The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Talking of learning curves, the so-called Office 2007 ribbon may well
reveal its true power once you become used to it. However, to a new
user the user interface is not really very intuitive. So those
organizations that do decide to upgrade to Office 2007 may have to
spend as much as the cost of the software again on training staff how
to use the new product.
Then of course there is the issue of backward
compatibility - always an issue with new versions of Microsoft Office.
Will Office 2003 be able to recognize all Office 2007 documents,
complete with formatting?
Users may need to pay for a copy of Office 2007 for their home desktop
and another for their laptop and perhaps others for their childrens'
computers. Short of piracy, there's no getting around paying for
multiple copies of Office 2007 unless users decide to put a peg in the
sand and go open source.
I am now using Office 2003 but I have also installed Open Office.org
installed on my machine and used it. They are very similar and
virtually interchangeable. Sometimes I create a document using Google's
free online wordprocessor Writely. On other occasions I have used
another online wordprocessor from a crowd called Zoho, who also have a
good online spreadsheet and presentation package.
The point is there are now real alternatives to paying for an expensive
upgrade to Office 2007 and the open source desktop office offering Open
Office.org is probably the most viable. Until now, the open source
crowd have not been as vocal as they could be. The question is can they
get the message out to businesses and the consumer that they no longer
have to pay for office productivity software? If they can, Office 2007
is going to be a hard sell.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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