brainstorming: which formats to use and which to avoid

MJ Ray markj at cloaked.freeserve.co.uk
Wed Jun 13 08:05:59 UTC 2001


E L Tonkin <py7elt at bath.ac.uk> writes:

> Plus, bear in mind that a lot of businesses' IT departments constrain
> themselves to the sort of options I described below. In short, installing
> and teaching anything radically new to over a thousand users is not an
> option. [...]

This sounds to me like an excellent argument for teaching them some
mark-up language once, rather than being subject of the whims of
corporate marketing departments who decide the product your company
uses is no longer profitable enough to continue.  Then you get all the
drawbacks of retraining with none of the planning.

OK, this hasn't happened with word processing recently, but it could.
The only reason companies don't teach their workers a sustainable
system is because the employees are coming ready-trained in Word from
colleges.  That is why getting more Free Software into colleges is a
very important task.  Fortunately, colleges are susceptible to both
the price and ideological arguments for Free Software.

Tenuously related, anyone near Norwich is quite welcome to a LUG
meeting on Sunday afternoon at UEA.  http://www.anglian.lug.org.uk/
-- 
MJR



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