I didn't want to divert or bloat the Outlook Express thread in General, but I had the urge to write this story down. I've told friends, but never written it down. It's not some fantastic tale, but it sticks in my mind, irony-wise.

Story:

3-4 years ago I spent 6 months working on a project with a medium-sized, somewhat dysfunctional company reporting to an nice, but weary interim CIO named "Jay"

Among other problems, due to poor management, IT turnover, and deficient inventory control, they had a software problem. Somewhat innocently, they had cruised along buying OEM licenses of MS-Office with new PCs on a somewhat haphazard basis; they *thought* they had everything covered under the then-prevailing concurrent-usage licensing for Office, but, along with many other companies, they were slow to pick up on the implications of the new "per-named-user" licensing model that quietly went into effect in late 1997.

Their problem got worse when a PC tech, fired for some sort of nasty behavior, reported the company to the SPA. So, months before I arrived, they were already getting nasty letters from MSFT lawyers. As the FNG on the scene, I became the obvious candidate to conduct a sweeping software audit that would miraculously find 2000 or so Office license certificates that had fallen into cracks in 20 locations over 3-5 years (or into trash cans or the homes of employees!). Well, we know that "miraculous" is tough to achieve. Gad, I hate software audits.

Jay was not happy with the result of the laborious audit, which turned up only trifling bits of software. We extended the audit, but little was gained. Finally Jay seemed resigned.

he said "Give me some alternatives".

A few days later I said "MS-Office: ~$300K. Smartsuite (we had a lot of IBM PCs): $125K. Corel Office: $75K. Star Office: $0"

Jay: "Well, that's no good. The people in research say they *have* to use MS-Word, and accounting says they *have* to use Excel!!"

Me: "OK, then the answer is $300K"

Jay: "well, thats's no good. Give me some alternatives"

With a few minor variations, we had pretty much this same little circular discussion every day for 6 weeks. All the while the lawyer letters increasing in frequency and urgency.

The day came when we had a BIG meeting. A vendor partner flew in 4 staff from Europe to review some huge system specification document. Their main office mailed the final version to us while these 4 staff were en route. The morning of the meeting, a bunch of IS staff attempted to open this 140-page Word document on their NT4.0 machines, but each time, it got to around page 120 and choked. The doc was created in the same version of Word97 that we used, except that it wasn't US English and the page size was Euro-spec. The doc was resent. Same problem. At this point many people are freaking out. About 30-40 manager/director types sat in our biggest conference room waiting for this doc. I tried opening it on my machine, a brand-new HCL-compliant, NT4-preinstalled Dell with 256MB of RAM. Same result.

At that point, in desperation, with like 3 hot-and-bothered people standing in my doorway, I took about 15-20 minutes, downloaded Star Office (5.2? I think), installed it on my Dell, fired it up, and had that 140-page document open in about 30 seconds. I changed the paper type and started printing. The hot-n-bothereds left my doorway and ran to the copy machine.

I told Jay the story of what had happened. Two days later....

Jay: "The people in research.......Well, that's no good. Give me some alternatives."

As the project that I was *actually* supposed to be working on was finishing up, I was able to make good my escape a few weeks later. So far as I was aware, the lawyer letters kept coming. Jay, a very lovable guy in so many other respects, stayed on for another 6 months.

Toward the end of that period, I heard through a colleague that all of the alternatives had been weighed and the choice had been made.

$300K