Resentment to Purchasing Software - Split From Unrelated Topic on IT Professionals
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@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.
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@stacksofplates 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:
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure?
In the order of $20-$40/month/user
It's a big number in most cases. Much bigger than people let on. Especially when you typically end up having to then pay for it for every user, even those that only open a document once a year, not just the power users.
Where is $20-$40 coming from?
The cost of MS Office and the constant support needs on a per user basis. We have to put in 1-2 hours more per year, per install of MS Office than of any other office product. That is the primary cost of MS Office and can't be overlooked. That's consistently what makes Microsoft products so expensive... their insanely high support needs compared to their main competitors. Not their base price, although that should not be ignored, as it often is.
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@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.Right, we build apps for that kind of stuff, we don't use office suites for it. So if LibreOffice (or anything) is bad at that stuff, we've solved it through other means.
We only use office products, from any vendor, for very necessary "office document" needs. Not as a general workflow of a place to put data.
Example: some places might use Word as a place to store IT documentation. But we use a wiki.
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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:
@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:
Can you save a few bucks a month per user using LibreOffice, sure?
In the order of $20-$40/month/user
It's a big number in most cases. Much bigger than people let on. Especially when you typically end up having to then pay for it for every user, even those that only open a document once a year, not just the power users.
Where is $20-$40 coming from?
The cost of MS Office and the constant support needs on a per user basis. We have to put in 1-2 hours more per year, per install of MS Office than of any other office product. That is the primary cost of MS Office and can't be overlooked. That's consistently what makes Microsoft products so expensive... their insanely high support needs compared to their main competitors. Not their base price, although that should not be ignored, as it often is.
So you're saying at a minimum you have $240 per hour of work for a single user per year just for MS Office?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@Pete-S said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.Right, we build apps for that kind of stuff, we don't use office suites for it. So if LibreOffice (or anything) is bad at that stuff, we've solved it through other means.
We only use office products, from any vendor, for very necessary "office document" needs. Not as a general workflow of a place to put data.
Example: some places might use Word as a place to store IT documentation. But we use a wiki.
And that's not external users that you're supporting. That's a completely different group of people. You've mentioned the users you support up until this part. Sure it's easy to make your internal users use this kind of stuff. How many employees do you have? 30? There's no way all of your external clients are using non MS Office products and you have less to support.
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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:
So you have to go to your NTG or whatever IT labor you use and open your pockets at $150-300 an hour when you have an issue.
The obvious examples would be things like Windows or MS Office vs. Ubuntu or LibreOffice.
I seriously have to question if people who like LibreOffice actually use it for business. It is terrible at so many things. This is coming from someone who has used an Ubuntu workstation with LibreOffice for the last 6 years while working for multiple companies. Microsoft Office is 1000x better, and makes collaboration much easier. I have spent so much time trying to get LibreOffice to work or read MS office documents (that everyone else uses), and there has been nothing but issues. Not to mention LibreOffice is slower than MS Office by a good margin. If you work with big documents, LibreOffice is a dog.
I disagree with this as well. I actually have more experience with OpenOffice (not Libre) but the problem is that Microsoft as usual does a lot of proprietary shit in their file formats. Can hardly blame someone else for that.
And I have large files (csv and similar) that can't be opened in Excel because they are too big. But they open just fine in other programs.
But the real problem as I see it is not which office suit you use, but rather that people use the wrong tool for the job. Like trying to use excel to fill out forms and stuffing it with lots of macros and other crap to make a half-assed attempt at something that is barely usable.
This stuff doesn't work with open/libre office but it doesn't even work the same in different office versions.
Scott,
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 isnt 2005 anymore. Standard file servers are a thing of the pass as they should be.
@Pete-S said in File permission and samba help needed:
I have a server running samba. It's messy with lots of files in it and people have been connecting to it using the same username/password.
I want to split this up so I created usernames and passwords for everyone, both in linux and samba.
What I think I want is one share but under that directories for different departments - like HR, finance etc. And the users should have different permissions so they can only see the directories they have permission for.
What is my next step? Should I create groups in linux for each department and then add users to that group? And then change the group owner on the departments directory and files below?
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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, "
