Most of my colleagues write using Microsoft Word and the university also uses Excel quite a bit. When you compare these products to the OpenOffice alternatives, then there’s no contest (ditto NeoOffice for Mac users).

If my University, in the interest of cost savings, tried to push everyone into using OpenOffice, I imagine there’d be uproar.

The perfect example of this is the disastrous NHS IT overhaul. Admittedly, it wasn’t helped by the most ill thought out procurement process in IT history, but it was made even worse by the fact that the IT providers have control over the code, so they can’t be turfed off for underperformance without having to start all over again.

My buddy who teaches at a small liberal arts college down the road is using moodle and loves it. Its amazing, flexible and cheap. We can’t have moodle, or even our own wiki server, because the central office has forbidden it. We are all using D2L and thats that.

One last thing, the central office’s IT budget has grown steadily while tuition has gone up and salaries have staid flat, system wide for the past decade. But we have D2L… which just got sued by Blackboard.

Phooey.

The promise of open software that is not controlled by IT far exceeds the reality. It works in 90-95% of the cases, but in business where zealots and techies are not about, the 5-10% failure rate kills the reputation of the software. It often needs obtuse and obscure commands to operate.

When I inquired a local Linux user group on what to teach newbies, there were 2 responses. One was to teach them how to research problems on the web using wiki and google and the second referred me to a 10,500 word essay teaching newbies how to ask linux folks questions without pissing the linux folks off.

This will not work in the business community. If you look at OSes, Linux has a 3% market. You cannot get more market if ignore the customer is your business model.

Open source supported by consultants to handhold customers can wonderful. But bring it without the hand holding and it fails, then its reputation is ruined forever. Folks want to get the job done. Less expense is nice, but not at the cost of getting work done.

After all you are competing against something that does work. You are bring in change and change has few allies. When it fails to meet expectations, you are lost.

The class of dilemma I am interested in is when your application is as simple and important as a WordPress site.

The question is one of leverage—software is important for its effects, so if the goal is social effects (more talking, more shared awareness, more co-editing, whatever) then the simpler apps may work better. If we were just in a pair of boxes labled ‘Complex and Important’ and ‘Simple and Unimportant’, there wouldn’t be any issue.

I may have spoken imprecisely. When I say simple and unimportant I’m referring to the choice of software specifically—of course its utilization may serve a very important role for a given organization. But how hard would it be to replace if it broke, or was found lacking, or you discovered you couldn’t support it within the organization? If it’s a blog the answer is “not very”. There isn’t a big downside to rolling the dice and seeing how it works.

Contrast this with, say, the selection of a VoIP system for your office. The phone system may be much less important to an enterprise than its website, but switching phone technologies is likely to be a much bigger pain than switching from WordPress to Movable Type.

I say all this from experience, incidentally. We could be forced to migrate a dozen WordPress sites to Drupal, MT or whatever before it’d be half the hassle that dealing with our FOSS VoIP system (Trixbox) has been, although on a day to day basis the phones are far less important.

The purchase of expensive, non-performant software is a form of conspicuous consumption. Status accrues to people in control of large budgets who spend it on visibly expensive things.

You can view the expensive lunches, fact-finding tours and other freebies that typically accompany very large enterprise software purchase as a form of potlatch.

I know that sells on the conference-club. But it’s really irritating the next time I have to deal with a manager and explain no, it’s not about some sort of anti-corporate ivory-tower ideology.

To amplify what peter just said at #27, running a large project in corporate management is very different from what’s valued by a perpetual-beta early-adopter mentality.

This behaviour is not risk-aversion or stupidity on the part of CIOs, it is rational commonsense. Corporations have good reason to be cautious about messing with their mission-critical systems and operations.

The class of dilemma I am interested in is when your application is as simple and important as a WordPress site.

The question is one of leverage—software is important for its effects, so if the goal is social effects (more talking, more shared awareness, more co-editing, whatever) then the simpler apps may work better. If we were just in a pair of boxes labled ‘Complex and Important’ and ‘Simple and Unimportant’, there wouldn’t be any issue.

James #11: Open Source is often produced by people paid to produce Open Source (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ltc/), because people of sound technical judgment recommend it (http://www.ameinfo.com/69674.html)

And Seth #9, I never use the words Gift Economy, because they are not merely hollow, they actively obscure the real economics at work.

And the point of ‘Just try it and see how it goes’ is a telegraphic version of the observation from Here Comes Everybody that the great advantage of many of these systems is that the cost of failure is so low. I am specifically not saying “Just adopt simple solutions because its the Right Thing To Do”; sometimes it is an sometimes it isn’t.

Instead, I am saying “One way to decide whether to adopt a piece of software is to study it; another is to try it.” I have observed, among people adopting software, that trying something that may fail is seen as inferior to studying something that may fail, even when trying it is both a lower-cost and higher-value test, precisely because studying something that may fail is only a proxy for trying it, so you can still get the green light for something that may not work.

I think that the observation about Boeing is right on—people put faith in contractual relations, even when they provide zero leverage, as with Windows. what I am wondering is why that it. It may be that failure aversion is so built in, to either minds or social systems, that any cost-benefit analysis will overestimate the willingness to try things as a way of telling whether they work or not.

“Software is priced three ways: free, cheap, and dear:

Free. Open source, etc. Not relevant to the current discussion. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Cheap. $10 – $1000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce. Most shrinkwrapped consumer and small business software falls into this category.

Dear. $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.”