Looking beyond Windows 7 and Office; Thinking about the alternatives

Gartner is telling users to upgrade to Windows 7 and the latest Office, but adds that it may make sense to at least think about the alternatives and move toward a more reliable operating system neutral stance.

In a talk at the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando, Gartner analyst Michael Silver knead much of what the research firm revealed last week.

However, Silver seemed to advocate that customers at least think a more mixed source environment. For example, an enterprise can have Microsoft Office but use Google Docs or OpenOffice.org as a subsidiary to lower overall costs. Same for operating systems, but the cost equation is a little more complex.

Silver said that most programs in an enterprise will still need Windows well beyond 2011 so the appeal of the Mac OS and Linux have limited appeal. Virtualization is changing that equation somewhat, but the costs can be more with other operating systems when support if factored in. Silver said that Macs will enter the enterprise through the back door, but it is possible that a company will standardize on the Mac OS.
The other issue is the question of the operating system’s significance. By 2014, 20 percent of customers will primarily use a browser-based product as their primary office tool.
As for optional office software, Web-based optionals are not going to be mature enough to change Microsoft Office until 2014. But these alternatives can be a tool to lower costs.

Silver has said that there have been many companies that have investigated moving off Microsoft Office, usually to a distribution of OpenOffice.org, but comparatively few have actually made the migration. Obstructions have switching costs, problems with macros, stationery, databases and mail clients. For better or worse, for the last 15 years, companies have chosen to overprovision and deploy a product that can do everything the most-enhanced user requires to every user for the sake of Uniformity uniformity. Companies that want to deploy OpenOffice.org need to come to terms with the fact that some users will still require MS Office and they will be forced to support a mix of products.
To Gartner, it makes sense to take advantage of feasible perpetual licenses for Microsoft Office for as long as possible. The costly product you already own will be cheaper than the cheap or free products that you need to spend money to which to migrate.

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