Another Smart Way To Cut Costs
The economy today is making all of the news. There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about how businesses are saving money by spending on updating both their hardware and software.
While it never bad to look at your programs with an eye toward improving their efficiency, it continues to blow me away that companies are spending so much money, time and resources on many different software products when there are so many open source alternatives available that are almost as good, as good as or even better than what they are currently using. Not all of them are free, but many are.
Take for example Open Office. It’s a wonderful FREE tool that I have been using for years and in all that time I have only reverted to my old version of Office once for a particular mail merge thing. While I learned everything that I needed to do on my own and I think most current MS Office users could as well, if a company still had to invert in training I can’t imagine it would be anywhere near the cost of just one MS Office upgrade (or new install).
There are also appearing several online versions of Office Applications. I can understand how many companies would not trust any website with their sensitive data (including Google) many others do not do much more with their programs than typing letters and could benefit from this method.
This was just one example off the top of my head, I’m sure there are many more. Here are some others.
