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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 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
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?
Statement's like this are totally, well, retarded:
*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.
So, the whole paragraph is an assumption to start off with. But it is also contradictory and misleading: "but there are things that they will need to learn how to do differently. All things being equal,", for example.
And the next paragraph:
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.
Um... many companies base their entire inventory tracking and accounting systems on complex macro programs. (Not a good idea in my opinion, but hey, what can we do).
I'm not going to go on but the article is not exactly something I would use as a reference... even for a grade 5 project. The whole article is saying nothing but "well, yeah but I think", and is obviously heavily anti-microsoft. It's what is known as "junk science".
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/
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.
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!
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.