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

[Christopher Chan]

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.

You have just blown away the whole retraining argument for using Linux. 
If you have to constantly retrain Windows users, there ain't no TCO 
argument on the training front anymore.

> 
> 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.

/me shrugs. When I finally clear out the mess left behind by the 
previous predecessors, I will offer voluntary training for the teachers. 
  For some, it is going to be hard...they are over fifty and will need 
constant reminders. For others, I don't see a problem.

> 
> 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.
> 
> 
> 

Thank you for blowing away the foundations of your TCO argument with 
regards to Linux vs Windows on the training front.