Re: Think this will affect you?
Ohh, fisty cuffs!
Apples and pears. No, you don't migrate overnight to Open Source. The first thing you do is setting an Open strategy - focus away from the locked up shop and make the infrastructure open. We did that somewhere by introducing Apple kit for higher management (with support team) - that forced thinking about a more open architecture. It's not something you do overnight, but if you haven't been going down the more Open route for almost 10 years now you haven't been paying attention.
As for your argument for retraining of users for Openoffice, I disagree. EVERY SINGLE VERSION of MS Office over the last few years has been sold on the basis of UI changes, and as someone with close to 30 years of document writing experience, every single version has made my life harder, not better - especially the ribbon crap amounted to taking a nuclear warhead to productivity as users had to root around to find the features they were used to. That productivity loss + training time is a hit on time you cannot recover with the so-called but in my experience mostly imaginary improvements to usability.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, has remained pretty stable when it comes to UI (although some people are trying to make as bad a mess of it as MS Office to stay UI compatible). This means train ONCE. And people can use it home, and on Apple kit (and even Linux for the hardcore techies) without extra costs, and without any issues in presentation - stuff looks the same on all platforms. Add to this that the various flavours of OpenOffice all support the ODF format, a European Standard achieved by consensus rather than by flat out corruption and you also know you will have access to information so produced in a way that is stable.
In that context, in the rich and horrific history of MS Office there has never been a more shocking realisation for me than when I discovered that spreadsheets created in one language did not work in another because the formulae were language dependent. Now, OK, they are a US outfit, but not tokenise this? That was an absolute jaw dropper for someone like me who tends to work in about 4 languages - you couldn't share a spreadsheet unless you used the same language version of Office.
and personally...i've never seen a open source environment that's as feature rich and slick as a well setup Microsoft environment
I'd cheat. Get a Mac. Cute front end, and every conceivable language in the back end including bash scripting, the simple to use Automator and Applescript (that's not Enterprise ready but gets you sometimes out of a hole).
Furthermore, I hear a lot of yelping about OSX/Apple being expensive. You should actualyl start adding up what you spend in software (and maintenance) on a PC and on a Mac - you'd be surprised. And, if you have a hardware or repair issue you have global coverage..
Once you have started down that route you can see where Linux makes sense as well. Do you really need to blow a fortune on your web server or is a simple, open CMS enough - that way you can invest what you save in customising it to make it work for you. Shorter deployment time, and in many cases you can get hold of the original author - ever tried to get decent support from MS? I worked for MS's second largest customer in the world and it was a struggle.
Anyway, I'm not saying that every environment is perfect. But your argument that you cannot invest the effort to change doesn't stack up - you are already changing and retraining every time new releases come out of Windows and MS Office. About the only thing that keeps people hanging on to MS Office is Outlook - I'm astonished that there is really NO viable Open Source alternative out there, and even Apple still does it the old-fashioned way. It's actually the lack of Outlook alternatives one of the main barriers to change (MS Office on a Mac costs an absolute FORTUNE in comparison to *any* other software product on Mac except for Adobe, and that isn't in use by everyone).