With a lot of changes at True Corp. lately, I would like to announce that True is currently one of the leading companies in Thailand that use the Linux operating system (Red Hat Enterprise), as a member of the Charoen Pokphand Group its propably the biggest corporation that switched to Linux in Thailand

Although I still consider myself as a newbe in Linux, I now can say I don't regret the switch and I managed to convince people in my surroundings to make the switch too.

Of course I'm happy to see that companies do seem to have the nerve to abandon microsh*t.

Although I still consider myself as a newbe in Linux, I now can say I don't regret the switch and I managed to convince people in my surroundings to make the switch too.

Of course I'm happy to see that companies do seem to have the nerve to abandon microsh*t.

I think you'll find a lot of people that are running Red Hat Servers moved away from Unix servers (i.e. Sun / HP, rather than from Microsoft). Microsoft only dominates on the desktop, and then primarily because of Office.

(And before you say Open Office, There is nothing available on Linux that comes close to Excel for people who really USE spreadsheets...)

Although I still consider myself as a newbe in Linux, I now can say I don't regret the switch and I managed to convince people in my surroundings to make the switch too.

Of course I'm happy to see that companies do seem to have the nerve to abandon microsh*t.

I think you'll find a lot of people that are running Red Hat Servers moved away from Unix servers (i.e. Sun / HP, rather than from Microsoft). Microsoft only dominates on the desktop, and then primarily because of Office.

(And before you say Open Office, There is nothing available on Linux that comes close to Excel for people who really USE spreadsheets...)

I totally agree on that Mike. Just a few observations here..

Open Office/Libre Office do still have a long way to go before they'll match Excel. Does it need to be said that most of the people having a computer at home and running Office of MS to run Excel spreadsheets, don't even use 40% of it's possibilities ?

Whatever these people use Excel for, might be covered largely by Open/Libre Office software.

I don't even mention the use of Access of which even less people know how and what to use it for. Even the Word application is by most people used as a simple but overpriced typewriter.

Nevertheless they keep spending large amounts buying this software.

It will indeed take a long time before the other Office suites will be a match to MS Office and can be used in large office environments.

Before we get into a big discussion, most computers which run now RedHat Enterprise and Fedora 17 as Linux distribution had before a Microsoft operating system installed.

Second if before somebody says MS Excel is better than an opensource office package. Tell me what MS Excel can do what I cannot do with spreadsheet program which is part of Lotus Symphony? And maybe not averybody knows it, but Lotus Symphony is avalable for most Linux distributions (and 100% free for non-commercial use).

Also did MS Excel already fixed the problems they had with 64-bits? What I hear MS Oiffice 2010 is the first really native 64-bits version, while the latest OpenOffice/LibreOffice/StarOffice are based on countless generations of 64-bits versions...

Also not forget that the 32-bits versions of MS Excel where limited to spreadsheets of maximal 2GB. Quote from Microsoft for selling there new 64-bits MS Excel 2010 "For example, this additional capacity is needed only by those Microsoft Excel users who require Excel spreadsheets to access more than 2 gigabytes (GB) of addressable memory."

Even LibreOffice 32-bits can load and work with spreadsheets larger than 2GB, while the 64-bits version of LibreOffice (with enough internal memory) will work faster as it not needs to swap to hard drive...