Fedora

Bug #1 (liberation)
Comment #1863

Comment 1863 for bug 1

Revision history for this message

Tom (tom6) wrote on 2013-05-31: Re: [Bug 1] Re: Microsoft has a majority market share

#1863

Hi :)

It's probably better to tell them further down the road. Once you have become a bit friendlier with each other and they know 1st hand that you are excellent and provide good quality services.

It might surprise them how much extra effort you had to and were willing to put in to secure the relationship. It might embarrass them to know that Word formats are increasingly tough for people now that Windows is not number 1 and that their form causes people such problems. Are they starting to lose business by sticking to such temperamental formats?

MS Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 365 can "Save As ..." "OpenDocument Format" (.odt for 'text' (really documents done by word-processor NOT text-files)). That's 6 years and 4 versions. 2007 and 2010 cunningly used the outdated Odf version 1.1 but that's only a problem for spreadsheets. 2013 and 365 use Odf version 1.2 same as everyone else has been using for over 7 years.

Odf is becoming much more widely used because it means documents will be able to be read long after MS's formats have changed so much that old documents are unreadable. Entire countries and large organisations are switching to it. The French police force over a year ago, hospitals in Copenhagen about a year ago, all government desktops in one of the 'States' of Spain (40,000 machines) added to 70,000 machines in schools which switched a few years ago, all of Brasil for many years now. Errr, those are just a few that caught my eye.

It's probably still better to use the older Word formats (.Doc) (fomr MS Office 2000, Xp, 2003) rather than their newer ooxml .DocX format even if they want to restrict their business to other MS Office users because the DocX implementation changes with every release. In fact we often find that it's the LibreOffice user that has to act as "go between" in offices when 2 people have trouble sharing documents with each other. The DocXs produced by LibreOffice are the only ones that can be read by all different versions of MS Office!!

So, it is tough at the moment but things are moving your way and beginning to move quite a lot more quickly. Are businesses going to be ready? Your new corporate customer's isn't. Yours is.
Regards from
Tom :)

>________________________________
> From: Pedro Galvan <>
>Sent: Thursday, 30 May 2013, 23:05
>Subject: [Bug 1] Re: Microsoft has a majority market share
>
>
>Just this week, a corporate customer with whom I am starting a business relationship sent me a ms word document with a form that I needed to fill in order for them to register me as a supplier.
>
>Needless to say, I had to use ms word to open it.
>
><snip />
>
>I know that some will say that they would have told the customer to send
>the document in a non-proprietary format. Yeah, right. I would like to
>see you tell that to a new customer with an important deal.
>
><snip />
>

Hi :)

It's probably better to tell them further down the road.  Once you have become a bit friendlier with each other and they know 1st hand that you are excellent and provide good quality services.

It might surprise them how much extra effort you had to and were willing to put in to secure the relationship.  It might embarrass them to know that Word formats are increasingly tough for people now that Windows is not number 1 and that their form causes people such problems.  Are they starting to lose business by sticking to such temperamental formats?

MS Office 2007, 2010, 2013 and 365 can "Save As ..." "OpenDocument Format" (.odt for 'text' (really documents done by word-processor NOT text-files)).  That's 6 years and 4 versions.  2007 and 2010 cunningly used the outdated Odf version 1.1 but that's only a problem for spreadsheets.  2013 and 365 use Odf version 1.2 same as everyone else has been using for over 7 years.

Odf is becoming much more widely used because it means documents will be able to be read long after MS's formats have changed so much that old documents are unreadable.  Entire countries and large organisations are switching to it.  The French police force over a year ago, hospitals in Copenhagen about a year ago, all government desktops in one of the 'States' of Spain (40,000 machines) added to 70,000 machines in schools which switched a few years ago, all of Brasil for many years now.  Errr, those are just a few that caught my eye.

It's probably still better to use the older Word formats (.Doc) (fomr MS Office 2000, Xp, 2003) rather than their newer ooxml .DocX format even if they want to restrict their business to other MS Office users because the DocX implementation changes with every release.  In fact we often find that it's the LibreOffice user that has to act as "go between" in offices when 2 people have trouble sharing documents with each other.  The DocXs produced by LibreOffice are the only ones that can be read by all different versions of MS Office!!

So, it is tough at the moment but things are moving your way and beginning to move quite a lot more quickly.  Are businesses going to be ready?  Your new corporate customer's isn't.  Yours is.  
Regards from 
Tom :)

>________________________________
> From: Pedro Galvan <>
>Sent: Thursday, 30 May 2013, 23:05
>Subject: [Bug 1] Re: Microsoft has a majority market share
> 
>
>Just this week, a corporate customer with whom I am starting a business relationship sent me a ms word document with a form that I needed to fill in order for them to register me as a supplier. 
>
>Needless to say, I had to use ms word to open it.
>
><snip />
>
>I know that some will say that they would have told the customer to send
>the document in a non-proprietary format. Yeah, right. I would like to
>see you tell that to a new customer with an important deal.
>
><snip />
>