RE: https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/116189938186518281

Great! πŸ‘ But look, guys, even if you maybe don't want to directly badmouth Microsoft, you don't have to keep pretending that most people prefer it.

Yes, there'll be minor switching abrasion; familiarity is a strong motivator - but I assure you, the number of users who *want to* work in MS Office or Windows is well witin a single-digit percentage.

- which also means feel free to improve on the experience. "We're not Big Tech" is not your only selling point.

#privacy #OpenSource #QuitBigTech

@jwcph I do a ton of talks on this subject. People are very attached to their working environment and even if they are unhappy with Teams or Word or Outlook, they also overwhelmingly don’t want change if they can stop it. Your single digit number is very much not what I observe.
@bert_hubert @jwcph as a former Microsoft customer facing engineer, I can back this up. Changing tools is incredibly painful for orgs, just in terms of training and Skilling. We held sessions that would last a whole week just for technical people on how to use new tools, and that process would always require follow up training and reinforcement for technical people. For non technical people this is even more pointed. Doing migrations to or from Teams, which no one loves, was and still is a laborious and slogging process, something that takes months or longer. Changing systems is hard, and without mandates and top level support, is extremely hard.

@tstruthers @bert_hubert @jwcph And that is why Microsoft has been getting away with outrageous license fees for two decades - from our tax payer's money.

We need to free ourselves from this hostage situation. And yes that will be painful but it is necessary.

@kdekooter @tstruthers @bert_hubert Guys, I neither disagree with any of this, nor do I want to challenge your experiences - but I do want to reiterate that resistance to the inconvenience of switching (which I specifically referred to as a strong motivation) β‰  preference.

What people prefer is for IT to not bother them or make them feel stupid - NOT "using Microsoft products".

I have a bit of professional experience with this, too, and I stand by my percentage 😁