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Attempts to push us up, into the cloud.
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Read more.Quote:
Attempts to push us up, into the cloud.
It's all well and good trying to nudge people into the cloud but until net connections are properly reliable and with sufficient bandwidth, low latency and the like 24 hours a day, 7 days a week there is no way i'm willing to move over to it. The number of times I have to work remotely, or from home without a business net connection, I'd be unable to work if the software was cloud-based a la google docs. We get hit twice - paying for unsatisfactory net connections, and for installed software which we have no choice but to opt for.
My home net connection is not reliable/fast enough for this sort of thing at all.
I think these companies sometimes forget what it's like for the ordinary person. Especially here in the UK, where a great many people can bearley get 2Mb connections and they drop all the time. Assuming they've even got internet at home! I know a lot of people who haven't and just rely on using it at work, at the library and on their phones. More and more companies in the UK are prohibiting personal use of the net at work, and libraries are very restrictive.
If I was to get an Office package now I would stick with the Home & Student Edition.
We still use Word 2002 at home (along with Libre Office if needed). 'Business' and 'professional' software is way to expensive for the average home user anyway.
$100/y for basic productivity suite? Not in this space-time continuum. LibreOffice does everything I need it to do and costs me nothing. And there's always ${MSO tool} Viewer for annoying people who insist on sending proprietary formatted files, which works perfectly fine in Wine.
Whenever I've worked with larger firms, the tactic was always to give everyone libre/open office by default, buying licences of Microsoft Office only for client-facing employees who may have had certain formatting issues.
At the moment we use Google Apps for Business, I share the concern with losing internet connection, but our office has perfect full-bar 3G coverage so we have a router with fallback and most of us are capable of phone tethering. You can actually edit docs offline with Chrome apps, however presentations and spreadsheets don't work properly yet, I'm hoping Office 2013 will push Google to sort this. We also deemed more important than docs downtime was e-mail for us and Cloud service with an SLA are adding insurance here and saving the stupid costs of running Microsoft exchange (both price and the resources it consumes).
At this rate when the Zombie apocalypse or Alien invasion hits us,the resistance has no chance as any computer device will not work.
:p