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Microsoft Office Faces British Invasion
jdkane writes "CNet reports that a small British software maker, Ability, plans to challenge one of Microsoft's most profitable markets by selling its low-cost package of productivity applications in North America.
Ability Office faces competition from Corel's Word Perfect, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice package and OpenOffice, it's free, open-source sibling. None of these products have captured a significant share of the market from Microsoft's Office.
Does anybody have any hands-on experience with the Ability Office suite, or are there any general speculations as to why this move will make a difference in the office software market (if not just for the bottom line of the software company)?"
OpenOffice rocks. The new 1.1.0 is even better, since now you can make PDF files. Anyone paying $500 for Office XP needs to visit Openoffice.org.
I wonder what disrespects Microsoft more: pirating their shitty office suite, or hating it so much that you refuse to even pirate it.
I agree that MS Office is the standard, and it is where I work. However, one would hope that end users wouldn't need to take a class to learn the other. Unfortunately, my experience is that end users do not think about what they're actually doing, but memorize steps needed to accomplish their goals. Most of them anyway. There is the small, say less than 10 percent of end users who do actually think, and are able to figure stuff out on their own.
Anyhoo... I've tried Ability Office, and it seems pretty slick, and it does have the PHB "It's got to be better than that free crap if we have to pay for it" factor. Unfortunately, the infrastructure set up whereby all pcs for organizations are pre-installed with MS operating system and productivity suite would be hard to sway. Also consider that the office suite isn't the main reason why people use pcs in many environments, like mine. As such, it's just easier to go with whatever's fed to us without having to think about it very hard.
But, having dabbled with AO, yes, it does seem pretty nice.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Until someone breaks the Exchange Server lock on Outlook clients, and until some office suite offers something way better than Outlook -- which is entirely possible, there's no going to be much buy in to another office suite.
Learn something new? Okay, OOo isn't EXACTLY like Word, but why would anyone need significant retraining? As long as you know what you want to do, you've got online help. On a basic level, word processors haven't evolved much since the Word for Windows 2 days.
Schools don't want to have classes for both. These days, community colleges are filled with people seeking Office certification (MOS/MOUS certification). Some companies and employees value these certifications. Schools play to that market and won't offer 2 totally different word processing courses.
Okay maybe I'm elitist here, but classes for MSOffice in 2003? Everyone under 25 grew up on Office, and everyone over 25 who needs to know it should've learned it by now (on the job). This might make more sense for Excel, but not for Word.
I see this kind of bullcrap al the time on slashdot... and it is bullcrap!
As a long-time user of Office I have been thru 4.2, 97, 2000 and XP as well as a hundred "minor" updates that scrambled the user interface horribly. Items are moved from one menu to another, defaults on the shortcut bars are shuffled, changed and moved without regard to any learned experience with previous Office versions. Things that worked one way in one version of Office work entirely differently in the next version. Macros crafted for 4.2 needed to be rewritten entirely for '97 and then required major changes again for 2000. Don't even get me started with the endless work retooling existing document formatting to work with the latest version of Office!
I now use Open Office. The work required to get used to OO was about as much as the work required to get used to the newest version of Office.
This is a null argument and needs to be modded Funny rather than Insigfhtful!
People want to use at home what they use at work.
What about for people who aren't in the workforce?
My retired parents use a computer for light word-processing, and they have no need for 90% of Word's features, plus having next to nil income makes Office at $500 even less attractive.
Then how about school aged kids whose parents don't use computers (or at least Office) at work? The kids just need to bang out reports, essays and the like at home.
Plus, there's also non-profit organizations. These places are cut to the bone on IT expenses (my wife used to work for one).
Granted, this is not the majority of the marketplace, but it might make a nice niche market for a smaller company to play in (the non-corporate marketplace).
GRH
DRM is an option. The default is to store your documents and send your mail in a non DRM format. However, you have the option to use DRM on those documents if you want to control who sees the documents you publish and what they can do with them.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Everbody seems to think that "MS-Office is the de facto business standard, people will always use MS-Office!" Isn't that just like saying "Fountain pens are the de facto business standard, people will always use fountain pens!" Times change. As each new version of MS-Office becomes even less compatible with the last in an effort to force purchase of upgrades and screw software developers trying to export data to third-party applications, eventually most businesses will get wise and decide to get off the merry-go-around. But this will be more of a generational change than something that happens overnight.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The biggest leverage Microsoft has for forcing new workers to learn Microsoft Office, is the insistance by recruitment agencies and employers that they submit resumes and CV's in Microsoft Word format. That more or less forces everyone to learn Windows, Microsoft Word before anything else.
I've seen the evolution of word processing technology in my high-school. There used to be one classroom completely full of mechanical typewriters; great big clunky machines that dripped oil and rust. These were replaced by electric typewriters with single LCD line displays, which were in turn replaced by a handful of dedicated monitor/keyboard setups, before the financial resources were finally pooled with the computing department.
This more or less makes it easy for Microsoft to dominate the market. The only way all the other companies would be able to compete against Microsoft Office is to adopt a common document standard, and if possible try and keep the basic interface the same.
DRM could certainly become an issue at some point, should Microsoft choose to pursue it. IMHO if they did, all it would do is push more people to the various alternatives. They would be complete retards to even consider it.
What I would like to see is an office suite built around something like a framework similar to Eclipse. Not everyone performs Mail-Merges, nor does everyone require all the little drawing tools in MS-Word. If it was an open platform/open framework where extensions could be supported by pluggable bean components, I think that might be even more highly adopted.
Of course, one of the "Save-As" beans could be setup to do some form or fashion of DRM too if it was necessary but even that would be a plug-in, as would various plug-ins to translate between the various Office suites.
Granted, something like the Eclipse approach would be better served with components that can more easily be downloaded/integrated via some means of automation to insulate the average Joe User, but I think the idea itself would have merit. Not only this, but a single group, company, whatever wouldn't have to spend all that precious time working on 2% of the functionality that an even smaller percentage of the user base needs or uses. Small focused groups could work on those plug-ins directly outside of the core framework. In fact, I could envision an HTTP based delivery mechanism where your copy of "PlugOffice" could automatically go to certain trusted sites and install signed beans to give you the precise functionality you (or your corporate team) is looking for, or remove those components you don't find useful to keep the package light.
Just my $0.02
Spiritgreywolf
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
I did some work on the DOS version [1989] just after Migent, and a few hops before these people. I'm glad to see that it has a good home and hope they survive The Curse. (Of Ability, The Curse of Slashdot seems to have downed them for now.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The website is not responding right now (Slashdot-effect, I presume).
The original incarnation of Ability appeared on the market years ago. It came from a Canadian company, Xanaro Technologies, on Bloor Street in Toronto. When the company went bankrupt, the assets were auctioned off. I had the opportunity to look at the source code (assembler naturally) and I also took a look at the market. At the time, there were a couple of similiar products. Context MBA (which was pCode running under an OS from UCSD) was already on the market -- but that market had already decided which OS was going to be used on PCs and that wasn't it. There was also a product called Word. Interesting product: in the days of character displays, this one had something like a "graphical window".
The integrated Ability suite came with a word processor, database, spreadsheet, comm package (good for bbs connections), a graphing package and some other odds and ends. The most fascinating part was the ability to hotlink spreadsheets and word processing documents.
The package came in an eye-popping black plastic case. The dies for the case must have cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. The package was sold for about $400 or so but because Xanaro wasn't paying their bills, companies that did work for Xanaro were selling unshipped copies for less than $100. I got my copy for about $50.
I shouldn't have thrown it out. Oh, well.
I'm sure it's gone through a number of revisions since those days. For a while, you could find a second release for about $30 at a variety of stores (or in ads placed in PC Magazine).
Fond memories
(Signed) Gramps.
Maybe we Open Source types should turn ultra-honest and grass up all those business users of hooky MS Office copies we may come accross to the BSA. I mean hardly a day goes by without MS spouting on about the evils of piracy so we should do our best to help them by dropping those nasty pirates in it up to their necks by booking them a software audit.
By the time the BSA has done an RIAA on a significant percentage of companies it would interesting to see what happens to OO.org's market share. And if MS don't aggressively pursue major infringers there's cause for previous victims to sue for malicious treatment.
And the ultimate would be to see Steve Ballmer having to stand up and say "This is a positive thing for Microsoft to see all those pirates bought to book even though our market share has fallen 50%" and look like he really means it. On the other hand, maybe he'd like to turn the press statement in an interpretive dance for the nest MS conference.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Lot's of comments reference retraining from MS to other software as a root problem in getting people to try new or different programs.
Almost.
The problem is that of end-users believing that they have to be taught a *particular* word processor, spreadsheet, whatever, instead of learning to use word processors, spreadsheets, graphics software, etc *in general*. A lot of the old '70's "computers are hard" crap is still out there, too, as well as elitism on the part of those of us presumably more computer-savvy.
We need to teach folks the truth: Computer software are tools, and if you can use one of a type, you can use others of that type without much trouble. I know; I used to have to teach people exactly that approach to using computers. It works, once people grasp the concept of software as a tool.
Sure there are differences between, asy, MS Word, OOo, WordPerfect, and the rest. But they're all tools to do the same job. Some may fit your hands better than others, just like different lengths and weights of hammers fit different people better.
Regardless of the superficial differences, ANY normally intelligent person, able to use one word processor, should be able to use any other without much problem. Example: my kid is stuck using MS Office stuff at school, though we use OOo and WordPerfect at home. I never taught him to use any of them --- just that a word processor is a word processor, etc. So whatever he loads is what he uses. For classroom presentations he usually starts them at school with MSPP, does his main work with OOo's presentation widget at home, then saves 'em off in MS format so he can show them in class. And sometimes he has a clueful teacher who has OOo loaded!
I belabor the point. Let's quit teaching *specific* programs and OS's in the schools and other venues, and teach instead the general skills needed to use software in general. Then, and only then, can end users have intelligent opinions and make informed choices about what suits them best.
Realistic? Probably not --- too many vested interests want to keep the people clueless. Too bad. Eventually people DO figure out they're being scammed, and the con collapses.
The free/open sources software world must not forget: It's not just about getting people to use our stuff; it's about education and informed choice. We *want* end users to be clueful, as much as they care to be.
'Scuse the length. Or don't.
Mal the Elder