtering, like MS Excel. I.e. you filter column by one parameter, then by another. In Excel it is compound filtering: you select list of parts that satisfies the condition1 AND condition2, in OpenOffice Calc the condition2 just replaces the condition1. Maybe it's even more _right_, maybe the behaviour of MS Office is just a gimmick - I don't know, but the fact is that a guy who manages inventory of parts in our company came to depend on the functionality of MS Office and making switch is just impractical.
The version of OpenOffice was 2.4 back then, but I have no reason to expect that those issues have been fixed since. OpenOffice is a nice project and helluva work, and open source is cool, but there are reasons why not everyone can use it.
I work for a small engineering and instrument making company. I suggested trying OpenOffice in a company, it was carefully considered and rejected, and there are reasons for it:
1. Some of the documents we get from partners who write them in MS Word just don't open right. The company can't afford this, period.
2. OpenOffice Calc doesn't have compound filtering, like MS Excel. I.e. you filter column by one parameter, then by another. In Excel it is compound filtering: you select list of parts that satisfies the condition1 AND condition2, in OpenOffice Calc the condition2 just replaces the condition1. Maybe it's even more _right_, maybe the behaviour of MS Office is just a gimmick - I don't know, but the fact is that a guy who manages inventory of parts in our company came to depend on the functionality of MS Office and making switch is just impractical.
The version of OpenOffice was 2.4 back then, but I have no reason to expect that those issues have been fixed since. OpenOffice is a nice project and helluva work, and open source is cool, but there are reasons why not everyone can use it.
I tried to download Symphony. Had to go through like 20 screens and then couldn't even download it because I had to sign up to use HTTP rather than their download manager which couldn't get through my proxy. Sigh. Why do companies think adding steps to a user interface flow is a good thing?
Symphony is just a shell around Open Office, with integration to IBM tools (such as notes). I don't think is really useful for "normal" people, it is better just getting OO itself. So, the website it targeted to companies, not to individual users.
Ah. Now it somewhat makes sense. It's still a heck of a lot of clicking.
[deleted]
MS Office is a great suite of software but if you don't actually utilize its extended feature set there are good alternatives that cost a lot less. I think more companies will go this route in the future or at least migrate to Office Online. One of the biggest issues I see with Office is the expense of keeping a homogeneous environment. Every company I've worked for seems to have at least 3 different versions of MS Office at any given time. Sometimes more. We have a decade span -- Office 97 to Office 2007. That presents a lot of support challenges. With a cheaper, or free, product you can always keep people on a standard version. I find the variation in Office versions with radically different UIs (2k to 07 for example) makes switching to an alternative a bit easier. People have learned to hunt & seek for features so if something is in a slightly different spot in OpenOffice it's not a big deal.
They've already started giving new hires and co-ops Lotus Symphony over Microsoft Office. The good thing about Symphony over other options is the tight integration with collaboration tools (TeamRoom, Jazz) and email (Notes).
That being said, if there's a customer with an issue, or a new grad looking for a job, and they use Word as their default word processor, then there's always Microsoft's Word Viewer which lets employees view Word files.
In my opinion, people need to stop making such a big deal out of this. From what I've seen, no one is really upset about the change, and it's definitely saving the company a lot of money. So if employees don't care, and shareholders are happy, why does it matter?
That being said, if there's a customer with an issue, or a new grad looking for a job, and they use Word as their default word processor, then there's always Microsoft's Word Viewer which lets employees view Word files.
In my opinion, people need to stop making such a big deal out of this. From what I've seen, no one is really upset about the change, and it's definitely saving the company a lot of money. So if employees don't care, and shareholders are happy, why does it matter?
staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony
Nope.
Nope.
I think IBM employees can still use MS Office Web Apps http://blogs.msdn.com/officewebapps/archive/2009/09/17/98964...
I interned at IBM in 2002 and didn't have Office on my computer. I spent a whole day trying to format and print my resume in Lotus Notes for their internal career fair.
* No new MS Office Licenses unless approved by the managers.
* Symphony will be the default office suite installed on the Laptops and PCs handed out.
I have seen Lotus Suite (123 etc) installed on recently issued hardware (2008). Typically they also have MS Office installed alongside. This will now be replaced by Symphony suite.