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Microsoft FUD Machine Aims at OpenOffice.org
Roblimo writes "If you're using Microsoft Office and considering a switch to (free) OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would like you to read their Open Office Competitive Guide first, in which they tell you how much better/faster/cheaper MS Office is than OOo. Taran Rampepersad, an IT consultant in Trinidad, believes this "Competitive Guide" is nothing but FUD, so he wrote a detailed rebuttal to it -- and released his article under the FDL so you can feel free to republish his piece or share it with anyone you like, however you like." A followup to this story. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
I've never understood why a lot of authors pepper their articles with redundant links. I mean, look how many links to www.openoffice.org are in that article -- it's crazy, especially when considering what this program is called (ie a website in itself!).
Otherwise, very good rebuttal.
I read that document actually. In short, it shows the disadvantages of OO: which there are- and then it shows the advantages of MS.O. It only goes head to head with OO on one point, the point of integration with the Outlook suite. Unfortunately, MS makes the assumption that we want more than a write-clone and a basic spreadsheet.MS believes in the extreme abundance of features. I don't care for gazillions of features, myself. I want essentially Write from Win 3.1. Anything more tends to be utterly unused. Spreadsheets need to have math functions, coloring, some decent copy functions, and a decent grapher.(Excel ain't a great grapher) Anyway, it is mostly FUD.
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
OpenOffice does not have an e-mail client, so customers may incur a licensing cost associated with buying an e-mail application.
Why don't you use this 'free' software?
Because it doesn't come with an email client!
Why don't you use a 'free' email client?
Because it doesn't come with a web browser!
Why don't you use a 'free' web browser...
Ensure that their mission-critical information is adequately protected from virus attack.
Over the last month I have been sent over 20 virus infected MS office files. I hardly think this argument could possibly hold up.
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam. Consequently, if bugs go unresolved, users have the option to resolve problems by scouring through numerous community sites and chat rooms.
As opposed to what? Finding out you have a bug in your software and waiting till the next version or patch two years down the line? OOo is bad because thee is a community of people happy to help you.
All in all its pretty pathetic. I doubt the person who wrote it was convinced.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
First of all, it's OpenOffice.org, not Open Office (trademark issues).
Secondly, even though I am a participant on the Marketing list for OOo, I must say that the disk space comparison between OOo and MSO is unfair. MSO comes with fonts + clipart, which OOo lacks. Maybe SO vs. MSO would've been more fair. (we want our products to win through honesty, not FUD).
Jay | http://oldos.org
"third party studies show that competitive office suites retain only 75% accuracy (data and formatting) when receiving documents from Office users..."
Well, who's fault is it for using proprietary file formats in attempt to lock everyone else out of the market?
I wonder if MS Office 2003 will correctly open a document created in OpenOffice.org.
$cat
This might sound like flamebait, but I havn't read either article so I'd just like to post my own 1 point rebuttal.
You can't download MS Office legally.
I rest my case.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
Don't confuse politics with business, or donations with payments for services provided. Microsoft is paying for a service: slashdot displaying their ad. The price of the ad placement should be more-or-less equal to its value (Economics 101), thus Microsoft owes no more to slashdot, nor does slashdot owe Microsoft anything besides display of their ad.
I think it's fairly safe to say that Microsoft would not advertise on a "hostile" site such as slashdot if they did not perceive some benefit from that greater than or equal to what they paid for the ad placement.
sig != null
Promoting OO to my clients to become...
As i have small clients, they are not dependent on macro's.
Only big companies or very specialized companies get dependend on macro's or better said, the bugs and propriarity rules in the macro system.
All others can change without problem...
MS is becomming predictable in spreading FUD where it hurts them in the market...
A bit like the bully that get's kicked in the head by the new kid that is not impressed with the bully.
Huh?
"Microsoft feels compeled to insult openoffice.org by saying how wonderfully better MSOffice is"
So, anytime anyone says anything is better than something else, they're insulting that 'something else'? "Best hamburgers in town!" is an insult to every other burger place?
That's the stupidest logic I've ever heard.
How, exactly, is it an insult to anyone using OpenOffice for Microsoft to say their product is superior? What else would you expect from *ANY* vendor of *ANY* product over their competition?
I've used macros more in spreadsheets than in text documents, for automating those pain-in-the-rear repetitive tasks, or for setting a sheet up so that a person without great computer skills can get something done without understanding how the spreadsheet works.
Macros in text files are useful for those automation functions that Bill's marketing minions didn't need but that make your life easier (such as including the full path name of the file in the footer).
I'm administering the IT of a small company that uses MS O, Access in some places, Lotus Suite and Lotus Notes. The articles points about Outlook therefore does not apply to us.
We're still having trouble translating the old Lotus application documents to MS O. There are too many of them. For now, keeping Lotus Suite is cheaper than converting to MS O, while all new docs are Word-based. Trying to goto OO is therefore worsening the situation unless compatibility with MS O 2000 is guaranteed (minus Active X and Macros which we dont use).
Hardware is also not an issue since all machines are Pentium3 with 256mb ram and win2k pro minimum.
I tried OO a while ago, a few Word documents did not translate well, and it seemed too slow. At one point during testing it crashed on me. Since it was a while ago, I intend to try it again. However it will have to be very stable. It should also be noted that like PDF, MS Word documents are a bit of an industrial standard with everyone sending them in email attachments expecting you to be able to deal with them. This is another sticking point... can OO's compatibility be guaranteed with MS Word? I doubt the UI training will be an issue.
So we cannot dare switch to OO, even to lower the TCO. If a company stepped forward to support OO and guarantee compatibility, we will pay them the licensing fees. For now we'll remain stuck with MS O and MS Windows. Some points in that document against OO are valid, and I must say that, although I'd prefer OO anyday.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
My staff recommended including it in an XP distribution kit I'm puting together for a new promotion. I declined only because OO didn't work in XP as a limited user, and that it didn't support multiple users' settings.
.whatever files), but still set per-user.
I realize OO's built from a common source code base that should work for multiple platforms, and such proprietary things as The Registry would be verbotten territory. That doesn't forgive the designers, though, who have access to per-user environment variables, per-user home directories and common areas to store information as defined in Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Of note:
%userprofile% is the equivelant to $home. Store per-user settings here, or in %appdata% which is hidden normally (like
%allusersprofile% and %ProgramFiles% point to common areas that are at least read-only to all users.
Minor programming changes to look for these environment variables would let OO be multi-user and secure on current and supported versions of Win32. How hard is that?
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
The points are aimed at people who actually buy software. The fact that you can write a thesis without using word is not a great surprise. I wrote mine using LaTeX.
The marketting points look reasonable enough to me, OpenOffice does not do everything that Word or Office does, it does provide a clone of the core functionality. But what happened to open source being innovation and Microsoft being only able to copy? Is there anything that OpenOffice does that is new?
When the VA Linux puts these stories up on slashdot they do so with all the objectivity of a Congressional hit squad. When it comes to Microsoft the editorial line at VA Linux is even less objective than Matt Drudge. At least Slate tells us that it is owned by Microsoft before they comment on stories that affect their employer, heck Slate even bites the hand that feeds it. But not Slashdot, there they stay on message even more comically than a Whitehouse press spokesperson.
Is this the most important tech story going on in the world? I don't think so. The editorial diet today has been pretty thin, recycled stories published a week ago on the BBC, the fascinating news that Mozilla Foxtrot is going to allow the users to choose the name for themselves. Well whoop-de-do, Internet Explorer went through that phase roung about release 3.0, you could download a tool that would let you brand it any way you chose, stupid icon and everything. I used to annoy my Netscape friends by running a version that announced itself as Netscape Navigator complete with N icon. The sometimes took quarter of an hour or more before they realized they were having their chain yanked.
I still think the Wired story on how to get casual sex via bluetooth was more interesting. Oh and that virginity auction in the UK. Or how about Boeing being about to launch high speed internet service via WiFi on planes next month?
Sure the latest discovery of some perfidious Microsoft marketting litterature was desperately more important and interesting. Does it tell us anything new we did not know before?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
why do people keep reiterating the fact that this document was exported from Quark Express? is there a fundamental misunderstanding of what Word/Office is capable of or marketed as? This document is well laid out and visually designed in a way that not only is Word unable to do, but isn't expected to accomplish.
MS knows the capabilities of their software and they haven't tried to position the Office suite in competition with Quark, InDesign, or other professional layout applications. you're comparing apples and oranges in this criticism and it comes off rather silly.
File access controls? Yeah, I'm sure that works great at the application layer (use your OS's damn filesystem for access rights). And encryption? MS Word passwords are trivial to break (search the Internet for password breaking tools). OpenOffice.org, on the other hand encrypts documents with Blowfish in CFB mode and SHA1 hashing for crypto-quality integrity checking. This is as good as using GPG in symmetric mode.
The big deal is that Microsoft is finally admitting they're threatened.
Creating marketing material that directly targets OO is quite an admission and they probably resisted doing it as long as possible because simply naming OO like that actually has the negative affect (for MS) of elevating them into the ranks of "serious competitors" - which will make people start talking. It also telegraphs to investors and stock analysts that there may be choppy waters ahead in the Office margins.
Remember, Sun didn't give away OO just to be nice. They did it to make a dent in MS's margins in their #1 cash cow. Looks like it's working.
So sure, that's what their marketing dept is supposed to do, but until now, they'd never needed to. In fact, up until now, the only real competition Office had was Office - pirated.
There are these things they call "marketing firms". You send them a money bag and they produce the other things knows as "marketing materials". When you send these "marketing firms" what a discription of what you want them to product the tool used to make it is usually not dictated.
And you'll notice that even though they don't use MS product they STILL didn't use the open source solution. What a bunch of mass market end user common deniminator mickysoft dumbfuckoids, eh? 'Course they got that bag of money and will probably get laid tonight.
Exchange business transaction information externally with customers and vendors.
Now IMHO, THAT is funny! So I need MS Office for this, when Microsoft's OWN solution is to use PDF. Talk about making your own counter-point!
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I predicted the downfall of WordPerfect Corporation and of Novell years before it happened.
Now, using the same kind of logic, I'm predicting this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. Also, I think Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer know this. That's why the new licensing scheme, "Pay us even if we don't do anything." They're on a ride to the bottom, and they know it, and they want to extract as much money as possible on the way down.
The problems, I think, are entirely due to bad management. No one would object to paying for closed-source software if it did a little more and if it had a good reputation. But closed-source has become synonymous with abusiveness.
I have sympathy for Gates and Ballmer. While teenagers, they were caught up in something intense. They have thought about mostly one thing since then. They have not had time to grow up. They have not had time to learn the difficult art and science of management.
A lot of Microsoft's abusiveness is like the abusiveness of a teenager who doesn't know how to live in a complex adult world.
Everyone needs an amount of money sufficient to live. The value of having a lot more than that cannot even come close to compensating for the horror of living in an abusive world of your own creation.
It's funny to think of the same kind of abusive intent applied to open source software. Think what could happen. After OO becomes the world standard office suite, and almost everyone is dependent on it, why, they could double the price! And everyone would have to pay because they have so much time invested in training in and customization of OO!
Sometimes really, really wonderful things happen in the world, and OO is one of them. Thanks, Sun, for getting it started. Yours was an $88,000,000 investment toward making the world a better place for Sun and for all of us. I predict you will make a profit from selling Star Office, as well.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I think the most important thing to remember here is that M$ took the time to even write something about OO. This means that they consider it a thread, more of less making all their points less valid. If it is a threat worth defending, they must be concerned.
It's amazing that Microsoft is still saying with a straight face that you can call their support line and get help. Admittedly half of that statement is true, but not the half that matters to most businesses. Microsoft's ineptitude on the phone is legendary. Their developer's site is nice and quite useful, but that's not going to help the average clueless Joe who wants to know why Office is reformatting all of his documents with the tagline "0wn3d by PH3rN4nd0!," or keeps crashing with the words "missing vsdl95.dll." They charge ludicrous hourly rates to provide the kind of tech support a jr. high school student would consider incompetent. Come to think of it, I sense an opportunity to revitialize our schools...
Furthermore, their document reads like a argument against closed protocols. "If you leave us, you leave your data. You leave your database. You leave your correspondences. You can't leave us. You're ours." If your file cabinet supplier came to you and told you that your business histories and documents would be shredded if you ever thought about leaving, you would consider it blackmail and would find a new supplier right away, threats be damned. Why do we take this as a viable argument in the computer world?
The ______ Agenda
Hmmm.... Maybe these guys should learn LaTeX and concentrate more on the content, not formatting of their papers.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say "based" rather than "base". I know of two companies which went bankrupt because their macro-based accounting practices buggered things up.
One company found that the macros were stuffing things up when their biggest customer complained. Auditors were called in and found that the macros had overcharged for some things (some of them by an order of magnitude) and silently failed to charge for others. When the dust settled, the company had to pay back some humungous amout of money (millions, I think) and they survived that, but then a macro virus went through their business like a bushfire through spinifex and they suddenly discovered that their backup procedures really were as bad as the auditors had claimed. My little Linux gateway box was still faithfully doing its thing when the auctioneers came and took it away with the rest of the office equipment and furniture about three months later.
The other company rolled out a new version of MS Windows and MS Office, then discovered on Monday that the new MS Office broke their macros. In the time it took them to fix their macros, they nearly went out of business too. They contract out their accounting, now, and use stylesheets and templates to replace their macros for other stuff. If they hadn't done, the poor (absent) error-checking in the macros would have sent them bust as well. Technically, they did go bankrupt but the authorities took note of the reasons for it and let them keep trading for a month or two until their considerable cash flow had dragged them past the danger zone.
On a similar note, my book-keepers make a specialty of rescuing businesses from DIY accounting packages like MYOB. The businesses using them don't understand how the programs work. They enter data, they get regular reports, and not only are the reports wrong because the data's wrong (or in the wrong place), but they aren't able to meaningfully interpret even the wrong results. BKN take their data and paperwork and return reports which are not only rigorously correct but also meaningful in a business sense. On top of this, things like tax forms get submitted correctly and on time, which averts the fines and other cost associated with getting that wrong.
The moral of the story is that there are some things which bodging past is difficult and dangerous for, and "bodgy" pretty much defines a typical set of MS Office macros.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The only seriously annoying thing about OOo is that they have decided to postpone the Mac OS X version until kingdom come, and I have to fool around with 1.0 via Apple's X11 program. This is partially Apple's problem, too: If they had any sense, they'd get rid of AppleWorks and MS Office for X and push OOo.
OOo, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird put you in the wonderful situation of not having to give a damn about which operating system you use. This is terrible for Microsoft, of course, but great news for the rest of the world. We can now concentrate on fighting about other and far more important things -- like who makes the best chocolate bars, or who is the cutest witch on TV, or which sequal to the "Matrix" was the worst...
I would think that because as desktop publishing tools, MS Word and even MS Publisher totally SUCKS ASS!
Paragraphs run, fonts don't kern correctly, line widths magicly change when you open the file on other PC and the list goes on and on.
Word is only good for 1 thing. Word Processing. Publisher is good for zip.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Guess which one be read?
While I use OpenOffice.org, instead of MS Office, I do think the author's argument is weak, in places.
Data Migration and Testing: In migrating Microsoft Office documents to OpenOffice, some advanced formatting may be lost - and this is a problem, but it is unreasonable to demand this because of the fact that Microsoft does not make it's data formats public.
It may be unfair to expect the OpenOffice.org team to get 100% compatibility with a closed source product but it isn't unreasonable to demand it. As far as a corporation/business relying on MS Office is concerned, they're not going to look at the alternative and say "Oh, well, it's hard for them to have all those features" and buy them out of sympathy. It certainly is reasonable to demand it.
OpenOffice does not use Visual Basic for Applications, but has a macro language of it's own. It should be noted that Microsoft's macros are also incompatible with those of OpenOffice. Therefore, this is a valid point and would be part of a migration cost, yet one has to wonder at how complex such macros would be in a SMB.
Another poor argument: "Although ours is incompatible with yours, yours is also incompatible with ours!" For a company thinking of switching to OpenOffice.org from MS Office, the fact that OpenOffice.org won't work with their current macros could potentially be a massive deal (from my limited experience) - the fact that if they rewrote all their macros in OO.org's macro language they couldn't be used by MS Office is pretty much irrelevant.
Training: OpenOffice is, for the most part, the same as Microsoft Office XP for a user, but there are things that they will need to learn how to do differently. All things being equal, if a company's staff need formal training for OpenOffice, then they probably need it for every new version of Microsoft Office. Therefore there is a cost on both sides, and they are at least equal.
A cost on both sides does not make things "equal". Let us assume it costs a certain amount to learn a new application, but a bit less than that to learn a new version of application (for the sake of argument; I think we can agree it won't cost more). It's therefore cheaper to stick with MS Office and upgrade it occasionally, than to choose a new application.
Email client: Microsoft notes that OpenOffice lacks an email client. This, however, would take us to Mozilla, which is a standalone web browser with more features than Internet Explorer (such as tabbed browsing), and is much more secure than Microsoft Outlook as a default.
Poor argument since comparing email clients would be a whole new argument in itself.
Support: Microsoft says that there is no dedicated team for the OpenOffice suite. What Microsoft fails to realize is that the 'dedicated team' are mainly the users; OpenOffice has a community whereas Microsoft users have support groups.
Businesses do not want to have to search the internet and post to newsgroups, mailing lists and forums to find solutions. That's not to say those support methods are not very helpful but a business wants a dedicated team. This argument is like saying "Well, no, we don't have a tyre for your car but we do have some rubber, and a furnace [or whatever], so you can make a tyre yourself."
I just think this rebuttal was a bit lame; it's looking at the original article from the wrong angle. Not that I think its sentiment (that OO.org is not inferior to MS Office) is wrong; I just think the article is poor.
Manta