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Re: [school-discuss] StarOffice in Edu.

On Wed, 18 Sep 2002 07:48, Christopher Reed wrote:
> I'm curious why a free product like StarOffice is not more prevalent in
> education. Is it an issue of support? Usability? Laziness (people don't
> want to switch ffrom MS Office)? Or other?

 * NIH syndrome: many people really don't like to discover that they
   haven't been clever enough to be the first on their block to learn
   about something, so when new stuff (OOo/SO in this case) comes
   along, they rubbish it instead of trying to learn about it.

 * The learning curve is indeed very shallow, but some people won't
   (or are too overloaded to prioritise the time for) face that curve
   at all if they can avoid it.

 * OOo/SO is new, Word is entrenched. Moreso on the Mac, where OOo is
   not even officially released for OS/X and is nonexistent for earlier
   OSes.

 * The `free can't be any good' furphy.

Cheers; Leon