Have You Been Listening?
I once went to a training evaluation where an organization was switching mail clients to Outlook. Although the trainees were supposed to be end-users, the departments sent 'computer-savvy' people. These were the people I'd assume could pick up how to use Outlook (if they didn't use it at home) the fastest. The result? Most of them had no clue! One of the issues was how hard it was to transition to the 'Send' button to send an Email message! So how is the 'average' user going to react to OpenOffice? WordPad? This suggestion makes sense, but won't fly. Your receptionist example will look at it and take offense that she doesn't rate highly enough in the company to get MS Word. What happens the first time she receives a .doc or .docx file?
I was running our software pretty lean with older versions, and told some people with newer versions all they needed to do was use the 'Save As' option so their documents would be compatible with everyone else. They refused, saying it would take up 'too much of their valuable time', and that it was the OTHER user's responsibility to have an up-to-date version. Their managers backed them, "How cheap are we that we can't get new software for our people?" and so it goes. I imagine this behaviour is pretty widespread, or a lot more of us would still be using Office 2000 or other options.
Cost? I looked into separate licensing costs for my users, and for a very small extra cost I could put the Office Basic Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook) onto each desktop as opposed to fiddling with one or two apps and tracking licenses.
