And the latest MS Office is $699 + a five-year upgrade contract + who knows what all. Star Office is about $60, IIRC.
I'm working to have my entire office (all of about 15 people) over to StarOffice 7. I think it's $75, but I've been using SO-6.0 for over a year now and I am REALLY impressed. No crashes, no bugs, 99% file-format compatibility, and lots of neat stuff. Some things are not quite as good as MS Office (pivot tables), some things are much better (mail merges).
For 15 people, MS Office = $10,500. Star Office = $1,125. Savings, $9,375 (89%). With the average price of a new computer being $600 around here, 15 new computers are $9,000, and $375 left over.
Good deal. Once office productivity software that is sold by the millions and has a marginal unit cost of $5, charges me more than the actual computer, there's monopoly pricing in effect and I look for a way out. And once I have everyone on SO, allowing a few machines to move to Linux, then more, then more, is a gradual process which hopefully will proceed nicely.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
