Slashdot Mirror
Another Office Alternative
MiTEG writes "The Washington Post has an article on a cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, ThinkFree Office. Currently selling for $50, their product also includes a one year subscription to Cyberdrive, a 20 MB web file-storage service. While it's no StarOffice, this glowing review may help people realize that Microsoft is not the only option." 'Glowing review' probably isn't the right term to use, since the reviewer found quite a few faults.
Java really needn't be slow, especially if using 1.2 or above. As for buggy, a program can have bugs whatever langauge it's written in, but the nature of Java maks them less likely than say, C.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
The worst part about all these MS Office competitors is that none of them are as good as MS Office. I use Linux exclusively (and have since around 1997) but I'd have to say without a doubt that the application I miss most has got to be Microsoft Word.
I know the slashdot sentiment is to hate on all things Microsoft, but it's easy to use and does damn near everything you'd want it to. Star Office and the rest just really aren't as nice.
I guess Linux isn't as polished, either, but when I'm developing, I prefer Linux to Windows by far. But when I'm writing, I prefer Word to anything else. Oh well.
Either the max. spreadsheet is abysmally small (8k-16k rows), or there is no cross-tab reporting functionality, etc.. There is always something
I know that playing catch-up with Microsoft is a losing battle, but some features are essential. If it is available in Lotus, WordPerfect, and MS Office, you can be pretty sure there will be people who can not work without it.
I'd love to switch to a Microsoft free shop, but until I can go to management with solutions to every problem, and assurances that no functionality will be lost, I can't. Office suites are only one battle in the war, but it is one I should be able to win...
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
That doesn't sound like a huge gap until you notice that -- oops -- the 1.7 version of ThinkFree Write has no word-count function.
...)
I learnt many years ago that if you want a decent review of your word processor you MUST include a word count function.
Sure, the word count function is, for 99% of users, just bloat that they are never going to use, but reviewers get paid by the word for writing their reviews, and naturally try to write their reviews using the word processor under review, so if you don't include a word count function the entire review consists of a whine about the missing word count function.
(The same reviewer, oddly, seems to think that a missing spelling checker is no big deal. That's fair enough if s/he is a properly trained professional journalist and never uses words s/he can't spell and never makes typing mistakes, but for the other 99% of us
Really, the question is not so much the language (Java), as it is the people writing the application. You can write dog slow applications in any language. Java can be fast, but it takes time and effort, and some good tools to help you fine bottlenecks. (Think: "OptimizeIt")
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I have to concur with another poster - there's nothing inherently slow about Java. When you drill down to the runtime environment, each component is almost as fast as c++... The problem is that Java makes it really easy to write slow code - and pretty Java is usually slow java.
The trick is to keep in mind that 10% of the code is executed 90% of the time, so once you're done writing a Java app to be pretty, go back and performance tune it. Thus far, most programmers forget that step.
As a lot of people have to repeat every once in a while: Java != Javascript. Java has nothing to do with Javascript, actually (nothing more than with, say, CShell). The name of the latter was a marketing gimmick.
That said, Java earned a bad reputation from being used in Applets all over the Net, which are victims of every defect Java has (or at least used to have until very, very recently).
One of those defects is that Swing really, really sucks. Now, it's design may be great or not, and it may be full of design patterns or not, but it has been, up to 1.3, very "buggy and slow". You can cope with the buginess if you need to, but it will make it even slower.
AWT too, but at least AWT didn't claim it had fixed the problem when it did not.
Another defect, which is not exactly Java's, is that Applets on the web were mostly programming experiments by novices in both the language and programming. Java was hip, and everyone who had a webpage had to have an Applet. They were bound to be buggy. And the circumstances didn't help.
The world was exposed to millions of "Hello World" desktop applications brought online by Sun's Magnificent Hype Machine, programmed in a cranky and immature GUI library (AWT/early-Swing), with incompatible JVMs (Microsoft's), slowly downloaded to the client's machine through a 28.8K-56K modem... all increasing the amount of frustration when the "ClassNotFound" exception presents the user with a dazzling gray square.
Java is a nice language, but for desktop applications it's just not a great choice, unless 1.4 delivered the promise (I have yet to try it for desktop apps). But that promise was there with 1.3, and even with the birth of Swing.
I'm sure it is technically possible to use it for medium-big applications, there are plenty (big) IDEs written in Java that are very, very usable. I also hear very good comments about some non-Sun libraries, but I'm afraid no one really cares.
Java for the desktop is seen as the wrong solution to the problem, and will remain so for a long time even if they fix it, thanks to Sun's mistake. Java's place as the right solution seems to be on the server, where it's definitely not buggy nor terribly slow, with the desktop as a thin client (SOAP, JSP) implemented in something else.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
The article lists some basic MS Office features and says: It's a waste to use $480 worth of Office suite for such simple work.
It depends on how important the work is. A PowerPoint sales presentation may be worth thousands of dollars in sales, an Excel spreadsheet could manage a large budget, a Word document could be a report on an important project or a book manuscript. Any one of these examples would be worth more than $480 by itself. In fact, the time spent creating the document would exceed $480 many times over.
If what you do with an office suite isn't worth $480, maybe you should do something else that is.
They obviously haven't done a good enough job for ThinkFree, since they're having to maintain separate Windows, Linux and Mac versions of the Office Suite.
john
I couldn't agree more. I've thought this for a while and still don't understand why such an obvious thing hasn't happened.
There are lots of office suites now available, both open source and proprietry. Some are very good. But everyone bitches that they can't shift Microsoft from its monopoly position. If they all got together and agreed to use a single format (Suns XML format for StarOffice/OpenOffice is a very good start) then we would quickly have hundreds of useful tools for manipulating document formats, and rather than chasing Microsoft's tail-lights, we would be setting the agenda and Microsoft might have to start following us or start to loose serious market share.
I believe this issue is the single most important one for getting Linux onto the desktop. So, all you people who develop office suites - get together and agree on a single XML format which you'll all use! It will do you all good in the long term.
An agreed-upon public replacement for Word files would help, too. Probably something that's zipped XML. Then push to make it a formal standard, get government agencies to mandate it, and put a display engine for it in browsers.