Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's the job of Microsoft's marketing people to come up with literature that says their programs are better than anything else out there.
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.
Ten out of Ten SCO Group Vice Presidents recommend MS Office over OpenOffice.org ..oh wait only for unsecure data..ass cahnges show up in wor ddocumetns
Don't Tread on OpenSource
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)
I forgot, Microsoft is not allowed to publish any marketing material. Go look at Sun, Apple or RedHat's sites and watch all the drivel they post that is anti-Microsoft FUD. Hell isn't that what mostly Slashdot is?
It appears you are contemplating jumping $hip. Do you wish to:
[ ] believe our obfuscation of your choices?
[ ] wait until you don't have any choices?
[x] make your own mind up?
When Microsoft is sued out of existance by China, the EU and Asia for anicompetative practice there will still be support for Open Office.
Beep beep.
Given how many times MS has talked about cross-compatibility of Office one has to wonder why that document itself is PDF???
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
Often it's not even possible to use Office formats between versions. Try to edit an MS Office 2003 file on a system that's using MS Office '97.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
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.
So this asshole claims Microsoft Office requires more hardware and more disk space, and therefore OO.org "holds its own." Well I'll tell you, when I load OO.org on my P4 it takes a fucking long time to load. When I load MSOffice it comes up very snappily. I can't imagine using OO.org on an older machine. It must be like using Mozilla on an older machine, where you wait 2 minutes for the cursor to even show in the URL box! I have 200GB of disk space, I don't care how much space an office suite takes up.
The m$ document is in PDF format that is not supported by office ! OO can save document in PDF.
That makes 1-0 for OO.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
A couple of things to note about Microsoft's
fud:
1) It's not in Word format. Why not?
Not everyone can afford Microsoft Office,
although everyone can afford Open Office.
2) Microsoft office doesn't export to pdf.
A third party app is required --- unless
of course you open the word document
in Open Office 1.1 and export it as pdf.
3) The fud was written in Quark express on a
Mac --- looks like Microsoft doesn't use its
own tools.
4) Had they written it in Word format, folks
who couldn't afford Microsoft Office would have
to download open office so they could
use open office to view a word document
telling them why they shouldn't use
open office to view word documents.
I don't know if any of you read SysAdmin or Dr. Dobbs Journal (I get both) and the Microsof tFUD machine doesn't stop at OpenOffice. In my latest issue of SysAdmin was a pack containing a 180 day time crippled copy of Windows Server 2003 and a "Learning Resource" CD.
I went through part of the CD before I raised the "bullshit flag" over the following:
1. Poor Plug and Play support based on Solaris 2.6 and an equally ancient version of Linux. Did not mention HP-UX, IRIX, or AIX.
2. The only way to have a remote desktop similar to Terminal Services was to use VNC, what about a remote X session?
Microsoft would not get in so much trouble over this stuff if they simply told the truth. Or are they expecting Linux and Unix admins and developers to "jump ship" for some crippleware (not including "Windows Services for Unix" which Microsoft had to Interix to develop!The advertisements are there to keep everything Fair & Balanced.
This is not a dupe, it discusses a *rebuttal* to the Microsoft FUD, not the Microsoft FUD itself.
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
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.
Nice how the author completely sidestepped speed issues. I can have anything in Office opened up on my woeful K6-2/500MHz machine in 10-15 seconds. Firing up any portion of OO takes from 45 seconds to a full minute. No, I am not overstating the problem. OO has some great functionality, but it is horrendously slow to start, and runs slower than Office once it's open.
Also, the comparison of OO and Office system requirements is weak. "Wow, look! OO doesn't mention what processor to use! We win!" No, I don't think so. The Office guidelines are merely more specific. Who is going to be running Office XP on such a low-end (P133, 24MB RAM?) system? NOBODY! It sounds to me like OO and Office have the exact same system requirements... "A computer that doesn't completely suck."
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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
*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.
The first thing I thought when it mentioned the Microsoft users having support groups was group therapy such as AA or ones for Depression!
FYI I FSCKed up my PC on RH9 (I take full responsibility, thus PEBKAC) but DLed MDK and installed OO.o and now I say STFU to MS FUD. YMMV though.
OO.o is better TCO and ROI. If you use MS (including IE), you'll need to visit NAI or get AVG ASAP or your machine will be DOA.
Top 10 Microsoft FUD tactics attacking Open Office:
10. "War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Open is Closed"
9. Chalk-drawn penguins all over New York sidewalks. It worked for IBM (?)
8. Fake COMDEX "OpenOffice" booth set up by Microsoft, featuring Tubgirl as the hostess.
7. Lobbying for "Star Trek 11" film featuring Gates as the leader of the Good Borg.
6. "If you use Open Office, none of the locks in your office building will work any more. Believe me"
5. "If you use Open Office, and if you maintain an erection
more than 4 hours, consult your physician immediately to avoid sponteneous genital implosion"
4. Spreading rumors of Michael Jackson about to sign promotial deal with Open Office folks.
3. Armies of Clippy's seem training with assault weapons in wilderness camps in Idaho.
2. Microsoft claims that OpenOffice smells funny.
1. Planned series of commercials featuring Goatse image with voice-over saying "Open Office, Open Orifice".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hmm. Funny how the Microsoft PDF wasn't creaded using Microsoft sofware... or Windows
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.
Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such Microsoft propaganda films as "The Triumph of the Bill", "Ballmer Dance 2: Electric Boogaloo" and "Apple: The Evil that Began in 'Genesis'"
Dude, you're missing the point... Being a college student is about screwing girls (or guys, if that's your cup of tea).
Wait 4 years and you can support OpenSource by trolling slashdot in your bosses' time
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.
Open Office provides no database client support.
In OpenOffice if you hit F4 or go to view -> Data Sources you are able to connect to any number of database types via JDBC or ODBC.
I have used this for projects at work with great success, it works in both 1.0 and 1.1.
Obviously the author did not spend too much time on research into what OpenOffice actually can do.
*Create a ready-made step-by-step logical argument using a template?
*Use a series of prompts to develop a funny and ironic takedown?
*Develop a detailed plan on how to attack the opponent in a fiery flamepost?
*Pretend to write a logical arument but instead write your own version of FUD with linux references thrown in for karma bonus?
*Just write the rebuttal.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Of course, since I'm coming up with this idea, I don't have to work hard to make it happen. Someone else do it for me. I'm busy typing up a report in vi.
vi. Because friends don't let friends use emacs.
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?
Open Office: Cold-blooded Communist
Microsoft Office: Compassionate Capitalist
Open Office: Created by nerds living in their parent's basement.
Microsoft Office: Created by techies in Microsoft's underground bunker.
Open Office: Has naked code on prominant display.
Microsoft Office: Code is decently compiled and hidden from prying eyes.
Open Office: Bugs are reported loudly, increasing fear in users.
Microsoft Office: Bugs are kept hidden from users, so only those who wish to exploit them need worry.
Open Office: Terrorists and dictators can copy it whenever they want.
Microsoft Office: Terrorists and dictators must spend their money purchasing licenses, decreasing the threat to the free world.
Open Office: Uses GPL.
Microsoft Office: Uses EULA, an acronym with 33% more letters.
Open Office: Doesn't make any money for Microsoft.
Microsoft Office: Makes lots of money for Microsoft.
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.
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
"Our plan is to automatically generate FUD, to lower the TCO of our marketing department, while simultaneously increasing ROI," said Steve Ballmer in an interview. "Currently, we are spending just too many billions on marketing, and some of those funds could instead be diverted to SCO, er, I mean, to our legal defense department, thereby increasing shareholder returns."
The software is slated to appear in mid Q2 2004.
Six years later...
Microsoft stated that after years of delays, Microsoft FUD 2010 Constellation Edition will be released Real Soon Now (tm).
All properties are the property of their respective owners.
MS's take is that quite a lot of developers vist slashdot and they'd be stupid not to advertise here. Personally I don't care about thier product because I really think there are alternatives out there for most jobs. The real targets of their ads are those with purchasing power in their organization. My company has had the enterprise licese with them since 1998 so MS must be doing something right. The PHBs are in their pockets.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
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
Word doesn't produce pdf files because thats not really a word processor format, its a cross-platform display format. They are making it a .pdf format so that the majority of their target audience (linux users) can read it. More linux users probably have xpdf or native acrobat reader installed than open office.
They might as well just write Slashdot hates Microsoft and normally only posts MS bashing articles.
Look in Games::Xbox to see a more sympathetic view of Microsoft.
For the record, Fox News can serve as part of a fair and balanced news diet when taken together with a more left-leaning cable news source such as CNN or MSNBC.
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.
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.
Look, I'm a big fan of OOo, so don't go off on me; but I'm also a USER of OOo, not just someone promoting an adjenda. That said, a great many things are out of whack with MS' portrayal of OOo against Office, BUT there is at least one area that DOES need improvement: Installation.
If you are running a domain and authenticating users or even running multiple users in XP Home - it's a pain in the ass to get this set up. And for those who have experience with this, don't tell me that every user has to fill out a small install questionaire in order to get it to work. That's just stupidity. I want this like Office - install in one spot, and everyone gets it.
Unfortunately, this 'feature' (I would consider this a MUST for Terminal Services, public terminals or clients, or even families), won't happen until V. 2.00 - next year. You have no idea how frustrating it is for me to have to use a hacked registry patch and start-up batch file to make this work.
So... Ease of install... Er... Needs work folks!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
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.
For me, the worst thing is it depends on system-installed fonts and not on its own set. Result: The same document looks different on different computers. And I don't mean different letter shape. I mean I write a document with a piece of text and remainder of the page filled with a picture. Then I watch it on a different box and the text is one line longer. The picture lands on the next page. The layout of all the text is ruined. Large blank gaps, pictures that don't apply to the text, lone words lost on mostly blank pages...
It's not HTML which should look OK in every resolution. It's text that is to be printed. Sorry. MS Office never failed me on that.
On the other hand, never ask me to write a paper with a lot of equations on MS Office. Its equation editor sucks a big time. OOo has kinda language, that makes it VERY easy. sin({x_2 - x_1} over {x_1^2 + x_2^2} cdot ddot %varphi ) rules!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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..."
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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!
Xmove is supposed to be able to do exactly that.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win - Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948.
OO.o has officially made it to stage 3. Congratulations to all OpenOffice.org developers who have made such fantastic progress in such a short time.
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
Some of the arguments the author made seemed somewhat naive; and honestly there are good arguments for adoption of OpenOffice. When I see comments to the effect, 'OpenOffice can be installed at no cost, and deployed easily', I have to protest. The technical staff is a cost and their time to install on desktops is incremental cost that rises with the number of desktops to install; I haven't seen any documentation for scripted installs of OpenOffice (note: I can't say I've looked hard either). This is just one such point where the arguments need to be better... at least for business.
I have been in management and made the call to install OpenOffice in the retail stores of a chain retailer, so clearly I am a true believer of what this software can do. But you also have to be realistic about where the limitations are as well. Had this chain been much larger, the costs of installation may well have outweighed the costs saving of the license. There are other points made by the author that again, just seem weak or weakly considered... and having a life I'm not going to go into them here and now. But, someone, help this guy with his arguments... he may do more damage to his cause than good.
I'm a big supporter of OOo here at Linden Hall but I gotta tell you that this is the suckiest thing about Open/StarOffice.
This has been an issue since day uno and I can't figure out why they haven't prioritized this - especially in light of the fact that Sun is using the code to go head to head against MS! Sure, the install process will be completely changed in V. 2.0, but that's at least a YEAR AWAY!
As it is, I have to use a script and a reg hack to make StarOffice work for all users in my labs without foolishness. I can kind of understand why Sun may not want it to work with Terminal Services - they require you to call them if you want to install it on a term server (unbelievable in itself); but not supporting multiple users in XP HOME??!! WTF??!! This is the sort of thing MS can pick on because it's totally true.
Installation issues should be fixed ASAP!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Pro-OSS is closely tied to slashdot. Not to mention that OSDN [Open Source Development Network] is the same parent organization that funds Linux kernel development. That means any marketing against an Open Source project qualifies under, Stuff that matters.
As far as your sample stories, honestly - I think the Boeing one quite qualifies as something I am very interested in (and though it's off topic for THIS article), thanks for posting it. The other two have no personal interest for me (I'm happily married). I don't want slashdot to start in the gutter, us geeks can bring it there with off-color (yet tastefully on-topic) jokes!
I have this sinking feeling that I'm actually feeding a troll - I hope not.
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 $88,000,000 investment toward making the world a better place for Sun and for all of us. I predict you will make a profit from selling Star Office, as well.
Mindshare matters. File formats matter. I can't send someone a file in my native format that is using MS Office, I have to use a file format that has at times made my files ten times larger. It does matter when you are just putting a few files on a floppy for school. The huge MS Office files will fill it up quite quickly.
*nix users can use MSO the same as a Windows user. Crossover Office? The issue is it being native, which I guess is what you are getting at. There are other options as well. Koffice and the Gnome programs like Abiword.
Also, saying that you don't see it in your task list is a huge cop out. You don't see spyware in your task list, yet it is probably there. Even if it isn't, you know it's that way on other people's machines. Also, is there something on your task list that says "preloaded Internet Explorer" or is it bundled with Explorer? This is somewhat of a moot point anyhow, since I've never even heard this accusation. MsOffice loads like a snail when I had it, and runs just as slowly. I don't see that big of a difference between the two right now, but OO is growing while MSO is stagnating.
I take it this was trolling from your last comment. Or flamebait. It's not a must and it's not an alternative. I have friends who don't want to pay the hundreds for MS Office, so I gave them OO. They love it. That's good enough for me.
That's scary.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I think the most important thing to remember here is that M$ 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.
See my comment I posted above.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
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
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
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...
Ok, I downloaded OpenOffice and tried to use it for some of the same work I have been doing with Excel. I have a data set of 32 columns and 8k rows that I chart to look for various patterns. No formulas, just a simple array of floating point data items.
Excel has many more chart options. The few charts in OpenOffice draw extremely slugishly. I cannot change any parameters of an OpenOffice chart without it hanging up completely.
OpenOffice looks a bit like Excel, but for my needs it's performance is a joke. It's not yet ready for prime time. I'd love to see the open source movement succeed, but OpenOffice's spreadsheet engine needs a major tuneup before I can use it.
"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.
>A grammer checker is the thing that is holding me back from a full fledged jump to an OSS OS
why not just learn correct grammar?
Uh, if you're on MSDN, you can. MSDN even had Office 2003 months before retail did.
Ok, so in general, Slashdot is anti-Microsoft. What, precisely, is your point?
You don't find it a bit twisted that VA Linux owns a site called Slashdot that posts articles that bashes competitors and calls it "tech news?" Imagine the outcry if some other company owned a site that called itself a news site and posted articles negative toward Linux. We'd hear endless rants from the zealots about how it's "biased."
Regarding the speed issue, yes, right now OpenOffice does take really long to start. Now, let's use this as an example to illustrate the difference between the community model and the MS model...
OOo is scheduled for some nice optimization and speed increases in version 2.0 (and some major overhaul of the code if I'm not mistaken)
Office is actually getting SLOWER with new releases - only you don't notice it because when it comes out you have a faster computer! And good luck trying to direct the development of MS Office...
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
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
Guess which one be read?
Considering the number of comments mentioning MS Office's inability to save PDFs, it should be mentioned that only Windows version is crippled in this manner. MS Office v.X for Mac can save PDF files just fine. Just go File / Print and a the bottom of the print dialogue you'll see "Save as PDF". I love that feature as I always e-mail my documents in Word and PDF formats. While OO is a great piece of software it has many problems. Its word processer is generally on par with MS Word, but it's equivalent of MS Excel is not something to rave about.
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.
This has been a problem for us as well, but I have been able to fix it on Windows machines.
/net install does. But you can make these changes in a LOGON script.
r ap.ini y }
a me/Appication%20Data/OpenOffice
It is possible to install OpenOffice.org as an administrative user, and then move the program menu items to "All Users".
In that state, it is possible to share one OpenOffice installation amongst all users by making the "user" directory in the OpenOffice.org1.1.0 directory writable for everyone.
The downside of this is that all users will share the same preferences, on the machine. So when someone else logs on he/she will get the preferences of the previous user, will see what documents (filenames) that user worked on, etc.
To fix that, you need to make some simple changes to the installation that are similar to what a user install after a
After installation, in the file %PROGRAMFILES%\OpenOffice.org1.1.0\program\bootst
change these lines:
Location=$SYSUSERCONFIG/sversion.ini
and
UserInstallation=${$Location:$Section:$ProductKe
In the file %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\sversion.ini (which will have to be created when it does not yet exist when a new user logs on) change this:
OpenOffice.org 1.1.0=file:///C:/Documents%20and%20settings/Usern
Copy the user directory from the %PROGRAMFILES%\OpenOffice.org1.1.0 to that location when it does not yet exist.
Now the OpenOffice settings will be in the user profile and will roam to computers where this user logs on.
After putting these actions in LOGON scripts, we now have automatic installation and roaming of user data with OpenOffice.org
But I agree that this should be automatic, just as it is with Microsoft Office.
The only problem is that MSOffice is like using a 18 wheeler to get you around the city when clearly a fuel efficient VW bug will do....heck it even parks easier, just doesn't start up quite as fast.
-hopefully you can get past my complicated analogies and simply see that OO.org is FREE, MSOffice is 3 times more expensive than it needs be.
Needless to say the Office division at MS should be rolling out cheeper, smaller, more educational based versions. Instead they've made one huge clunker of a program and cut off non-essential pieces to sell in 3-4 smaller less "professional" programs.
I could also write a thesis on how MS charges more and more each year for the "business" portions of the program: Access, Powerpoint, and Publisher.....needless to say those parts are quickly becomming outdated, i wouldn't use PowerPoint if someone payed me minimum wage to do so, and i wouldn't touch publisher with a twenty foot pole.
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.
but if MS office would run on Linux I would drop Windows like a red-headed step child
You should have seen this comming from a mile away: ms office runs easily on linux.
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
So rather than bother getting the latest MS Office just for the spreadsheet and the occasional slideshow I started to use OpenOffice more and more. Since 1.1 I haven't hit any brick wall in terms of functionality. It really does all I need to do for my home / work requirements. It also has some brilliant features of its own such as being able to print straight to PDF which is just awesome.
I was pretty nervous of it to begin with, but now I don't know any reason to switch back to MS Office. I submit timesheets with OpenOffice, I write letters with OpenOffice. It works, it's free and MS is 450 out of pocket. Good riddance.
Besides, MS Office seems to double in disk space with each release for a barely discernable functionality improvements. I suppose someone somewhere needs whatever that bloat is there to provide but I suspect most people don't. OpenOffice takes a mere fraction of the space and provides nearly the same functionality and certainly enough for mere mortals.
Now I do have some criticisms. The first is the OpenOffice UI looks lousy. It looks like it was designed for Windows 95 and has never changed. Some of the icons are very confusing - maybe the Ximian ones should be used. And certain buttons such as the text colour / highlight dropdown buttons have a counter-unintuitive behaviour, where clicking on certain bits of the button make it popup but other parts don't. I'm assuming also that future versions will make use of theme engines that most OS's provide to ensure a native look & feel.
Secondly, the OO people must recognize that nearly all of their 'business' is ex-MS Office users. The easiest way to spread the word about OO is to offer new users an experience (toolbars, menus and keybindings) that closely resembles MS Office but for free. This would also make OO considerably easier to pick up and use and could mean the difference between OO being dismissed entirely as too difficult and the user raving about it to all his / her friends.
Finally I do miss outline mode in MS Word. Does OO have this functionality? I've searched and searched but have seen nothing like it. Now this would be a useful feature, especially for writing long documents.
The cost savings are enormous. Think about the current Microsoft Office paradigm; $450/desktop at retail rates (slightly lower for volume purchases). Now, compare that to OpenOffice.org on the same Windows desktop at a cost of $0.00/desktop. Multiply that out over say... 3,000 desktops, for a medium-sized installation. Let's say that you have a volume price of $200/copy of Microsoft Office in this case. You just saved yourself $600,000 in just licensing costs , and just for one application . Multiply that out across many more Free Software applications that run on Windows natively. Do you think you could use a spare $600k to improve your business, or hire some more staff, or upgrade the existing computers, or buy new applications for your core business process? I bet you could.
That's just for a small-to-medium sized business. Take a Pfizer Pharmaceutical for example... 70,000 desktops, most of them running Microsoft Office. If they get a nice cheap volume price of $100/copy of Microsoft Office vs. the $0.00/copy of Oo.org, they just saved $7,000,000 (yes, million) dollars by moving to Free Software on their existing Microsoft Windows desktops. $7 million dollars saved, in just licensing costs ! Yes, there are some advanced things that Oo.org doesn't do yet, but it will fit the needs of 90% or more of "office users".
But wait, that's not all (insert catchy As-Seen-On-TV jingle). If you ever decide to switch your users to a Linux desktop, they can continue to use the same exact applications that they were used to on the Microsoft Windows desktop; i.e. OpenOffice.org in this example. There is zero training curve, downtime, or lack of productivity.
Also, Oo.org provides MUCH more functionality, in terms of file formats, usability, interoperability, than the current Microsoft Office suite, and Oo.org is improving every single day in leaps and bounds. Is Microsoft Office improving this fast? Unlikely.
The switch is a no-brainer, and you don't even have to run Linux to reap the benefits.
(Note: I don't work for or endorse OpenOffice.org in any way, I just believe in Free Software very strongly, both as an author of Free Software, and an evangelist in the community)
If this were NOT a Microsoft artical you'd have someone posting "if this were a Microsoft artical" and getting mod 5 for it.
Thies are starting to become no diffrent than your typical "First Post" and "Hot Gritz" posts.
Compair and contrast this with the Apple Patent story (only like 3 storys later I think). The summery dose a pritty good job attacking the patent.
In the comments someone has posted an obigitory "If this were Microsoft" post.
"If this were Microsoft the summery would be a long judgmental rant".
Yet here we are... no less than 3 story before and... Long? No, Judgmental, Yes. But so is the Apple patent summery and the Slashdoters are ripping Apple for it. Well most are there are a fair amount of Apple defenders.
And how is that diffrent from any Slashdot story where Microsoft is the focus?
Nothing...
No joke the typical Slashdot user hates Microsoft with a purple passion but it's hardly as bad as the Microsoft defenders would have you believe.
I don't actually exist.
Open office lacks all the powerful features no user would ever need but is absolutly nessisary if your writing a document virus.
Microsoft office has virus protection built in (of course that protection wouldn't be nessisary if they hadn't made it virus enabled in the first place).
I've said it before and I'll say it again.. Windows is NOT user friendly.
Microsoft has inserted scripting and macro languages into every application.
The only people who COULD use that feature are coders. However coders do just as well doing the whole task under perl, TCL/TK, C, Python or any other programming language.
Back on the Commodore Vic 20 and 64 I always wrote unique database appications myself every time I needed one.
(With due respects to SQL DB coders...
It's one thing when your database runs on one 6502 processor and can be no bigger than two Commodore format floppys.
It's quite annother when your database has to be accessable by no less than 4 diffrent high end multitasking computers making thousands of requests a second each and the database is split accrost a 500gig RAID.)
I have access to Microsoft office at work.
I have koffice and open office at home.
Microsoft office reminds me of those software applications you'd get on a public domain floppy you'd play around with but wouldn't even dream of trying to use for sereous productivity.
Yes I'm compairing Microsoft Office to Commodore 64 public domain.
I actually prefer koffice...
On that note I'd like to point out that people are actually selling Open Office.org on eBay as a cheap alterntive to Microsoft Office and people are buying it...
They also sell PDF creation tools becouse Microsoft Office dosen't do this alone... While open office dose.
I don't actually exist.
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
From the PDF - 'OpenOffice provides no database client support'
From experience - I've successfully connected to and/or used various different database types, including MS Access via ODBC. The in build database connection manager and SQL builder is actually reasonably proficient for databases at MS Access level. It just can't do some of the fancy things I make other DMBSs do.
This kind of thing was worked out long ago on Unix platforms and there are even crude similar solutions for winblows. A portable home directory with preferences that follow the user login is the best answer here. Microsoft has finally come up with that for 2003, but you have to be careful or all user settings get coppied to every machine - what you have now. I suggest you look into this before your workstations need new 120 gig hard drives to hold all of those skeleton files.
Don't blame OO for working with M$'s pathetic limitations and oddball junk. 2003, despite it's name was only released a few months ago. It will take some time for everyone else to play catch up with the strange way M$ does things. In the very short term M$ Office might have some short term advantage here, but they still suck when you compare the total system offerings to Unix solutions that were working as long as 10 years ago. DEC, Sun and others had the multi user thing nailed down with hardware that would be laughed at today. Free software has adopted those best of class solutions. M$ is doing what it can to patch users into what is essentially a single user mode kernel and file system. It's not OO's fault that Microsoft does things so poorly.
If you can't afford winblows server and you have not looked into complete free software replacements to that M$ junk, you are shortchanging yourself and your students. MIT manages to offer all the comercial propriatory junk you want over there Athena system. There are better ways of running a lab than swollowing M$ junk whole.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.