Mastodawn

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

Great! 👍 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

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bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦Mar 8

@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.

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TheDude Mar 8

@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.

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zbrando

@tstruthers I say the same things every time someone says it's easy to switch to free software, why don't people do it. It's easier with private customers but only if they are technically prepared and want to learn. With normal people, business/corporate/public entities is a long, big battle and not everyone is willing to invest time and money for the switch.
The best strategy to displace closed software is to mandate open standards and to take users early in life, like at schools. (my daughter is already used to Google and Microsoft products and dislikes Apple's or open counterparts)
It's a slow, hard process. @bert_hubert @jwcph