I've gone through this at a few places now. Besides resistance from the users ("we only know how to use Outlook!"), is migrating from Outlook to another solution ranges somewhere between unlikely to impossible. For someone like me, I only have 3 or 4 appointments scheduled, and the other few hundred are meetings I was invited to. :)

You can have the best plan, with the best business reasons, but when a senior executive tells the CEO that he can't switch, you'll frequently find that it will veto the migration.

Here's a real-world example. I was Director of IT for the company. The CEO told me specifically to get rid of Exchange, because the upgrade costs were too high. We were literally a couple weeks from switching. The Director of Sales went to the CEO and demanded that we keep Exchange, or he would walk.

Funny thing about the sales department. He didn't manage to sell anything, and he couldn't retain the customers. The accounting staff ended up doing all the customer retention. That guy cost us more money than he made. IT, on the other hand, brought costs down, and improved the customer experience.

The only thing that sales brought to us were headaches, and very pretty forward looking reports, that pretty much consisted of a graph showing our sales history, and a line going up at a 45 degree angle showing our future revenue. Every few months, he had to update the graph, so it showed our revenue losses, and had a new starting point for his upward line. I don't think he had a grasp of the concept of forecasting.

Funny, I've tried MS Office a few times over the years. I usually go back to OpenOffice. If for nothing else, I install OpenOffice when I set up a new computer, since it's too much trouble to find an unused MS license outside of normal business hours. :)

Microsoft is probably counting every OEM that ships with the trial version of Office, and all the bundled licenses, even if they aren't used.

Most companies buy too many licenses, so they can be sure they have enough. So if we buy 50, and use 30, but only 10 use it on any sort of regular basis, MS will still count it as 50.

For most users that I've known who were willing to try OpenOffice, Calc worked fine for them.

The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.

There are enough users who refuse to even try OpenOffice for the word processor. "I can't because...". I've tricked some users into switching, by just giving them shortcuts on their desktop with the MS names instead of the OO names, and changing the default save types to the MS counterpart. When they ask about why it looks different, I just tell them "oh, this is the newer version.", and they're fine.

There is passable ( and suspect ) media, but not 'good'

They cant realistically kill the line ( "you cant stop the signal" ), but if you disable every access device known to man it would have the same effect... Killing every phone ( and soon tablets ) in one swoop would go a long way towards that goal.

This also gets around adhoc and private mesh networks that the feds have no real access to control.

What good media exists at all.

I say none.

He has no business being on the bench. A big F-You goes out to the bastard.

You're essentially claiming that both you and your AR-15 are at least as accurate as the gold medalist in the 50m rifle at the 2012 summer games was while firing whatever piece of art was crafted for him by Anschutz. You can imagine how one might be incredulous in the face of this claim. "You don't know what you're talking about" is not a valid response.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

... and since you said teleportation, your future prediction would be completely ruined by the sudden realization that you can safely establish stable wormholes with stuff that's already in most homes.

I don't trust any forward looking statement. Business people throw those around all the time, which always equates to "I hope we stay in business". They never make the forward looking statement of "In the next 6 to 9 months, I hope we go bankrupt, and the shareholders murder us."

Nah, I still don't win.

I do have some nice Mosins though.

LK

My oldest is a 1923 Tula.
Just picked up a 1944 Izhevsk ex sniper.

LK

Awesome heirloom but no one wins.

Yours has more historical significance to you and your family than any of mine but come on, I have guns that were used to kill Nazis.

LK

Isn't this what the "Chemtrails" conspiracy theorists say is going on right now?

LK

Nah, the Saturnians just did yet another launch.. You'd think they would have learned by now that they're really not good at it. Look at all that debris they left in orbit. That's what it's going to look like around the Earth in a few thousand years, if we don't start cleaning up after ourselves.