My 73 year old father never ceases to surprise me. He continues to work in his retirement years and is never afraid to start at the beginning. He works as a commercial real estate broker and recently took a position at a broker’s office in Beverly Hills, California. I often help him out with computer issues and on his first day in the office, seated in front of a new computer, he called up to say “how do I open the Excel files I brought with me from home ?”
So, I patiently walked him through finding Microsoft Office on the computer only to find it was not installed. He then asked, “where can I get Excel cheaper than $229 ?”
The answer was simple, I walked him through downloading and installing OpenOffice.
* Download time: 12 minutes over a LAN
* Install time: 10 minutes – about five mouseclicks and perhaps twelve words to type
Total time to become productive: Less than 25 minutes
Would someone care to calculate the time and cost to use Microsoft Office?
- drive to the store at +$3 a gallon,
- park (neither activity a pleasant experience in Los Angeles)
- find the CD on the shelf
- stand in line
- pay!!!!!!!!!
- drive back to the office
- open the shrinkwrap (toss into the nearest landfill)
- validate the product is not counterfeit
- insert the CD
- install the product
- put the CD and license in a safe place in case you ever need it again
start working!
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