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gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?
Deffexor writes "It appears that gobe (that famous software company that made the invaluable "office suite" for BeOS) has unveiled their v3.0 release of gobeProductive for Windows and Linux. ArsTechnica has an excellent review of why this is such an important "office suite". While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP, it certainly does garner a whole lot of Bang-for-the-Buck (especially with the FamilyLicense). The author does a great job of summarizing the superiority of gobeProductive in his conclusion when he says,"This review, which is fifteen pages of graphics and text (in the word processor), along with 5 separate sheets chock full of information, only uses 7MB of RAM while running. Microsoft Word XP (WINWORD.EXE), sitting idle with nothing open, uses 11MB of RAM."" Of course, RAM usage doesn't matter as much these days, with the standard RAM installed being above 128 megs, but still good to know. Update by RM, 8:58 US EST: Only the Windows version of gobeProductive v3.0 seems to be available at this time.
*The* most important thing with new Office suite, is compatibility. Near 100% compatibility.
;o)
Oh, 1st post too
In general a pretty good program, but a little crude when compared to MS Office. We will see if it can hold up to the onslaught.
does anyone know how this compares to star office
gobe cant compare to office.
:)
it's not extortionately priced enough for corporations to bother with.
feature wise its excellent
XP killer, eh? Just because it's a superior product? Well, if anything'll work against microsoft, that'd be it.
All incompatible. I'm sick of it. I don't give a toss how good the software is.
I've switched to HTML for all documentation in the future and that's that.
Deleted
Speak for yourself buddy. Anybody running multiple applications knows how quick you can chew up 300MB. And I'm not talking about doing graphics work. I work in the financial industry and my basic daily setup eats up 270Mb to start. Open a pdf in your web browswer and tack on another 20+ until you manually kill the acrobat task.
Its a really bad attitude to have that ram use doesnt matter. Its just an invitation to more sloppy programing and feature bloat.
It might be a great product but when the average user still thinks Micros~1 makes the best/only product it will never catch on.
It's the same thing with StarOffice for Windows.(which even was free) A great product, a lot more userfriendly when compared to MS Office. But somehow I could convince anyone to even try it.
Standard reply: 'Office is all I need.'
Man, MicroSoft does knows how to do their marketing...
They mention the Linux version here:
http://gobe.com/press/pr8_29_2001.html
Only $75, and they actually give you the rights an ordinary person would expect when buying something. Look:
"You are allowed to install gobeProductive on each Windows and Linux computer in your own residence. You are also allowed to install gobeProductive on your computer where you work. A certificate is included in the gobeProductive package explaining to your employer that this is allowed."
I'm one of those XHTML-or-die people, but I may have to give this a look.
Ok, so it's slightly off-topic, but it follows discussion on recent posts. A lot of consumers beleive you get what you pay for. Most aren't going to spend $400 for a full copy of XP, but they see that in the store and when they buy a computer with OfficeXP SBE (a cheaper version) they think they really have something. "Why would anyone charge $400 for a product if it wasn't worth it?" Linux needs an office app that includes all the basics, but added database and other high level apps most people don't use. Then put it next to the "stripped down" version that has just the apps people want. RedHat knows this. Go to Best Buy, and you see the $200 pro version next to the $60 standard. I'll bet they sell more of the $60 version, but the $200 pro version boosts the percieved value of the $60 standard one.
Anyone know if this will work under the Linux emulation layer in the *BSD family? I'd love to give it a try, but my only x86 box is running OpenBSD and I doubt they'll release a LinuxPPC build so I can try it with the penguin.
--saint
The D compiler will take html and compile what is between the code tags. So you can put both documentation and code in the same file. You can literally use a WYSIWYG html editor to code with.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Some of which seems a bit odd.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Come on people..
1) drive space makes no difference in the corp world today
2) cpu power is not a concern
3) memory usage is not a concern
4) "runs on linux" is not a concern
What is:
1) compatible r/w file formats with what everyone else is using
2) cheaper
3) comes pre-installed with a new pc
"gee look, it only uses 7 MB where word uses 11!!! holly cow.. it's revolutionary!" DOH!
-- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP
Then it's not an Office killer. Don't get your hopes up.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Gobe Productive was one of my favorites on BeOS. If this one is just as cool, I'm gonna buy it. I hope they have a special upgrade price for their old BeOS customers.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Alas, GobeProductive (like the name) is destined to be a niche product. I read the review and looked at the Web site - it looked good - nice design. However, Microsoft maintains it's lock on the (Office) market, not with it's UI, certainly not with it's licensing terms, but with it's file formats. You need to exchange a document, spreadsheet, etc. with another person. Odds are about 99%, that the other person uses MS Office. If an Office Suite doesn't offer 100% compatibilitity with Microsoft's formats (which is pretty difficult - since MS deliberately doesn't publish them) - then you're out of luck.
The review doesn't mention compatibility, but Gobe's Web site does - it has limited compatibility with Word and Excel. Unfortunately, that's really not sufficient. Sun (StarOffice) already figured this out. I hope Gobe realizes it too.
[Insert pithy quote here]
As a pimply smelly UNIX-hacker who has a wife that does not use MS Office (She has always preferred WordPerfect), I can say that the problem with all the OTHER office suites has not been about a lack of features.
_ __
The problem is the head-start that Mickeysoft got in the dark days when the idea of an office suite was quite novel. In fact, I would say that even more important than the MS monolopy on PC OSes the fact that Microsoft beat out every other player in the Office suite market.
Listen every other player got off to lame start. I have to give it to Micro$oft for putting together a very seamless suite of apps. WordPerfect fumbled all over itself getting together a suite of apps. Lotus did a better job putting Lotus 123 and AmiPro together but the Windoze version of Lotus 123 sucked for so long it gave Microsoft all the time in the world to make Excel a good product. By the way, I will venture to say that today Excel (for the common business user) is probably Microsoft most well put together apps minus all the bloat.
WordPerfect's office suite has a much better Word Processor. WordPerfect blows the socks off of Word IMHO. However, the spreadsheet program is forgettable Quattra Pro and the Presentation is ok if you do not need PPT compatibility (and you will).
My wife BTW was a paralegal which means that she was in essence a Office suite power user hitting almost every facet of suite's functionality. The whole idea that Office wins because of more features is a load of sh*t. At least her boss was smart and knew they would be using the word processing of their office app more than other function and choose a suite according to which one he thought had the best word processor.
_______________________________________________
ACK
It's wrong, completely wrong. I use MS Word as my email editor in MS Outlook and on my win2000 box Word 2002 is using 14MB of RAM. So someone needs to get their facts straight.
This is nothing compared to our in house CRM app that is written in Java. PC's running it need 256MB of RAM. And I heard rumors that the next version is going to require 512MB RAM on the PC.
gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?
No, but it is a very likely StarOffice 6 killer...
"gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?" and "While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP, it certainly does garner a whole lot of Bang-for-the-Buck (especially with the FamilyLicense). The author does a great job of summarizing the superiority of gobeProductive in his conclusion when he says,"
In my view, it is a bit too late to speak of "features" and "prices" as an MS Office killer (of any version). Why? For years, corporate office (average Joe/Jane employee/consumer) users have gotten used to the "look-and-feel" of MS Office -- it is a tool that they have become so familiar with for better or worse. Asking them to convert now based on price and feature set of a competing product is like asking them to re-learn walking all over again. Not an easy thing to sell.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Utterly essential that this works for communicating with the outside world.
Cheers,
Ian
From the FAQ:
Q: The initial release this fall is Windows only. How do I get the Linux version?
A: There will be a certificate in the package that entitles you to a free Linux installation CD once the Linux version is available. Fill out the certificate and send it to us. Once the Linux version of gobeProductive is released we will send a CD to you.
Q: Will both Windows and Linux installation CDs come with the package after the Linux version is completed?
A: Yes.
I'll address this issue right off the bat. This is great software, but it isn't an Office killer, nor is it designed to be
Quit it with the sensationalist headlines... this program is designed to be a smaller, faster office suite, not the XP killer everyone here would like to see (me included)
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
I remember back when LightWave first came out for Windows. Newtek thought they would crush 3dStudio becuase of its price/features. To their amazement, sales were low. When they researched to find out why it wasn't selling, they found many companies ignored it because it wa TOO CHEAP. The old saying, "You pay for what you get" made purchasers think that if Brand X is half the price of Brand Z, there must be a reason. What did Newtek do? They raised the price by $1000 and Lightwave sales took off!
The same thing is happening today with stuff like StarOffice, GoBe, and Linux in general. People that don't know better assume that if it is cheap or free, it must be something wrong with it. Maybe the solution is to charge outrageous prices (with deep discounts for personal uses).
Why is everyone treating Office XP like it is the best thing that ever happened to office apps? It almost drove me insane. Little icons popping up all over the text - without clicking on anything, those docked dialogs appearing on both sides of the document when least needed, dynamic toolbars that never seem to stay docked... I was glad it was just a 30day trial and I re-installed Office 2000 a few days later.
:)
I really have to try some of the alternative office apps. Tried StarOffice beta on Linux. Liked it a lot.
There does not appear to be a demo version available on their website. At one level I understand that there are issues with demos that are difficult to get around. (I used WinZip and Paint Shop Pro for YEARS without registering them) But if they really want to make a dent in the Microsoft Office Monopoly they are going to have to earn the trust of the techs. There is simply no way that I will recommend to my boss that we switch away from the most popular piece of software ever without being able to play with it for at least a month. How am I going to justify buying another TOTALLY EXTRANEOUS office suite, just to test it out? Something for the Gobe guys, or any other MS competitor to ponder...
It doesn't matter if it's 10x better then XP office and only uses 2 Meg of disk space and 300 k RAM, if I can't read the data everyone else is sending me I have no other choice but XP office. To use any non/semi compliant office suite would require my entire company taking the plunge and corporations want solutions that are proven, they are not looking to beta test. I have enough trouble using a non-MS email client because outlook loves to package everything into a winmail.dat file that my or any other standards compliant email application is incapable of handling. Abi word does OK at reading some word files but does not even have an option to save a file as a .doc, therefore rendering any compatibility entirely useless.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I was trying to keep the debate to office suites but I agree that the timely stable windows-based version was an issue. I would still assert that enough firms especially law firms used WordPerfect right up till the day they converted over to an Office suite environment or in some odd cases I knew firms that waited till WordPerfect 7 convinced them to go over to the WordPerfect suite.
_ __
In other words they used WordPerfect DOS right up till the day WordPerfect 7 convinced them that WordPerfect on Windows was stable to use. Most firms did not wait this long and corporate america in general said screw it and went with Office instead.
_______________________________________________
ACK
gobeProductive is a single office application (i.e., integrated) that does the job of five standalones: word processing, spreadsheets, image manipulation (photo manipulation), graphics (image creation), and presentations
Corel Draw always got bashed for having more features than needed in one app. How come this is suddenly considered a good thing?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems like everyone and his mother are creating Office Suites nowadays.
From the press release...
So they said they were going to release the Windows and Linux versions last autumn, but its now coming into summer of the following year, and they've only now released the Windows version...along with a coupon for the Linux version "when its released".
Err, I won't hold my breath, sorry...
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
"Prior to the Linux version's availability, packaging will include a coupon redeemable for a Linux version CD."
For those of us who use multiple platforms, it would be nice if their license was for any version on any platform. Any one see anything about a Mac OS/X version? An office suite that is uniform an consistient across Linux, Windows, and Mac OS/X would be useful. (I know that an Open Office port to the Mac is underway, so perhaps OO will be the solution).
I'll tell you where it will make a difference...
In school districts, where they've got 2000+ workstations and they're all Pentiums and Pentium IIs. My company is converting a local school district over from Novell to linux this week.
The school has OLD machines. Pentium 90s with Win95b (16mb) are the oldest of them all. However, one or two 486sx33s were encountered as well.
Every mb counts...
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Surely someone will write a linux emulator for OS X...how hard could it be? There's already emulators for BSD.
I compare MS Office to Adobe Photoshop whenever things like this come up: both applications are clearly the best at what they do, with the largest number of features and the greatest extensibility, and wherever they lead, other similar applications follow. They are easily twice as fully-featured as their nearest competitor, if not more. For all intents and purposes, they cannot be "killed" in the market.
But their prices reflect that. There is a simple reason for this (and it's not "monopoly power"): they're both targetted at professionals. Photoshop has print-editing features that no photographer or web developer will ever need; Office is powerful enough to create entire books collaboratively, but most office employees just want something to build good-looking newsletters. Too few consumers realize that they don't need half the features they're paying for, just to get the half that they want.
The trick for the competition, then, is to get that half non-professionals want, and then do them very, very well. Even Microsoft Works doesn't quite provide that. If gobeProductive (or StarOffice or any of the others) can, then it has a chance to be successful, even without scoring a "kill."
These guys really seem to be a rarity; a company focused on the consumer. Just check out the "FamilyLicense" you can buy:
You are allowed to install gobeProductive on each Windows and Linux computer in your own residence. You are also allowed to install gobeProductive on your computer where you work. A certificate is included in the gobeProductive package explaining to your employer that this is allowed.
So for $124.95 you get the Windows version, a certificate good for the Linux version when it comes out and a license to install it on every computer you use! No Product Activation telling you to plunk down another $450 because you have a second computer in your office.
I wonder if employers would give employees half of the cost back if they used it at work. Each side would benefit by saving close to $390! (Ok, employers might save less due to volume discounts.)
Still a good deal worth checking out.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Wow, it must be great to do tech support in an office full of geniuses! In the offices where I've worked, Word users used tabs and spacing to get their formatting. The finance folks knew only the most basic stuff about Excel, and were hampered by their lack of math knowledge as well. Powerpoint presentations were endless slides full of text bullet points or canned clip art.
Microsoft's own Office group has research that 70 percent of the documents created with Word are one page or less. (When they need this kind of info they recruit paid volunteers who run specially instrumented versions of Office that collect keystrokes.)
Anyway, my point is that the Pareto principle can work here. There's no reason for Gobe to build a product that meets the needs of 100 percent of the users. Let Microsoft try to do that, and Gobe can focus on the majority of the market that does simple word processing.
There's a trialversion at http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10016-100-853 9292.html?tag=st.dl.10001-103-1.lst-7-1.8539292
OfficeXP on Win2k on my machine (256MB machine) uses 9888K with nothing open. That's more than 10% less than 11MB's... not that much more than the quoted 7 of this "XP Killer"
Can anyone beat that?
I bought this about 3 weeks ago after seeing it posted on osnews.com, and so far I really like it. Keep in mind I am far from a Office suite power user. The things that attracted it me to were: the positive reviews, the ability to save as a pdf, the fact that I can get the linux version when it is finished, and the license which absolutely clinched it for me.
I think it is important to support companies that you feel are doing a good thing. I could have just used a copy of MS Office from the MSDN Subscription that my job provides, but I decided that I should buy this product to support the company. I am at a point in my life where I find it hard to justify pirating things anymore. I want the product, I have the money, I buy the product. I do understand pirating when you don't have the money to buy software you need learn a skill (some would argue if you can't afford it, you shouldn't use it), I wouldn't be where I am today if I was not able to do this in the past. But I don't know if most people are able to weene themselves.
Wondered a bit topic, oh well...
Every office suite has its own formats, so although I might like to I can't send in them. Where oh where is a modern word processor format that can cope with all the features of a modern powerful word processor, while remaining open?
I suppose ditto for spreadsheets too come to think of it...
PDF? You are joking right?
It's a print-layout format, not a document format. You can't simply open it up, edit the text, reformat, and save. And HTML has no page layout options whatsoever -- by design.
Two extremes when you need something in the middle.
Import of Excel said to be hindered by different naming conventions in the two programs, which sounds like something that should be addressed in the import mechanism.
These "naming conventions" are probably collisions in the function namespace. What if a user defines a function in one program that turns out to be a built-in function in the other? Even worse, imagine if one spreadsheet allowed Python programs in cells and another allowed Scheme programs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Does it have the paperclip?
20336K w/ 65MB swap file before
15144K w/ 68MB swap file after starting with new blank document.
Obviously a bunch of stuff already running on this Win95OSR2 machine.
Good point. Even though I despise Microsoft...I have to admit that if you find your self in a position where you have to use a spreadsheet every day...there really is nothing to compare to Excel. On the surface a well placed grid control and Number and Letter tags on the left and top of your screen appears to be a spreadsheet --- but once you actually have to start depending on one in order to be able to go home in the evening, its hard to compare.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Apparently a 14 day demo
Go to love that 'save as' 'pdf' capability.
Well sort of
Both AppleWorks & Gobe evolved from ClarisWorks.
Added to which, the momentum of an installed base and brand name recognition. If a company with a little more visibility was behind this product it might have a chance, but as it stands, I give this product a five percent chance at best.
StarOffice lets me re-assign the Enter key to toggle edit mode in spreadsheets (instead of move to the next cell).
Can Gobe do that?
Company's always like to spend less money, but they don't really like to gamble, so I see the incompatibility with file formats as a big strike against it (the review claims gobe has problems with tables, charts, and images in
Anyway, the real problem is that I haven't seen a good Access killer. Does anyone know a good competitor for it? I'm not trolling, I'm honestly just curious.
Of course, RAM usage doesn't matter as much these days, with the standard RAM installed being above 128 megs, but still good to know.
Less RAM used means less memory accesses, which means more free memory bandwidth, which means everything runs faster. RAM is still the bottleneck on 99% of systems, so the less you use the better. Oh. And Windows (I still run 98SE) itself takes up about 128mb of RAM with a few agents running. Stripped down to nothing running I can't get it below 75mb.
RAM still matters. Don't be bad programmers.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
Does MS Office support frames? (For that matter, does GOBE?)
Unfortunately, I haven't been in a Porsche in years. But I'd bet that if you drove one around the dealer's lot, you would notice a big difference between it, and, say, a Suburban (which is what I'd compare most MS products to).
Besides, when evaluating another product, "choice" isn't a feature. It's a "meta-feature": because you already have choices, you are evaluating the product. If what you are saying is that it is Not Microsoft, well, I have a dust bunny under my bed that is Not Microsoft - you want that I should ship it to you?
To me the most important thing is that it be a word processor that does what I need and works on Linux. If I can't read Word documents perfectly, that's too bad. I'd prefer to, but that's not what's really important. I can do that on another machine if I must (and then export them in another format).
AbiWord it good enough for what it does, but it doesn't do enough. KWrite crashes when I try to make it do what I need. Open Office 641c crashes on my Linux system (I'd tell them why if I had a clue). Mozilla is good at what it does, but HTML isn't a page layout language.
If this doesn't work out, then I'll need to try Lyx. I'd have done this already if it didn't look like composition & formatting would take so long.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sure. Unless, for example, your time is billed at $100 per hour, your machine is out of action while you swap the processor over, your sysadmins are incompetent and ordered a part that isn't compatible with your motherboard so you have to do it twice, and then you have to Flash the BIOS to get it to work. The $80 for the hardware is, as usual, nothing compared to the cost of getting it up and running. Except that you can't do that, because opening up the case voids your corporate warranty, so you'd have to get the PC upgraded by the manufacturer at much higher cost anyway.
Obviously, you can make a similar argument about downtime for the software, but that doesn't mean the point about hardware upgrading isn't valid. Comparing hobbyist home users and the commercial world is not fair. Why else do you think so many big corps shell out 2-3x as much for their everday PC systems than you or I would dream of paying for a home box?
Funny you should mention that. I actually borrowed the beta CDs for MS Visual Studio.NET from work a few weeks ago. Since we didn't have a spare machine at the office, and I was about to trash my hard drive and reinstall anyway, I volunteered to put it on mine to see if we wanted to upgrade. Unfortunately, my PC (about three years old, then nearly state of the art) is clearly below Microsoft's radar at this point, as the system was so laughably "underpowered" in processor, RAM, OS, and all the rest that I couldn't even install the tool, never mind use it.
So, until there's a spare PC at the office to try it out on, we'll still use VC++ 6, and MS will have lost a whole load of business, and all because a simple editor+compiler application couldn't run on a PC that's three years old.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Why teach them a specific platform or program at all? My personal theory is to teach people concepts and let them try out the different packages and decide which one they like.
I mean, do you have any problem switching from MS Office to Wordperfect to Star Office to Gobe Office?
I can fire up any of them and do any of the basic functions because I understand how a word processor or spreadsheet works, I can also do specific functions in each one that I can't do in the other.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I read the review. From the way the features were described, this doesn't sound like a product in the same league as Office XP; it's more of a Microsoft Works level product.
If it truly has 100% compatible document import/export, then people might feel comfortable using it as a replacement for Office on some desktops (much as StarOffice is being used now in many companies).
I especially like the licensing. I hope that they sell many copies to families with new computers.
On Linux, I don't think they have much chance of making money. The word processor sounds like it is pretty similar to AbiWord in available features. The spreadsheet sounds like it is not quite up to Gnumeric's level yet. Graphics are not up to the GIMP yet (although they might be a bit more newbie-friendly; I couldn't really tell from the review). In short, there is very little functionality here that is not available already in the free software. Most of the people interested in using Linux probably won't be interested in paying for software that offers little beyond what is already free on Linux.
The integration features are sort of interesting. When you do a Save As on a document with a spreadsheet, several pictures, and some text, I wonder what happens?) Microsoft Office has had features like this since forever, though: you can pick one document to be a shell and drop other documents into it, or else you can run the "binder" and make a metadocument with several other documents bound up inside. (I think most people just do the shell document thing; MS has mostly retired the binder. You can still install it if you like but it is no longer installed by default.) The clean "sheets" interface is nice, but I think you could get that in Office by using an Excel spreadsheet as the shell doc.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
when the best search tools for Microsoft errata are Linux based. /. seems to be the best early-warning system for Microsoft wormage.)
(And
Office 2K, running on a 500 megahertz P2 box with 256 megs of RAM. (Although it was running with 128 for quite some time.)
Idle at startup: 7.5 megs of RAM
With 8 documents open, all of which are many pages in length, half of which have embedded images, tables, and various other heavy formatting options: 17.5 megs of RAM.
Now, that's not exactly what I'd call terrible. If it was linear, and it was 7.5 per document yeah, that would SUCK. But it's not.
-Jayde
What's a sig?
Unfortunately, nothing will ever 'kill' Office until MS gets in (real) legal trouble, and Office loses support or something like that, Office has a huge, damaging exploit in parallel with another product's release, or other such things.
That, and 100% compatability with current MS Office products. I hear you say, "What about WordPerfect?" This really isn't such a big concern, because most people do, and have used, MS Office for the last 5 or so years.
The main concern with compatability isn't necessarily, "Can I use this flawlessly with the other documents circulating the office?" but, "Can I use this to flawlessly read documents generated in all the various versions of Office?" or, "Will I still be able to retain my original formatting, and can it be saved with that same formatting as well, so people still using Office can read it properly?"
Unfortunately, I suspect that MS Office has some sort of 'failsafe' *cough* mechanism that causes any documents written with another program to be rendered differently each time, etc.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
OK, gobe are the people that have been developing for BeOS (created by a splinter-group from Apple), and evidently Productive is developed by some former Claris employees (Claris was acquired by Apple). So, where is the Mac OS X version of this application?!?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I understand what you're saying, but do you think if those same people were brought up using different platforms they'd be so clueless?
Kids are being taught younger and younger, so I kind of have a feeling that the next generation of "office workers" will be more computer savvy and will be more non-microsoft.
Look at kids who learned on a Macintosh. Most of them that I know don't have any problems using MS Office, even if they were using Clarisworks on Mac.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin