On 2020/07/11 11:04, Michael Meeks wrote: >> Redhat will sell you a yearly subscription for a single workstation, >> as low as 180 USD. So will SuSE for 32 GBP. Will any ecosystem company >> scale down ? That takes a fully automated setup, where people >> self-register and pay on your website. > > Right - and such infrastructure requires significant investment to > setup; absent any need for that - no-one will do make that investment I > guess (outside of app-stores). Currently interest is negligible, so that > investment looks premature.
That is the SOHO market, and if WFH becomes the standard, that is the environment that support companies across the board will have to be able to support. >> So, if ecosystem companies want to attract the same "every business >> user pays" model, they need to make that actually workable, easy and >> as painless as possible. Currently, my feeling is that it is >> deadlocked into a chicken and egg type problem; the ecosystem >> companies are the chicken, and they need to invest effort (and >> capital) lay the first eggs. They cannot wait for the economies of >> scale to drop into their lap and make it worthwhile to setup the >> human-free "pay us" system. They need to put the system in place, and >> only then can the number of small scale paying users actually grow. > > Sure. Then again - if there is an explosion of interest that proves > demand (this would be a good problem to have) - I'm confident that the > ecosystem can respond in a matter of days to weeks to plug that gap =) Whether or not the ecosystem can scale up, depends upon: * How the ecosystem provides support; * What type of issues the user is having; By way of example, whenever I open a document in Apache OpenOffice, I get an error message about the document having been created with a newer version, and to update Apache OpenOffice. However, I've got the most recent official release, and I point blank to refuse to run either weekly, or nightly builds. The issue is that the document was originally created with LibreOffice 6.x, but AOo is on 4.1.x. How long would it take your Tier 1 support person to determine that that was the issue, and that AOo and LibO are slowly migrating towards mutual incompatibility. >> If the developer ecosystem companies are not willing to put their >> money where their mouth is (and "lay the first eggs" for the SME... > I imagine this can be finesse initially by careful marketing on the > LibreOffice Enterprise portal to steer the right people to use > LibreOffice Community vs. an Enterprise version. Each of those vendors needs to figure out their target market, both in terms of field of endeavour, and size (either gross revenue or employees) of the organisations that it targets. Where the LibreOffice paid support page can help, is having indicators for: * These firms specialise in this field of endeavour; * These firms specialise in firms of this size (number of employees); * These firms specialise in firms of this size (gross annual revenue); * These firms specialise in individuals; # For the places that claim to offer training, what do they mean by training: * LibreOffice 201: A college level introductory course in LibreOffice; * LibreOffice for your Office: A series of 2-16 sessions, on using LibreOffice in your specific office, with each session being roughly 45 minutes in length; * LibreOffice: A training session that purports to take one from computer novice, to LibreOffice superstar, in 30 minutes; * Integrating LibreOffice into your workflow: How to adapt to LibreOffice, without having to relearn everything, or throwing away your existing documents; # LibreOffice and A11Y tools Three years ago, _Services For The Blind_ went on a nationwide hunt, for somebody who had the appropriate qualifications, to teach people how to use A11Y tools with LibreOffice and Linux. No trainers were found. For a SOHO, or SMB, that automatically disqualifies both LibreOffice, and Linux, from consideration. It isn't that these trainers are cheap. (The individual that was hired to teach LibreOffice, who had the appropriate qualifications to teach MSO & Windows, admitted that they knew nothing about the software, billed their discounted rate of US$1,000/hour.) Can _any_ of the LibreOffice Ecosystem support vendors provide A11Y support? Going by the websites I've seen, it would appear that they do not. jonathon -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
