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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.
and my MS Office-using (on a Mac even) advisor is sixpence none the wiser. Total FUD.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I guess Microsoft is evil, except when that blood money comes your way.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
I'm no fan of MS (I'm browsing from FireFox within Linux), but he gives short shrift to the problem of macro/VBA conversion. The fact of the matter is that the documentation on the OO API absolutely stinks, and any business with a substantial investment in its current automation would have to think not once, not twice, but long and hard about the costs of conversion.
Well, when it comes from Microsoft, it always seems to be FUD, no matter what. Yet, anything from the open source movement has their FUD deemed as proof. At least according to michael...
I'm not trying to validate either side's claims. I'm also not trying to say that one side was or was not tossing around the FUD. But, for a change, how about you let me try to draw my own conclusions, rather than give me yours?
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Here is an article on why you shouldn't read slashdot:
DUPE!
Setec Astronomy
OpenOffice does not have a dedicated development or support rteam.
Obviously someone hasn't been using the MS spell checker.
And why are they distributing it in pdf format? I bet they didn't even use office to make this document.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Im in the middle on this debate, But i have a preference for open office if it can be used. Which is not true in all cases.
If a buiness is already using MS Office, the is reason to switch is if the buiness grows and they would need more MS office licences while the cost for migrating is cheap.
Alot of people dont upgrade office. A place i used to work at was still using office 97. There is simply no reason to upgrade to office 2k or XP.
For my personal use, i see enough value in office to make it worth purchasing, but for the time being im only using windows. (Could change in the future)
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Its funny that the argument about which tool is better is almost completly unique for the IT-industry. You don't see car mechanics arguing over which brand of screwdriver is better or a carpenter defending his hammer against the people using a nailgun. Sure, people have their own preferences, but mostly they keep it to themselves. This is commercial gone bad. Hopefully the industry will get mature enough that we won't have to see this kind of marketing. But I guess its a long way there...
Reading some of the more key points with OO it reminded me of some of the reasons that I am such a big fan of OSS and the OS movement. With these open (or at least more open than MS and the like) standards it gives a good feeling that you are in control of your data and the documents, etc. you create. When I would use a tool such as MS Office I would feel that I'm making the document for it or as a kind of expansion of it rather than as a self-created work for me. This sent a tinge of concern through me for quite some time. I know it is probably silly for me to feel a sense of liberation and it's really not anything I can describe properly. I guess I just enjoy the freedom permissible by using a standard that is not owned and controlled by an entity that has little to no desire for openness. With quality suites like OO I feel that once users get this feeling that they are in control of their own works - or at least more-so then they were - they will make the migration which will only bring futher support to the OSS community.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When writing text, write will do but for doing layout? not at all.
You can go 2 ways there:
- Use seperate layout software (alternatives exist for almost every plaform)
- Use a program that allows doing layout together with content.
When you don't care about layout, you wont need either. When you are writing for some kind of professional publication, you should end up with the first solution, but for all those who write things that must look decent on paper, but for whom writing and layout is simply not their profession, nor somethign they need to do a lot professionally, an intergrated content/layout program is really what you want.Do MS Office and OpenOffice have a lot of features that you personally have no need for? most likely. Do most users only use some 10% of the features? sure. The problem is that they do not use the same 10%, and as a result a lot more features are needed to serve the entire potential userbase then the few that you specifically use, and no, you are not going to see the need for those features, but try to get it into your head that there are many features that others do need, and thus the features you need are very likely not representative for the majority of users.
Having said that, I believe both OO and MS Office have features that are used by so few that not havign them wouldn't hurt either. Also, as soon as the basic feature requirements are covered, features themselves become more of a marketing then a usability issue.
At any rate, suggesting that all most users ever need is write and a very simple spreadsheet is like saying that noone will ever need more then 640kbyte memory. We know how stupid the later turned out to be.
I think that Microsoft Office won in the marketplace, and did have quite a bit of serious competition untill relatively recently, and now got some again with OO.
I'd say that MS Office won from its competition because Microsoft actually offered combinations of features that people found practical, and despite my rather strong dislike of Microsoft, I did agree at the time that their Office suite was simply more usable then anythign the competition had to offer. That said, I am using OO now since it offers all the usability that I personally need.
Microsoft's *PDF* (why wouldn't they put it out in .DOC virus format?) was made with QuarkXPress 4.11 with the Acrobat distiller 4.05 for *Macintosh*.
The sad thing is I can't even agree with Microsoft on THAT one. Acrobat didn't go OS.X until 5.05 I believe so this was created on a Mac using OS 9. At least they go HALF of it right.
I'll be keeping my Mac. Can't wait for the NATIVE version of OO to emerge. 2006 - bah. It'll beat Longhorn to market though. That's even sadder.
Microsoft: a rich pathetic company.
I think it's fair to compare "Typical" installations -- regardless of what's in them -- since that is what most users see.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Not for us, but for the PHB's.
Microsoft has so dominated the mindshare of so many users that they think their experiences with MS systems are representative of all experiences with computers. I've heard so many people go around spewing drivel like, "Computers are inherently unreliable and prone to crashing," or "Computers are inherently insecure and prone to viruses." All they've known is MS software, so they can't conceive of anything better.
So if MS says OO is less secure, the clueless may think: All computers are inherently insecure. So viruses will infect all systems to the same degree, though makers can try to stem the tide through heroic efforts. Microsoft is doing the best it can to keep, and they have lots of resources. Some group of volunteers couldn't possibly do any better. Gosh, I'd hate to think of how many viruses are in this OO software.
What we need to do is keep reminding users that there are lots of better systems out there, and viruses are primarily due to flawed design.
Most MS users remind me of a talk I heard by an ex-Soviet dissident in the 80's. He said that growing up poor in the USSR, he still assumed things must be worse in the USA, and he imagined a "typical" American boy his age, living on the edge of starvation under an oppressive regime. He was genuinely happy to be living under Stalin, where things sucked but not as bad as anywhere else.
The last two times I tried OpenOffice, I went back to MS Office. My experience was that many of the decisions that were made in the name of cross-platform compatibility hurt my ability to use the software productively. For example, many functions I was used to accessing through hotkeys in MS Office I found were available only through (rather deep) menu trees in Open Office. The one that caused me the most grief was "Fill down" in a spreadsheet being a menu-only function!
Can someone say that things are better now, or do I still have to macro around such frustrations, or what?
One of the reasons the OS movement produces better software (read more resource efficient, less buggy, more secure) than Microsoft, is that there are a lot more than 20,000 contributors worldwide.
Microsoft is certainly the largest software company in the world, however, the drive for market dominance and profit is not always compatible with producing good software.
One example is that the payoff between releasing software as fast as possible, getting it to the shelves, creating income and the all important user-base, and releasing software that is less buggy.
There are other examples based around software design. Eventually maximising the utility of an application is counterproductive to the mechanism by which the user discovers that an upgrade, or the next most extensive package contains just a little pit of functionality that is required.
But send no money to Trinidad, Open office can be downloaded for free - try it out.
Microsoft does however have a lot more money for advertising that the open source movement, and some of the ways that this is being spent to the detriment of the open source community are undeniably innovative. One of the less creative things that they do is spread FUD everywhere (they even seem to have a community of presumably paid employees posting and moderating here at slashdot). Only a very few members of the open source community could afford the advertising to reach Joe Public baring word of mouth.
Consequently it may be important to reply to a troll, because you never know who may be visiting slashdot for the first time.
To nitpick, the PDF was created on a Mac using Adobe Distiller. The document was created using QuarkXpress, on an unknwon platform.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The one thing I don't understand about Microsoft's stance is that people using OOo would obviously not be pirating copies of Office. This saves everyone time (searching for the crack) and money.
That in mind, wouldn't using OOo for windows be preferable for Microsoft, when compared to someone pirating and sharing copies of their suite?
Also, anyone using OOo is likely already using Mozilla or Thunderbird, which eradicates the whole e-mail issue (mentioned above). Free software users tend to fill holes in their library with... *gasp* more free software. Hell, I'm on a Mac running OS X and I've got more programs installed through Fink than I do of any other kind, our of habit.- Cloud
that you would use MS Office is if you HAVE TO have perfect MS Office document formats. Otherwise there is no point. Unfortunately unless a whole lot of people switch to the native Open Office format this isn't going to happen anytime soon.
I hardly ever use word processing etc applications so I use Open Office because my resumes seem to be converted just fine into larger files. Which equals more bandwidth required to send, times few million to billion people and you have bad efficiency of sending information.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Compare the price of MS Office with a Java desktop machine at Walmart.
Help fight continental drift.
I had to think for a sec. to figure out why the link to that .pdf was a different color than the rest. ;-)
I'll give this submitter credit though, he seems to have done his homework a little better than the previous submitter.
Which brings me to an interesting question. What's better- quick and dirty news or informative, slightly delayed news? I'll take the latter, fer sher dude.
"He said that growing up poor in the USSR, he still assumed things must be worse in the USA, and he imagined a "typical" American boy his age, living on the edge of starvation under an oppressive regime."
Being raised fairly poor on a midwestern farm, my father would tell my siblings and me as we passed fancy houses as we drove along the road that "Those people aren't really happy who live there"
The impression that painted mentally created a lot of internal confusion for years about whether it was right to be in a big nice house and risk unhappiness.
I laugh now, but in my late teens and early 20's I found myself walking more in my fathers shoes with his beliefs than my own shoes and my beliefs.
So getting off the farm and seeing the world opened up a whole new vista for me, and perhaps one day many MS users having nothing to lose will also take that risk and see the new vistas that are awaiting them.
And I also found that those people living in the fancy houses on the hill are happy much of the time.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The 'Big Deal' is a known and convicted monopolist is flexing their muscles to help destroy or at least discredit an LGPL project with just enough funding to stay afloat.
Sun, Apple, and RedHat are expected to do battle with the 'enemy' - whoever they are since they are commercial competitors in kind.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Nobody said they couldn't publish any marketing material. We driveling fools just think its funny that a company as big as Microsoft who has like 95% of the Office market is running scared of OpenOffice.
They are actually doing us a favor. No way the OpenOffice.org team could have bought this much publicity. Now like 50,000 VAR's were just put on notice that Microsoft is taking OpenOffice.org seriously and that its a worthy product that they shouldn't be surprised to see at client sites.
First Microsoft admits that OpenOffice.org is as good as MS Office 97, now this. Sweet. MS Office has only one place to go, and its not up. Bring it on Microsoft. More press releases and studies about OpenOffice.org please!
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
which is they start from the premise that you have to mimic MS to gain acceptance.
/. and elsewhere on the beneifts of OO leave me underwhelmed; office works for us - and the first rule of any bizness is dont fix what aint broke. And since it is working, all the arguments about bug fix in open software, online help community, etc are irrelavent - it is a null argument (logic here guys, you do undstand logic? if problem = 0, fix to problem =0)
.sxw file > cost of office; actually, loss of a single sale due to customer irratation >> entire IT budget !!! In short: in our company, no upside, lots of down side
How on earth can you win when you accept the enemys rules as the playing field ? OO will never be as good as MS at MS defined things....
People will only use OO when it can really do somehting that office cant
From where I sit in my cube, this whole discussion is kinda unreal. We are a 200 person company making scientific instruments; 2/3 of the employees are engineers, scientists or senior mgt. So far as I can tell, no one cares that much about MSoffice vs OO; it is just not an issue (you could say we are all brainwashed stupid MSslaves, but that is kind of an arrogant [liberal pay taxes cause its good; conservative obey my morals]point of view. So, like it or not, cares about offic software or the evil empire are irrelevant - we have concerns like shipping product, supporting customers, etc, and MS is just off the screen. I could probably suggest that we swithc to OO because MS is bad, but I'm a known wierdo scientist type - if one of the biz people suggestd this, they would probably be fired.
Again, you might not like it, but we are happy with office - it works for us. This change occured with office 2000; the idea that there is better software out there is simply not known, and the discussions i see on
The cost of office license is simply not an issue; maybe we r lucky there; the 350 bucks per person once every three or four years is just not a biggie
But there is a lot of downside to open office swithc. For instance, I tried the word program last night, and it took me 5 minutes to figure out the dic feature for docs; multiply that by 200 features, over our company, we would probably go out of biz if we swithced to open office, due to loss of time. That is us - again, call us stupid, but this is what we are facing. We use a lot of scientific software; it is all in windows and office compataible; loss of compat with a single office program wd doom open office. we have NO it staff to write scripts - no budget for that and not going to get approved int eh future (for a company our size, cost of IT support > cost of office licenses) we constantly exchange docs with customers, all using office; loss of a single sale cause customer got irrateted at wierd
-- Will program for bandwidth
I don't know, maybe it's not all one-sided. Interesting question, though.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
MS could then just use the power they have with the computer distributors bundle it in with all linux sold pc's and require them to sell it that it's not an option. They did it with windows didn't they?
The biggest problem is that people that have used open office are spreading the word. Im currently in college and I openly recommend it over word. We keep a cd in the CS lab with it on and burn it for anyone to use. While the Campus IT tells people buy word for x amount. To a college student we see free and go for it.
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
"Our CIO s happy counting money again. He loves SUSE linux and open office. We had no issue with 500 users converting to linux it did take some time but we did it.
If we can do it anyone can do it. Believe me our IT people are not smart since they were M$ engineers they freaked out when then didnt see ok cancel button on every screen.
Now they love shell programming."
I'm beta testing SuSE 9.1 right now. If they thought the switch to Linux was a scary only to discover the freedom of Linux they'll most likely like 9.1 even more. Beta 1 was one of the smoothest betas I've ever tested. Sure there were glitches and some kludgy behavior but no where near what I had expected from a beta - and this was beta one.
As far as OO.o is concerned I have not used a version of M$Word in a couple of years and now to my pleasure I send Office/Word users both presentation and text docs in Win formats and have yet to have any complaints. Even if one decides to stay with an M$Win platform on the desktop why in the world would you pay the price for M$ Office - even at the Student discount (of course for which no one has to verify their student/teacher status - mind games again). Seems only a few Pro Writers even have the slightest desire to use more the an Nth of the so called "features" M$ Office provides.
I have no conpunction what so ever for paying for software. Even though I have access to SuSE's latest and greatest OS ISOs I have always payed for the distro - I beleive in the company and hence support it with my wallet. M$ seems to think the way to better business is to stranglehold the clientele. This is the surest way to promote the competition... They just don't seem to get it and thank the powers that be they won't really ever get it. FOSS/Linux's best friend is for M$ to continue with business as usual.
Hopefully I won't be stoned for heresy, but if MS office would run on Linux I would drop Windows like a red-headed step child. But I think Microsoft knows that and would be signing a death-warrent if they did that.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
This whole topic raises the question of alternatives to Access.
MS Access is one piece of MS software I'm not ashamed to admit to using, and like using. I love the ability to link into our SQL database, create local tables stored within the MDB file, visually design queries, forms, reports, etc., plus the Visual Basic component has been a real life saver for most of the things I've had it done. At my workplace, it's gotten to the point where if there's any task we'd like to automate, or some really funky custom report, they usually ask me if I can pull it off using Access.
But if I knew of an alternative, that provided the same ease of use (well, providing you're already comfortable with queries, tables, and programming!) but wasn't made by that company from Redmond, I'd make every effort to switch even if it meant spending my own personal time migrating my MDB files. Oh, and a solution that worked on both Linux and Windows would be best. I can't completely shed Windows at work yet... gotta take it one step at a time. =)
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
My entire office is running Office XP. We hired a new employee and sought to license an additional copy of Office XP for her.
Of course, office "XP" is now so horribly outdated that it is impossible to find anywhere. We tried to find a cheap copy of it and were almost ripped off by an ebay scammer.
We were reluctant to purchase office 2003 since she would then be the only one in the office running it. While the new version might be 100% compatible we wanted to keep our software consistent for all our people. Microsoft would probably prefer we buy all new licenses of office 2003 for everybody but after spending thousands on Office XP, which works great, we see no reason to upgrade.
The retail price of a single license of Office has actually surpassed the cost of the computer hardware to run it on. Frustrated and sick end by our fruitless quest for office licenses, I decided to try OOo.
Our new employee with her rudimentary skill level picked up OOo just fine. She had absolutely no complaints. OOo proved itself that it is a suitable replacement. So as our company grows, we will slowly migrate to OOo.
I don't think any CTO's really listen to the Microsoft sponsored TCO studies. We know that the choice of MS is only due to its strangle hold on the desktop and the worker bee's perception of normalcy.
Look for office licensing cost to drop as Microsoft comes to the realization that they can't exploit their monopoly power for all it's worth any more.
To blog is sublime
I have come across more than one instance of excel documents that could not be opened with earlier versions of excel.
The most recent was a spreadsheet produced in Offce XP, saved in Excel 97/2000 format which crashed Excel 2000.
We ended up editing it with OpenOffice since it did not crash and was able to open said spreadsheet.
Where I am working, I have a Suse Linux desktop, and can use a Microsoft Terminal Server should I need it. I could have had a Microsoft Windows desktop, if I chose so. People at work can use Microsoft Office or OOo.
I am aggressively using OOo file formats in my daily communication. That is, all documents that I am sending are being sent out as sx? files, and if I am receiving MS office documents, I convert them to OOo anyway in order to work with them, and send them back in sx? formats. Usually, I include a customary copy of a PDF export with the document.
This strategy works nicely. Almost all the people I work with now have OOo included in their installation. In fact, new machines in my workplace will soon include OOo as a standard installation, I hope. Some people are starting to send documents in sx? formats as I do.
External communication is the next target. I will force our suppliers and partners to learn what OOo is and how to use it as well.
This is how you establish a standard: Document it (OOo file formats are nicely documented) and then use brute force to publicize it.
Number one:
The easiest step towards securing your network is removing Outlook (Express, 2000, XP etc etc etc) Outlook is the number one target of viruses and the biggest headache ever.
Number two:
Access may be a good tool for personal usage but in my opinion it is the shittiest piece of hacked ass software ever. It's ubiquity has led to a mass of shitty databases with crappy little frontends prone to corruption and horrific DB management. Forcing direct client to SQL connections IMO is a good idea, less chance for some of that data horded in the Access frontend being sucked off a hapless user workstation and having the thousand or so customers info cached locally released on the web.
Now, with that said my work uses a groupware package like Outlook+exchange that is faar less prone to attacks, with a good attachment blocking spam filter at our head end, we see basically 0 mail infections. (That and we remove outlook express/outlook from our automated installations so the users aren't happily installing and popping their personal mail either.)
Number Three:
The only other valid issue mentioned is the Word compatibility. This is really only an issue with the newest version of Office/Word, and I tend to save everything in PDF if it's leaving my hands anyways. With the trend of businesses holding off on office upgrades I see this issue nearly being void, nearly...
The only concern the adoption of OO has is that newer systems will come solely with 2003 and the DRM bullshit. And the only way to fight it is to back HP 100% and start getting FLOSS pushed onto more vendors. Eventually OO will get pushed on EVERYTHING new as the default option. Ubiquity for free beats ubiquity for $$$ any day.
I'm no zealot, but more power to the movement.
I'm a fan of OO, however StarImpress bugs me in one respect -- how do I create a simple print out formatted with 6 or 8 slides on one page, or one column of 3 sides with adjacent lines for notes?
Enquiring minds want to know....
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
Geez. What's the deal with all these pro-MS people posting? Is Bill ordering the minions to personally SPAM /. ?
...if the team at MS used it, they could have made their FUD document on a PC instead of a Mac!
Get a grip, folks. Oo doesn't require you to dig around in a computer desk drawer to find the old registration code when you have to reinstall a MS product. Oh, that's right - you don't need one at all for Oo!
We received a computer that was "Secure" from a Virtual Public School ( they really stunk, BTW). Since they neglected to provide the login and password for the computer, I did a Google of 'hack xp', found out how to bypass the login and create a new admin user. I then logged in again, setup the internet, downloaded Opera and OpenOffice, and accessed all the MSOffice documents the school provided. I couldn't use MSOffice or even Outlook for email since they required the unavailable LEGAL reg codes the school couldn't find.
HERE'S AN INTERESTING POINT!!!!!
My kids used Oo until the school sent ANOTHER copy of MSOffice. I went ahead and installed it, then found that OpenOffice WOULD NO LONGER WORK! I deleted MSOffice, and all was well again.
SUMMARY-
OpenOffice did what we needed.
The MSOffice installation somehow corrupted the Oo installation.
I still have Oo. I pitched(microwaved) MSOffice.
Oh yes, remember that OpenOffice can RECOVER MSOffice documents that will not open with MSOffice! And ANOTHER THING! If MS is so "interoperable". why can't I open my realy old MSworks documents with MSOffice?
Hmmm.
Use OpenOffice.