LibreOffice - Runs so slowly
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
For someone making over 100k a year, this means that if MS Office convenienced or saved someone roughly 18 minutes over a month vs a "free" priduct, that makes up for the total cost per month. Im only referring to the Office Suite though as far as what I'm considering in convenienced work vs LibreOffice or others.
As a company that does MS Office support for lots of companies, licensing "breaks" because of MS Office problems take easily 30-180 minutes per person of downtime per year. And for most users, we've seen zero extra time needed to use LibreOffice.
MS Office has so many licensing / log in checks that cause delays, require sign ins, or make it stop working and require IT to get involved that ideas like "convenience" or "efficiency" pretty much rule it out until you are doing things so niche that LibreOffice or G Suite or whatever can't do it. When you need ultimate desktop power MS Office is the best, but until then, it's actually the worst. And when you need power like that, almost always you should have been using a custom built app, not Excel to run your business.
Also, if your staff are "six figure office suite users", you are in a pretty insanely rare category of worker. Office suites aren't really significant tools for very many well paying jobs, everyone uses them, but generally really lightly (like almost to the point of just being a text editor.) In the doctor and vet kind of category, you don't even need to install them. For lawyers, they really just use the lightest text editing features. Publishers don't use office suites. Most usage of office suites is in error (people who don't think about their tooling and pick the wrong one.)
When it works, MS Office is a great tool. But it is rarely the right tool, and "when it works" being only 99% of the time makes the other 1% pretty expensive.
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
So yes, even if you waste just 40 seconds a day (or 5 seconds an hour) due to the differences of MS Office vs others, I'd say it's worth the money for that individual.
Agreed. That's perfect logic. And if that's the case, it pays for itself. But only if you can make the problems of LibreOffice, G Suite, Zoho Docs and others require more interruptions to user time than MS Office does. And from real world support of lots of companies, what we normally see is the opposite to a dramatic degree.... LibreOffice increasing efficiency with no noticeable end user delays to moment to moment use (MS Office is faster, but not normally noticeably so), but removing the version to version confusion of MS Office, more transparent updates, dramatically less IT support time (this is why MSPs hate LibreOffice, because MS Office creates a lot of MSP billable hours from the unnecessary complexity), and removes the semi-regular "we can't work until we figure out the MS Office account problems" that we deal with every day.
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@scottalanmiller said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
As a company that does MS Office support for lots of companies, licensing "breaks" because of MS Office problems take easily 30-180 minutes per person of downtime per year. And for most users, we've seen zero extra time needed to use LibreOffice.
MS Office has so many licensing / log in checks that cause delays, require sign ins, or make it stop workingI never experienced this anywhere or heard of it besides your one incident due to some mistake or oversight who knows where.
Licensing for O365 products just doesn't go away like it did in your experience, preventing users from using office. You can't base things off of anomalies or your fringe case.
I literally not waited a single millisecond or noticible amount of time ever, to use any Office app, like ever. Even in a big environment that mains Google Suite, and controlling office licenses and accounts through non-MS means.
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@scottalanmiller said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
Also, if your staff are "six figure office suite users", you are in a pretty insanely rare category of worker. Office suites aren't really significant tools for very many well paying jobs,
You honestly can tell me that it's rare for a 6 figure employee to not use any Office software? You've got to be kidding me or have a serious oversight going on in order to try to prove something.
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In giant shops (thousands of users and up), the problem with MS Office is that you don't pay for it just for the users who would benefit from it, but you pay for it for everyone. So at 10K users, you might pay $1m a year for the cheapest access to the bare bones MS Office suite. But only maybe ten users in that environment would benefit from having MS Office over LibreOffice. So that's a cost of $100,000 per user that benefits. In a giant shop, the cost of account management for your O365 account is negligible and we can't ignore it. But the cost of the product for people who don't benefit from it is staggering.
In a small shop, the cost of the management is big or at least risky. Two days ago we had this one... shop of 100 people that are forced to use MS Office (their market vertical app requires it for printing and nothing else, so they never open it, it's only used for its libraries... yes we are working on replacing that software) and because they have only ephemeral workstations the management of MS Office accounts is really high and costs them hundreds of dollars a year alone. This past week because management had a refreshed credit card, but got no notification from MS nor does the O365 management panel tell you anywhere with the newest refresh, couldn't figure out that their account had expired. So all kinds of support tickets and IT time went into trying to fix broken printing and MS Office across seven sites and they had a hundred users unable to service customers, and five six figure staff tied up for a total of easily twenty hours, trying to track down what was wrong and what to do.
Now, to some degree, having had their O365 managed by IT rather than management could have help here, potentially. But IT would not have been notified either, nor known that the credit card expired.
It's trivial with how much licensing overhead exists with MS Office, for casual day to day breaks including just flaky Internet, to cause delays in being able to work that make MS Office impossible to justify on a cost basis. We see lost productivity for every user of MS Office being so significant in any size shop, that it makes the $99/year cost to acquire it lost in the background noise of other costs that it creates.
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
@scottalanmiller said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
Also, if your staff are "six figure office suite users", you are in a pretty insanely rare category of worker. Office suites aren't really significant tools for very many well paying jobs,
You honestly can tell me that it's rare for a 6 figure employee to not use any Office software? You've got to be kidding me or have a serious oversight going on in order to try to prove something.
I said that they don't use it in any serious way. Opening it to edit a quick document doesn't give MS Office any advantage. MS Office is only faster when you are editing crazy huge crap that should almost never be in an office suite.
So yes, I'm absolutely telling you that effectively no real professional or highly paid person is doing this except in cases where it is blatant that they are using the wrong tools and that is the real problem.
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@Obsolesce what six figure professional task do you feel would happen in an office suite that is more than trivial usage of it?
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
I never experienced this anywhere or heard of it besides your one incident due to some mistake or oversight who knows where.
You don't work in the MSP space. When you deal with lots of companies, you see that MS Office is a huge money maker for IT.
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
Licensing for O365 products just doesn't go away like it did in your experience, preventing users from using office. You can't base things off of anomalies or your fringe case.
It does all the time, actually. Properly licensed MS Office installs will often experience licensing problems that require intervention. This is often caused by an end user signing into a personal or secondary Microsoft account elsewhere (like in a web browser.) It's extremely common.
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
I literally not waited a single millisecond or noticible amount of time ever, to use any Office app, like ever.
But you are an IT pro, so what would you be using it for that's not trivial?
Nor are you in an MSP and constantly having to log in to different accounts, I assume. So as an IT pro, you wouldn't be an office suite user.
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@scottalanmiller said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
Licensing for O365 products just doesn't go away like it did in your experience, preventing users from using office. You can't base things off of anomalies or your fringe case.
It does all the time, actually. Properly licensed MS Office installs will often experience licensing problems that require intervention. This is often caused by an end user signing into a personal or secondary Microsoft account elsewhere (like in a web browser.) It's extremely common.
Don't get me started on how bad it is when you forget to use and the close all incognito windows. You sign into one client's account to reset a password and the admin window you end up in some other random account. Nobody can convince me that is not a total security nightmare waiting to happen!
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
I literally not waited a single millisecond or noticible amount of time ever, to use any Office app, like ever.
Have you ever waited like this for LibreOffice, G Suite, Zoho Docs?
Personally, I never wait for any of them. As an MSP, most customers wait a lot exclusively for MS Office. If we only go by "our" usage, it's trivial to show that the cost of MS Office doesn't make sense because it's not actually faster than LibreOffice... just the time to put in a credit card to buy it, not the cost but the time to purchase, loses more efficiency in a year than any slowness from LibreOffice in code. So based on that logic, MS Office is a definitely efficiency lose because we don't really see slowness from any of them when we work directly as competent IT pros in an non-MSP environment.
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@scottalanmiller said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
In giant shops (thousands of users and up), the problem with MS Office is that you don't pay for it just for the users who would benefit from it, but you pay for it for everyone.
That is so totally false. I have not seen that anywhere, including where I currently work which is many thousands users.
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@Obsolesce said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
@scottalanmiller said in LibreOffice - Runs so slowly:
In giant shops (thousands of users and up), the problem with MS Office is that you don't pay for it just for the users who would benefit from it, but you pay for it for everyone.
That is so totally false. I have not seen that anywhere, including where I currently work which is many thousands users.
So your claim is what... that they 1) don't actually pay for the software or 2) they use it only for a few people who would actually benefit from it or 3) the kind of work that they do is both appropriate to an office suite and so insanely heavy that they actually get to the point where MS Office is noticeably more efficient, yet still an appropriate tool to use?
If any of those, how does that work?
If 1... okay piracy.
If 2... how do they interoperate with others, or is it all office suites for only individual use?
If 3.... what the heck kinds of tasks are they doing that are so different than any other company?
