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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'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.
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.
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
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?
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
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
-- Will program for bandwidth
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.
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
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.