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Re: Monday, December 31, 2001
Mad Dog suggested during LINUX Lunacy that the application training companies could help with the LINUX market share of the office desktop by offering classes in Star Office and Corel WordPerfect Suite. Good idea, except there are not enough customers, at least from my experience in the training industry. In the Nashville market it is almost a complete waste of time and resources to offer, and prepare to teach, either Corel Office or Lotus SmartSuite products. (As a Training Consultant, I would however find time and resources for a large enough account for any desktop application.) The desktop application war in the training industry was won by Microsoft by the time Office 97 rolled out. I could have run the Manpower training lab (I trained about 6000 users in three years) just on MS Word, Excel, and Windows end user classes. Demand for Mac classes, other than an occasional Word or Excel class, completely evaporated, with an occasional request for PageMaker. The best thing that could happen for LINUX, as a desktop environment for day to day endusers, is for Microsoft to release a version of Office (including Project and FrontPage) just for Linux. The courts may even see to this, in a strange act of irony. The Open Source and Free Software Illuminati will gag over this idea, but Microsoft dominates the desktop office applications market. Corel will never regain significant market share. Star Office... well, you could give away Star Office and no one would use it... (Oh, it is given away, just like AOL CDs.) Is there a single company running its office environment with Star Office (Afgan cartels do not count, even for this rhetorical question), or that would pay a training company for Star Office end user classes? A LINUX version of MS Office would not be open source, but it would accelerate the integration of LINUX into the business community. Of course, some businesses might make you wear a suit to work under the pretense that it looks more professional to the customers, and that could cause serious problems for the Anti-Suits. (Has Adobe released LINUX versions all of its products yet?)
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