Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
It will cost you more support hours and you will get less productivity.
You say this, but we do this every day and this is absolutely false. Again, I'm not hypothesizing or just trying to push a point, we literally can lower our support pricing for companies doing this because it costs so much less to support. And that's when we aren't the ones buying it.
The amount of additional time needed to deal with the constant breaks and bugs in MS Office is costly. When you are the one paying for the time on tickets, you pay attention. When you pay for the time managing the licensing, you pay attention.
It's easy in the trenches, especially once you are a server engineer, to forget how many tickets and management time is going in to fixing registry breaks, account problems, licensing decisions, application incompatibility, upgrades, etc. for a product. But when you are looking at the tickets over thousands of users, it gets really obvious just all of the ways that a product is costly more to support than another.
We have right now one Windows PC that is royally screwed up after having had O365 locally installed with Microsoft login. I'm not even going to bother looking at it. Just reinstall OS + everything and start over. Which takes much, much, much longer than installing for instance ubuntu + libreoffice.
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
As you mentioned, LibreOffice and MS Office have compatibility issues and the rest of the world uses MS Office.
This is where things get weird. What do I care what the internal document format is of some other company? First of all, our partners don't primary use MS Office, but ignoring that, neither we, nor the majority of companies we work with, nor most any company that I've ever worked at (anecdotes, I know) should be, or are, exchanging data via office documents. It's an editing tool, not a final results tool. We don't send spreadsheets between companies. And Word style docs are turned into PDFs before going to or from another company.
Sharing office docs in editable form is a huge security risk, and just generally goofy. Are there exceptions? Of course. But it's almost always a broken workflow. It's not a format or tool meant for that kind of use. So if you can fix the bigger picture, it tends to trickle down and fix lots of other things either.
Now sure, if someone with more clout than IT simply demands that a large company spend millions on MS Office so that one or two people don't need to change a really bad workflow, sometimes there is nothing that you can do. I get it. IT doesn't always get to run IT decisions. But stepping back and putting on my owner hat, you want the business to do what is healthy, and spending loads of money on an expensive to support product, to placate a vendor who is so inconsiderate of our profitability that they use proprietary formats to communicate with us, I generally find a vendor who is actually good rather than acting like I'm powerless to demand they act sensibly.
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@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
It will cost you more support hours and you will get less productivity.
You say this, but we do this every day and this is absolutely false. Again, I'm not hypothesizing or just trying to push a point, we literally can lower our support pricing for companies doing this because it costs so much less to support. And that's when we aren't the ones buying it.
The amount of additional time needed to deal with the constant breaks and bugs in MS Office is costly. When you are the one paying for the time on tickets, you pay attention. When you pay for the time managing the licensing, you pay attention.
It's easy in the trenches, especially once you are a server engineer, to forget how many tickets and management time is going in to fixing registry breaks, account problems, licensing decisions, application incompatibility, upgrades, etc. for a product. But when you are looking at the tickets over thousands of users, it gets really obvious just all of the ways that a product is costly more to support than another.
We have right now one Windows PC that is royally screwed up after having had O365 locally installed with Microsoft login. I'm not even going to bother looking at it. Just reinstall OS + everything and start over. Which takes much, much, much longer than installing for instance ubuntu + libreoffice.
We have a whole process for customers with Avimark and Word that we have to reinstall their servers regularly because Avimark requires Word (on the server) to function, and it regularly corrupts (probably Avimark's fault, but stil) and Office can't be repaired, even with a clean install, and so we have to reinstall the entire application server VM to fix it
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@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
It will cost you more support hours and you will get less productivity.
You say this, but we do this every day and this is absolutely false. Again, I'm not hypothesizing or just trying to push a point, we literally can lower our support pricing for companies doing this because it costs so much less to support. And that's when we aren't the ones buying it.
The amount of additional time needed to deal with the constant breaks and bugs in MS Office is costly. When you are the one paying for the time on tickets, you pay attention. When you pay for the time managing the licensing, you pay attention.
It's easy in the trenches, especially once you are a server engineer, to forget how many tickets and management time is going in to fixing registry breaks, account problems, licensing decisions, application incompatibility, upgrades, etc. for a product. But when you are looking at the tickets over thousands of users, it gets really obvious just all of the ways that a product is costly more to support than another.
We have right now one Windows PC that is royally screwed up after having had O365 locally installed with Microsoft login. I'm not even going to bother looking at it. Just reinstall OS + everything and start over. Which takes much, much, much longer than installing for instance ubuntu + libreoffice.
Yeah you can use O365 on Linux also (obv web version but it's easier anyway). So you don't need Windows. But even if you had to use Windows for it, how do you not have a default image?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
As you mentioned, LibreOffice and MS Office have compatibility issues and the rest of the world uses MS Office.
This is where things get weird. What do I care what the internal document format is of some other company? First of all, our partners don't primary use MS Office, but ignoring that, neither we, nor the majority of companies we work with, nor most any company that I've ever worked at (anecdotes, I know) should be, or are, exchanging data via office documents. It's an editing tool, not a final results tool. We don't send spreadsheets between companies. And Word style docs are turned into PDFs before going to or from another company.
Sharing office docs in editable form is a huge security risk, and just generally goofy. Are there exceptions? Of course. But it's almost always a broken workflow. It's not a format or tool meant for that kind of use. So if you can fix the bigger picture, it tends to trickle down and fix lots of other things either.
Now sure, if someone with more clout than IT simply demands that a large company spend millions on MS Office so that one or two people don't need to change a really bad workflow, sometimes there is nothing that you can do. I get it. IT doesn't always get to run IT decisions. But stepping back and putting on my owner hat, you want the business to do what is healthy, and spending loads of money on an expensive to support product, to placate a vendor who is so inconsiderate of our profitability that they use proprietary formats to communicate with us, I generally find a vendor who is actually good rather than acting like I'm powerless to demand they act sensibly.
I have a hard time believing this seeing some of the customers you've mentioned. One specifically recently who just bought a desktop and it wasn't imaged and had an encryption password set that the customer didn't know about. I do not believe in any amount of time, that company is not sending and receiving office files directly.
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
No he's basing his arguments on the fact you had to write custom software so your again "internal only" users have something else to use that's not an office document.
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
I have a hard time believing this seeing some of the customers you've mentioned. One specifically recently who just bought a desktop and it wasn't imaged and had an encryption password set that the customer didn't know about. I do not believe in any amount of time, that company is not sending and receiving office files directly.
That particular clueless customer who runs their own IT definitely does foolish things. So absolutely, it is possible. But as they are HIPAA regulated, they shouldn't be and we've never seen them do it. But you make a great example... companies that aren't thinking about their IT, that do no research, that never evaluate costs or productivity, that get things really, really wrong... tend to be the ones that gravitate to MS Office.
This, of course, exacerbates any already existing MS Office problems. Software that encourages bad users to choose it, will obviously have sprawling issues. In their case, however, MS Office has been relatively stable and they use it very little as they use their EMR for everything and never work on their own computers - they don't even have a file sharing device or anything so they have no simple means of collaboration outside of the EMR. Their use of Office is mostly to make flyers and stuff. For them, most of their MS Office support cost is in managing licensing and broken account logins.
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
No he's basing his arguments on the fact you had to write custom software so your again "internal only" users have something else to use that's not an office document.
That makes no sense, obviously, since "have to" is good business and you do it regardless of LibreOffice or MS Office. LibreOffice makes it ever so slightly less necessary. But just because LibreOffice crushes MS Office in value and functionality, doesn't make it any less an office suite and totally idiotic to use in that manner.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
No he's basing his arguments on the fact you had to write custom software so your again "internal only" users have something else to use that's not an office document.
That makes no sense, obviously, since "have to" is good business and you do it regardless of LibreOffice or MS Office. LibreOffice makes it ever so slightly less necessary. But just because LibreOffice crushes MS Office in value and functionality, doesn't make it any less an office suite and totally idiotic to use in that manner.
What functionality? Give me a functionality of LibreOffice that "crushes" MS Office?
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
Yeah you can use O365 on Linux also (obv web version but it's easier anyway). So you don't need Windows. But even if you had to use Windows for it, how do you not have a default image?
Default images are awesome, but not every SMB can do them. Not practically, anyway. In a perfect world of unlimited time and money, of course. But real world, you have to work with constraints and it's rare that SMBs can or will justify this expense. If you are dealing with customers, most will just refuse to pay for the time for that kind of work. And if you are dealing with really small companies, often it's impractical to have a default image because you don't have standard hardware that repeats and reinstalls happen so rarely. And in the world of things like Ansible and Salt, the value of default images has declined significantly when you can reinstall so quickly. And not all software licensing allows for default images, so it's not always even an option in the way that you'd hope.
It sounds great to say that everyone should have them. But like anything in IT, every situation has to be evaluated and the average American company has no real effective value to doing that. When you work in a big environment and don't work across many companies, it's easy to forget that average businesses are tiny and poor and non-standardized and can't afford full time IT. So IT is a "by the drink" hourly cost, and someone with no IT training is making some or many or even all the real decisions - especially buying and deploying end user devices without IT getting a say (and often without them getting told.)
Golden images aren't a best practice. They are good and common practice. But not a best practice as there is a significant part of the space where they shouldn't be done, even when the option exists.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
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@stacksofplates said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
What functionality? Give me a functionality of LibreOffice that "crushes" MS Office?
Installation, support, licensing, self hosted live collaboration, connections to remote file storage.
MS Office tends to do things that I don't want an office suite to do... like work with files so large that it requires a custom built computer to handle it. It's brilliant that they can do that, but at some point I need people using databases, not spreadsheets.
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
You said "Scott, "
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
You said "Scott, "
Yes but you are Pete S. , right?
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
You said "Scott, "
Yes but you are Pete S. , right?
Are you actually thinking that we are the same person?
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@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
You have to realize we have clients. All my stupid posts on this forum doesn't reflect how we run our internal IT at all.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
You said "Scott, "
Yes but you are Pete S. , right?
Are you actually thinking that we are the same person?
yes
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@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@IRJ said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
You proved my point with this thread. Imagine if you just ponied up the money for Office 365 and didnt have to spend time doing all this dumb bullshit making it harder for users to collaborate.
It's funny how you call "more efficient with no problems at all", "all this dumb shit." We've had zero issues so far with users who have moved over. Zero. You act like you are confident it's crippling our businesses. Do you know the last time that we received a collaboration document in an MS Office format? Like... I can't even remember. Yes, once in a while we get CVs in that format. But you seem to think that LibreOffice doesn't work with those file formats. But it does, just fine.
You are basing your arguments on the theory that we are running into problems with LibreOffice and not with MS Office. But my point was, that that's the opposite of what's happening. Nearly every customer with MS Office is having it break on them and can't collaborate. None of the ones with LibreOffice are having that.
So this whole line of thinking makes no sense.
Are you Pete S. ? I assumed you were and you answered me like you were him
You have to realize we have clients. All my stupid posts on this forum doesn't reflect how we run our internal IT at all.
Right, same with us. We have clients and they sometimes make their own decisions. Most of the time, in fact.
