[ubuntu-uk] Open formats in UK gov?

[Avi Greenbury]

Nigel Verity wrote:

> I think that standardising on open formats is a significant step but
> it is a long, long way from seeing the likes of LibreOffice running
> on the typical civil servant's desktop. 

I don't think that's going to happen. I think office suites will be in
web-browsers before LO achieves that much traction.

> If all that's being opened up is the use of ODF, Microsoft will point
> out that they support ODF, though their implementation is far from
> perfect, but that's no different from LibreOffice's implementation of
> the DOCX format.

Yes, this is often mooted as one of the benefits of an open standard;
you may use whichever client you please. MS Office isn't necessarily a
poor decision from a functionality standpoint.

> In schools and elsewhere people are not taught "word processing".
> They are taught explicitly how to use MS Word. Likewise with
> "spreadsheets" and Excel. Although for most people the transition to
> LibreOffice would be fairly trivial, the civil service would insist
> that everyone is given conversion training. Microsoft could
> reasonably point to a high cost of migration which, combined with the
> cost of Office pared back to cost price or less, would see the
> company able to maintain its stranglehold on government IT
> procurement. Civil servants can already buy personal copies of Office
> Pro for well under £20. Think of the price the government would get
> when ordering half a million copies.

This is largely why companies don't tend to switch either. Though the
costs aren't in training the users so much as in training or finding
support staff, reimplementing macros and templates, and putting
together pipes such that systems expecting or emitting particular
file formats will still be operable.

-- 
Avi