Convincing a school district to migrate from OS X to Ubuntu or Edubuntu

[Christopher J Combrink]

Amen. 

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 10:01 -0500, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> Christopher Chan wrote:
> > CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 
> >> That's because they may not save any money at all if the cost of
> >> retraining and the loss of productivity during the transition period
> >> exceeds the cost of software licenses. This is the TCO (Total Cost of
> >> Ownership) argument, which is an argument that Apple is very experienced
> >> at making.
> >>
> > 
> > A one time pain. Don't forget to make training videos and make them 
> > available over the network! It will all be over in a year or two! 
> > TCO...hah! Who does TCO over a decade?
> 
> One time pain?!  Do you know how many times you can tell a someone how 
> to do something like change a default printer on Windows and *still* get 
> called with that same question from that same person? Or how to save a 
> file to the home directory? These were things that we personally showed 
> people. Repeatedly.
> 
> The issue is if it's something they don't want to do, they won't listen 
> and memorize how to do it. Training videos take time to make (lost time 
> and resources there) and watch. Users do NOT want to watch videos or 
> anything else that takes up their time when they can just call and have 
> a person get back to them to fix it for them so that it's more 
> convenient for them. Otherwise every fast food joint would eke out 
> barely any profit and every 10-minute quick oil change joint would be 
> out of business.
> 
> Training is inconvenient for end users and they don't want to do it. 
> They view their IT department as the ones to do these annoying things 
> for them.
> 
> AND there's rollover in staff. One time pain to teach someone how to do 
> it "your district's way"? I don't think so.
> 
> 
>