Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 21:05:55 -0700 From: Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC <chad@shire.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Is Yahoo! moving from FreeBSD? Message-ID: <d7637bd0788cc7abf4e6dd634d2beaf4@shire.net> In-Reply-To: <1922605381.20050225204735@wanadoo.fr> References: <1907334115.20050225132200@wanadoo.fr> <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNEEIJFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> <1922605381.20050225204735@wanadoo.fr>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Feb 25, 2005, at 12:47 PM, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Ted Mittelstaedt writes: > >> Your missing the point. It's far more cost-effective for a business >> to >> not hire a bunch of whiners in the first place. > > They aren't whiners. It's perfectly logical for them to want to work > with software for which they are already trained, and it's equally > logical for a company to let them work with software for which they are > already trained. There's no reason at all to retrain them on something > completely different. > >> But I don't expect this kind of whining from someone I hire at $30K a >> year to actually do some real clerical work that requires some >> responsibility, and I am not going to stand for it for the $60K and >> above grown up adult that I hire for a managerial or ops position or >> some such. > > I guess you can spend another $60K on training them to use something > else and hope they don't leave until you amortize that additional > expense (if you ever do). But that doesn't seem to make very good > business sense. > Give me a break. Most all (excepting a few power users or financial analysts) users of Office in corporate work use about 2% (or some small amount) of the features of Office and have never received formal training. They write a few memos in Word, and a few incidental uses of perhaps PowerPoint or Excel. They are self taught. They use Office through institutional inertia. I have worked in both large and small organizations and this is true across the board. Very few people have had specialized training using MS Office, and very few people use it for more than writing memos, simple spreadsheets of their budget (adding up stuff), etc. If they were given some other program that they could write memos with, and were told to use it, they would. There are no massive costs involved in retraining the major mass of employees. There may be a couple of power users who use Office to a large percentage of its capabilities and who would need to be retrained. Those are the facts. Office is used throughout the corporate world because of simple corporate institutional inertia and some high level manager or IT person declaring that that is the standard. The training costs come in the custom apps that people actually have to use to do their work. SAP, and that sort of thing and other custom SW. Or specialized software like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, etc. where a small number of people are experts at using specialized tools. Chad >> Unfortunately, there's still too many upper managers in business today >> who came of age before the computer became integrated into business, >> and chose to be lazy and not learn how to use them, and as a result >> today cannot themselves operate the things, so it is not possible for >> them to hold their employees to any kind of standard in this area. > > They already _know_ how to use computers; they just aren't familiar > with > the software that you personally prefer. They know the most popular > software on the market and how to use it; they can get their work done > with that software alone, without any need for anything else. There is > no reason for them to look elsewhere for software, nor is there any > reason for them to waste time and money learning other, more obscure > software packages that just do nothing more than Office already does. > > Managers don't have an emotional attachment to any type of computer > software. They run Office because everyone knows how to use Office. > And employees want Office because that's what they know how to use. > It's perfectly rational, and fully cost-effective, and it has nothing > to > do with laziness or the age at which someone was first exposed to > computers. > >> All throughout our businesses careers, we will be faced with this >> problem of having to unlearn the old way of doing things and learn >> new, better ways. > > Not necessarily. When something works well enough, there's no reason > to > learn anything else. > >> Everyone that works in a job faces this. > > Not necessarily. Even in jobs that require the use of a computer, it > isn't necessary to relearn things over and over. Microsoft Word and > Excel haven't changed significantly in ages. > >> Unfortunately, many people choose to refuse to unlearn old ways, and a >> larger percentage of them get like this when they have been doing the >> old way for a long time. > > They have to have a good reason to learn new ways, and "because someone > in the IT department hates Microsoft" isn't a good reason. > > -- > Anthony > > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?d7637bd0788cc7abf4e6dd634d2beaf4>