Re: embrace and extend...

On Montag, 21. Juli 2003, at 18:02 Uhr, Al Mulnick wrote:
> They want the ability to work offline and the ability to get
> full features while disconnected.  Hard to provide that with a server 
> based
> client.

If they want to limit themselves to what Outlook provides, they can go 
with ZideLook. We are just some days away from providing offline 
capabilities to it (by using a local WebDAV cache daemon).

This is somewhat a nice advantage of OGo. "Workers" can use the 
simplified Outlook interface while "Managers" can assign tasks, 
appointments etc to projects - relations to other objects in OGo are 
*not* lost during editing in Outlook (or Evolution).

> They also want to know that it scales and can be used with a
> minimal amount of bandwidth (compression techniques etc).  But with 
> all of
> that, they want the meaningful features that make it useful and 
> reliability.

OGo scales very well.
OGo is certainly reliable, especially regarding to data consistency, 
since it stores it's data in fully transacted, relational database 
systems.

> My only conclusion is people buy it because it does what they want and 
> the
> price will have to be tolerated.

That is a misconception. Those products are primarily bought because 
they are supposed to be the "standard" products. Technical issues or 
price have usually nothing to do with it.

> If that means that a client is similar to Outlook in appearance then 
> so be
> it.

This is required, otherwise training costs will exceed license cost and 
destroy a significant value of OS.

> Opensource or not, there is a lot of
> companies that aren't ready to switch to a *nix desktop even on the 
> intel
> platform so clients need to go where the clients are.

Unfortunate, but I agree. The reason why OOo is so successful is that 
it runs on Windows (IMHO).

regards,
   Helge
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