Does...not...compute. How many software purchases are based on logical decisions?

Are products like Microsoft Office really that much better than their free rivals, or are companies just too scared to train staff to use alternatives.

It’s finally happened. It has taken ten years but, for the first time, the ageing sales manager in the corner has managed to send you his week’s figures on a spreadsheet attached to an email, rather than bringing it over on a floppy disk. Things are looking up. There’s only one spanner in the works. Your IT monkey has been clamouring for the last two years for you to replace all your familiar but virus-prone Microsoft products with free stuff he swears is just as good and will save a fortune in upgrades and new licences.

Go with Open Office (www.openoffice.org), he says. It’s made by Sun Microsystems, not exactly small beer, and it’s compatible with Microsoft Office. OK, there might be temporary problems of backward compatibility when a new version comes out, but the same problem exists for Microsoft users who have yet to fork out the upgrade fee.

The financial case seems compelling, and you’re on the point of relenting, but you can’t shake off a niggling feeling that half your staff will somehow manage to spend a month “learning” how to operate the new package, and another two years doing no work while they complain about being forced to use it.

But if you worried about what your staff thought you’d have gone bust years ago and, when you take into account the fact that hackers and virus-writers tend to focus their attentions on “industry standard” products – particularly those made by Microsoft – you have to wonder why everyone hasn’t made the switch.

Mark Guttridge, director at Rochdale-based fastenings manufacturer Atwell Eyelets and Pressings, says his company uses Open Office on a couple of shared PCs on the shopfloor. “It’s far cheaper than buying a Microsoft licence and, for machines that aren’t dedicated to a particular person, it’s fine,” he says.

For himself and others who are stuck behind a desk all day, however, it’s a different story. “Open Office is quite good,” he says. “But I’d prefer to use Microsoft myself. You tend to go with the market leader and what people are used to.” At least Open Office actually works, though, and is largely compatible with its larger rival. Microsoft’s own pared-down version of its Office suite, Microsoft Works, is another story.

Stephen Alexander, founder of Hale, Cheshire-based web design firm First Internet, is an unrepentant Microsoft Office user who points out, “You can’t open a Works spreadsheet in Excel.” If saving a few quid on licences by buying Microsoft’s own cheapo version means you can’t email figures over to the bank when you need an urgent extension to your overdraft, it could prove the mother of all false economies.

Business software dominance does not, of course, stop with Microsoft. Sage, the company founded by Newcastle entrepreneur Graham Wylie, who has since cashed in his chips for £195 million to concentrate on horse racing and building an IT services empire, is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the accountancy systems world.

The consensus, though, even among those who swear by them, is that Sage products are a tad on the pricey side. A single-user licence for its standard Line 50 product starts at levels of customer support. As far as Alexander is concerned, he’s happy to pay: “I use Sage. It does what it says it will do, the support is pretty good and there is comfort in using a big name.

“I’m sure I could source another package for half the price, but for the sake of a couple of hundred quid a year it’s not worth losing that comfort. Cheap is not necessarily best.” Another Sage Line 50 user is Mark Pepper, managing director of Longfield Chemicals, a Frodsham-based supplier of materials to the plastics industry.

“Now we use Sage Line 50,” he says. “We had been on Line 100 [a higher-specification version] but it needed upgrading. Line 100 is very expensive, and basically still a DOS-based system, so instead we went for the presentational rather than functional superiority of the cheaper Line 50.”

There are, though, alternatives – especially for the smaller business. Sage itself markets the “Sage Instant” bookkeeping system, starting at £110, and US-based Intuit produces the “Quickbooks” financial management package, costing from £34-£255. Quickbooks is rapidly gaining currency, and you can even do evening classes in its use, but there are other competitors to Sage out there. One is Mamut, a Norwegian company that says its software is not only priced more keenly than competitors (between £79 and £229) but is specially designed for the needs of smaller businesses rather than just being a scaled-down version of a big company system.

Mamut is the package used at Atwell’s which, until last year when Guttridge took responsibility for sales and marketing, had an ad-hoc system using spreadsheets to deal with invoices. “We decided we needed a proper accounting system and initially considered Sage Line 50 but rejected it because of the cost,” he says. “With Mamut we saved around 30 per cent of the Sage price for four users – about £1,000 – and we have since added another licence.”

Guttridge admits to a few issues at the beginning – “but we had a guy come in and do a day’s training with a couple of us” – and teething problems for staff who had used Sage with previous employers.

However, on the issue that worries many people about lesser-known software products – support – he says Mamut has been very good: “We generally speak to the same four guys and we don’t have to queue for our calls to be answered.”

Superior support from local engineers is also one of the big plusses Longfield’s Pepper identifies from using Sales Base, the customer relationship management package from Leyland-headquartered Integrate Software. He admits to not using all of the system’s functions and says that had his company already had an incumbent CRM package, he probably would not have succumbed to the Integrate salesman’s three-year courtship. But, around five years ago, that salesman’s persistence paid off. “We were new to it, and they were local and prepared to handhold,” Pepper acknowledges.

Ongoing support is not a problem, he says, “because the guy only lives ten miles away”. Sage, which he happily uses for accounts, also markets a CRM system. “But they would never send an engineer down from Newcastle,” he claims. “The other beauty of it compared to Sage is that when you post suggestions for upgrades on the wish list they actually get acted upon.” He admits, though, to not being sure whether he saved much money by going with Sales Base: “I’m sure it wasn’t more expensive than the competition but, to be honest, we would buy on service rather than on price.”

One man who is keenly aware of the importance of pricing, though, is Simon Yates, managing director of the QS Discounts value retail chain.

The company now uses it internally and with foreign suppliers, though Yates is keen to emphasise that staff weren’t coerced into adopting the technology before they were ready. “It was our IT guy’s idea,” he says. “He simply downloaded the software and, over time, we gradually used it more and more as we got more comfortable. It wasn’t a strategic decision – more of a ‘let’s try this’ moment.”

A moment, though, that has paid off. “Calls abroad are very helpful. We have suppliers all over Asia who we can now call for free and it’s just like they’re in the next room.

“We’re also excited about using the video calling facility in the future. I’m a man who likes to see the whites of people’s eyes when I speak to them.” In terms of cold, hard cash, though, how much does adopting this technology save him each year? “It’s difficult to put a figure on it but it’s probably into the thousands,” he says. “Time savings will become as important as the savings on call costs, though.

“I spend hours each week on the motorway travelling between stores. A video call or video conference might save me – or other staff – a two-hour round trip. And video calls to Asia might even save me a couple of flights a year, potentially adding up to tens of thousands of pounds.”

With all that money saved he can probably afford to keep on using Microsoft Office.

---