Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice.org, MS Office 2003 Compared, Evaluated
kotj.mf writes "eWeek is running a relatively lengthy article comparing OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2003, as part of an IT decision whether to migrate a 300-plus userbase office away from Office 97/2000. The not-so-surprising conclusion: OO.o can be a better deal for smaller companies that can't fully leverage Redmond's volume licensing. Hell, it'd be cheap at twice the price."
I work for a not-for-profit company that qualifies Microsoft's charity licensing. I haven't ever seen the actual prices, but from what I hear, the per-seat costs for Office are less than even the highest-tiered volume licensing.
:-(
Kinda hard for me to fulfill my conquest of moving our mail away from Exchange.
"Independent research analyst META Group found that Linux costs are not lower than Windows."
Such conflicting views.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
They're the ones publishing the never ending stream of F/OSS/Linux lies from The Enderle Troll, no?
Save yourself a click.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The only thing that matters to me is whether OO.o comes with Clippy or not!
Amazingly enough, OOo has this little exploding light bulb that's almost as annoying. Pops up every time OOo corrects a mistake, saves a document, or thinks you're looking at it weird. Its only positive attribute is that it isn't animated like Clippy.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For all the documents you absolutely must exchange with people, PDF fits the bill 99 times out of 100. How often do you email an EDITABLE document to someone, have them edit it, then send it back? OOo's "Export to PDF" fits this nicely. I have a 'stealth' OOo install here at work, most other people fear the fact that somehow I scored Adobe Acrobat. PDF simply rules.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The article states that for the tests, users where easily moved from M$ to OOo... exept for those who use exell in a profesional way!
It was a short review, but one problem I had with their comparison of PowerPoint/Impress was that Impress had a hard time working with a PowerPoint file that had a lot of imbedded Excel and Word information. Frankly, PowerPoint isn't nearly as good at handling those things as it ought to be either. Most of the testing was done to see how well an office could migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice, so the concern is a legitemate one, but I think that one will see that Impress will handle Writer and Calc files as well or better than PowerPoint will handle Word and Excel files.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
Yeah, used to be Excel wasn't done until it broke lotus. Now, I guess Office isn't done until it breaks OO.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them. Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
They're just another troll for hire.
How this this go? Quote from 2002
Guess you guys got a few months more to fail that one completely. Hold your breath!
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I'd agree that small businesses, shoestring budgets, home, school, charity, underdeveloped nations would be better off going OO.o.
At large corporations, smooth 2-way compatibility with MS Office is a must have and OO.o is not there yet.
It's ironic, though. If a few of the larger MS Office licensees were to pool their resources they could contract out to improve OO.o so that it would be sufficiently compatible.
But there's the tragedy of the commons: even though many would benefit from lower costs, etc., everyone hopes "George will do it" I'll just wait until its good enough for me and meanwhile I'll shell out for MS Office.
But the more small time users lap over the barrier, the more it wears down.
A day will come when a Fortune 500 company makes the jump. It will look impressive, but it will just be the culmination of years of work by others on OO.o
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Very true.
.NET is killer."
To quote Miguel de Icaza from today's story, "Everyone is arguing about tiny bits of the equation. [...] They are all fine points of view, but what makes Longhorn dangerous for the viability of Linux on the desktop is that the combination of Microsoft deployment power, XAML, Avalon and
Admittedly OpenOffice is pretty good if you're migrating from Office 95/97 (more 97 than 95). But start anywhere at Office 2000 level, and there are some things that are copied into OpenOffice on an acceptable level, but for even the slightest deviation off the regular path for creating and saving a document you're penalized by not having a certain small feature, that exists in MS Office, but was not important enough to include in OO.
OpenOffice also gives you the choice of building equations by hand or by text primitives (similar to LateX). Learning the syntax for sums, etc. takes a few minutes, but then it's supremely easy to create the coolest equations with no fuss.
CON: ...
Lack of traditional support Office suites typically do not require much vendor support, but the fact that OpenOffice.org is an open-source project means software support must come from the community, generally spread out across various Web sites and newsgroups.
Ok, so tell me again why the guy was thinking about switching from MS to OO? Oh yeah, "Benincasa is looking to upgrade because Microsoft has discontinued distribution of new licenses for Office 2000 and Office 97"
So MS won't support what they deem "old" products at all, and that isn't listed as a "Con" for them. Yet distributed, widely available support is a "Con" for OO?
And in the "Con" for MS high licensing costs, it doesn't mention that these will be recurring costs, at the whim of Microsoft and their End of Life policies.
mangles documents when passed back and forth between MS Office and OpenOffice
As someone who also has to transfer documents between the two applications, I can honestly say that most of the time, Office does far more mangling than OO.o does. Hell, Office often can't even properly read older versions of Office itself!
OO.o isn't completely in the clear, but I find it's more consistent.
I like OpenOffice.org as much as the next guy, or maybe even more -- I've used OOo on my Windows box exclusively for about two years now. But, I just can't get used to OOo on my PowerBook. I really wanted to like it, but the OS X version left me wanting more. Really, it's hardly a port at all -- it's just the Unix version running under X11 for OS X. So, it has the Unix interface and it's lacking the usual Mac OS niceties such as the Aqua look and even the nifty Finder-ized open/save dialogs.
At this point, I'm just torn between trying to find MS Office/Mac for cheap (perhaps an older version) or just waiting for the proper Aqua port of OOo (even though that could be a while).
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Why put in the last two points? Your second I could see if you argue that "normal users" aren't going to be able to open a help file and/or read a support BBS and/or google, but 10 seconds longer? I'm sorry, since when did 10 seconds become an earth-shattering timeframe? Remember now, these are small companies, not companies whose CEOs make $10 in those 10 seconds. I'll give you the finance one, but for a (very) small business that has only one accountant, this could mean simply one version of Excel versus 10 versions of the full Office suite. Still a considerable gain at that point.
Stuff.
Thats because that while everyone moans and complains about how you can't live without office, its still just a word processor, spreadsheet ... to most people.
.....), plus they are not willing to run an "unlicensed" version.
I rebuilt a PC for my inlaws last year and when they asked about office, I said it would cost them about $300 (consumer version, no student discount
I installed openoffice and it worked like a charm. A couple of weeks getting used to it and then it was no trouble. The only extra help needed was instruction in importing and saving to office formats. I know the filters aren't perfect, but being that the machine was only being used for basic word processing and spreadsheets, it wasn't an issue.
I work at a school -- We don't license MS Office for the students, but this year is the first that we have put MS Office on every faculty machine (about 60). I also put OpenOffice on every machine. We have been 100% Wordperfect until this year, but the new president "likes MS Office", so he's slowly forcing everything that direction. When I rolled out this year's install image, I had made a bit of a mistake (completely unintentionally). When someone double-clicks on a MS Office document, it opens in OpenOffice instead of MSOffice. This has basically "forced" everyone to use OpenOffice.
And HARDLY ANYONE has noticed. Only two or three of the faculty (those who call themselves the Techno-elite . . . yeah right) have switched it back to MS. Most people don't realize they're not using MSOffice. I'm of the opinion that I could COMPLETELY remove MSOffice, rename all the OpenOffice icons to the MS equivalent, and we'd be in business.
I was also pissed that they didn't include Outlook in the comparison. Anyone who's worked with Outlook 2003 will know what I mean. It's by far the biggest upgrade to Office since 97. I can't stand Outlook 2002, no less 2000! To say it's a fair comparison, then leave a competitor's strongest asset, is totally bogus. And, just in case you're wondering, no you can't buy Office without Outlook. The lightest weight version (retail) still has Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. proof
I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations in my line of work. I played around with OO for a bit especially the Presenter application. Two key points:
1) There seems to only be a single slide theme in there. OO needs to bundle more presentation templates in there. (Fortunately I have my own)
2) It's hard to browse between slides. With PowerPoint, all you have to do is hit page up or down to change slides in the editor. OO has these weird tab things you have to click on.
/rant on/
.doc format of them.
.doc interface as it evolves or face many slow and painful years prior working toward open products.
/rant>
Haven't we covered this many times before?
Assuming only one of your users (whether you support 1 or 1,000 of them) needs to exchange editable complex documents with a MS Word shop even occasionally. Adobe doesn't cut it, nor do any of the commercial or open products. (Try a complex document with images and outlines within different parts of a table.) Yuk!
So...... if you start by converting your existing base of users to an open product, you are already supporting TWO word processors and the conversion of documents between same.
Now you've got to deal with resentment between those users who think you are "favoring" the ones you "let" buy MS Word. Can you say Career Limiting Maneuver (CLM)? Sure I knew you could.
I don't care if Word costs $100 a year per copy and open is free because the competent support desk resource costs are far and away our resource whose demand far exceeds hours available.
Meanwhile, any external vendor who tries to send us non-MS stuff has never given us grief when we require
I'm not saying this is fair. I'm not saying this is right. I am saying this is reality.
Either we legally and ethically reverse engineer EACH
I'm more hopeful by colinux (http://www.colinux.org/) where one has a fighting chance of introducing non-MS components (PHP, MySQL, Apache) and running them in tandem with MS office as needed.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
I love the principle behind OOo and wish them all the luck, but until they fix some of the major bugs, like the three-year-old autofilter bug in calc that allows you to modify/delete data that you can't see (Bug 2977), OOo will remain the tool of secretaries and non-power-users. One cannot use calc for serious scientific work (yet). *sigh*
Cost to install is not the only cost. With a free product, your own IT guys are the only resource if you encounter a bug or difficult error situation. If you're paying for a license, you have another level of support, i.e. the developer.
It has been said many times before, and better than I could, but:
When you find a bug in a Microsoft product, can you really get hold of the programmers? Is the helpdesk really helpful? Are Microsoft products (Office, in this case) really more bug-free than the major alternatives?
I has also been said that it's often a lot easier to just email or call the OSS programmers and to talk directly to the person who coded the app you are using, and suggestions for new features have more chances of being listened to in the OSS world.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
One of the main problems with OpenOffice on the Mac is that it does not yet use Aqua for its user interface, and a side effect of this is you cannot use the different international input modes in OS X to type in OO. So I can't just switch to Chinese and start typing in OO, as it does not know how to handle it. Without that, half my use for a word processor goes out the window.
There may be a way to rig the X11 environment or OpenOffice itself to allow Chinese input in another fashion, but it's just one more usability knock against the program when run on Mac OS X. Ugly UI, incosistencies with the Mac's interface conventions, international input kludges, etc. Not to mention the performance issues, and missing niceties like AppleScript automation (which can be done on ANY native OS X app, even if it's not designed for it), non-crappy file dialogs, etc.
Microsoft Word may have its share of problems, but at least it can start in less than 45-60 seconds, and it follows most of the Apple UI conventions. So while OpenOffice is nice, it definitely is not a decent substitute for Office X at this stage.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Say I'm creating an Outlook 2003 group appointment. With 2 clicks (inside Outlook), I can create a portal site for the meeting which includes a discussion list, document/picture library, agenda, surveys, etc. No programming and very easy for the average user to accomplish.
Say I'm in Word working on a document and I'd like to get my attorney to look at it. With 2 clicks (inside Word), I can create a portal site to allow him to review the document. We can discuss it using the discussion features, and he can create different versions. Using the web folders functionality, this entire process is seemless (no downloading the file locally, editing it, and uploading...just hit save and it saves automatically back to the portal).
I have put OpenOffice on three machines in our office, but mostly for the ability to open and use Excel and PowerPoint files. I have used Writer in place of Word and it was pretty quick to learn and I wouldn't complain about some of the problems with it when it is free and very full featured.
But, in our field (legal), we need Word or Word Perfect. So, we've been buying copies of Works 2003 which contains Word XP/2002 at 40 bucks a pop on eBay. We just don't need Excel or PowerPoint to pony up for MS Office, and can use OO.org when we need those programs.
I would love to go to OpenOffice in its entirety, but the problem is that many popular and specialized programs in the legal field support Word or WordPerfect and will never support something like OO.org (heck, our scheduling program doesn't support the main file being on a Linux server, which would have saved us some money for getting additional licenses for WinNT).
Our scheduling program (Amicus Attorney) supports creating documents through its scheduler/address book only though Word or WordPerfect.
Until OO.org figures out a way to interact with specialized programs in specialized fields (legal, medicine, engineering, etc), I think it will be hard for many companies to make a switch.
I have one version of office. I paid it. It is 97.
And it cannot open recent word documents. So saying M$ as no migration cost is PURE BULLSHIT.
Don't tell me it is normal, it is too old because:
1) the PII/400 I bought it with is still more than enough for bureautic, and I don't see the first reason to upgrade.
2) OOo can open, even if not completely correctly the Word files I cannot open with Office97.
Perhaps it is you that needs experience. Although it has gotten better over the years, the MS products have had serious bugs that advanced-functionality users have repeatedly experienced. For specfific examples, try these: While opening a document from a WINDOWS2000 server, MSWord(also 2000) dies and corrupts the file. At what point is there a user fuck-up? Maybe they should not have double-clicked to start the file up and done a File|Open instead. Dumbasses. Or the same error in reverse, where changes were made and the save dies (icon selected), again corrupting the file and thereby losing the changes (the backup save is close but not complete). Perhaps the user should have done File|Save. Shitheads. And the Man IS out to get me... It's time to start skimming the gene pool
To help readers guage the ease with which corporations could switch from MS Office to OpenOffice, the article includes caveats like the following:
"Certain Impress capabilities, such as three-dimensional text in presentations, did not carry across to PowerPoint."
That's probably a fair assessment, but with a vastly larger user base, any issue you encounter in Office is more likely to be known and documented (by someone).
When it comes to advanced features there are a lot of features in MS Office that aren't in OO, however, these are features that aren't used by ~80-95% of your userbase, depending on your industry.
Yeah, that is something you'd have to have your users evaluate, e.g. in a trial conversion.
Exchange.
So a company has to have an Exchange admin. And since Exchange can't face "the net" directly or risk getting black eyes, knuckle sandwhiches, and hackers asking for it's lunch money every single day...you'll have to hire a good unix admin to build a *nix smtp proxy for it.
disagree?
show some balls and reply your exchange servers IP address below.
we'll see if it's running by the end of the day. (and no, it won't be slashdotted...you be wishing it had when i'm done with it)
In my beginners class, I teach OO.o along side MS Office. Often times, my very computer illiterate students have trouble understanding that there are differences. (e.g. They have no trouble using the free alternative.)
Of course, they don't use much beyond the basic tools -- but I'd venture that the majority of office users don't either.
Required reading for internet skeptics
It will be _VERY_ difficult to make OO read and save perfectly MS Office docs. What we need to do is to install both in the same machine and start producing documents with OO.
;).
I started doing this, and it promotes the knowledge and use of OO. As of version 1.1.1, I am proud to present it to the people. Right now, MS Office CANNOT READ OO docs _AT ALL_. ***Isn't this a great advantage?*** In a few years, when MS Office finally can read and write OO docs, it will be too late or too expensive for people to pay for MS software just to read their OO documents. Office is its worst enemy. Too bloathed, too user un-friendly, too expensive, and the power that it has is not really a big deal for 90% of the users. It is just that it is the "default" application that converts a PC into a typewritter machine. People is surprised when I install a program without the need of a stupid number (as if a # were to stop illegal copying...), and to print PDF is a brilliant add-on. Very well done! Did I stay it is multi-plataform compatible too? This is a modern kind of software my friends.
Hint: Have you ever switched the IE icon with Mozilla's, and the MS Word icon with the one from OO and saw what happened?
Except there's like, two developers working on an OS X version of OpenOffice.org
Might be nice of Apple to contribute some developers on this one if they want some competition on their desktop.
I know visio isn't part of MS Office, but it might as well be. I have had to use it almost as much this semester as word, and visio was the only thing that prevented me from doing several large (15-50 page) papers in OOo. If they had a visio workalike, they (I'd) be set.
I'm writing a book using NeoOffice using its edition of Writer, and have written a few training presentations using its edition of Impress, and have made a bunch of spreadsheets with its edition of Calc. The latest rev is fairly stable. It's a tad pokey to launch and eats up RAM, but stability hasn't been too problematic.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
I feel like I've been poisoned. I used MS Word )and the other Office programs) for years. I recently dumped it in favor of OO. Mind you, I never used Word heavily, nor do I use OO heavily now.
But I still can'y (read: not patient enough to) figure out how to do some of the things I could easily do in Word. The arrangement of the menus and toolbars just feel foreign after growing accustomed to Microsoft's.
This isn't necessarily MIcrosoft's fault (I could just as easily have been addicted to an alternative program, just less likely due to Microsoft's dominance.) And it's not OO's faultm either. They shouldn't make their toolbars and menus look just like Microsoft's and limit their "innovation" (I hope MS hasn't trademarked that word!)
Nonetheless, my mind is poisoned and its taking some time (instead of effort) to purge myself.
you could have a qualified admin who can do BOTH. I realize it's a difficult concept for most unix admins to grasp the concept of being proficient in more than one tool, but...there it is...
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
The Microsoft charity licensing is pretty nice.
Well it seems nice on the face of it.
Some believe that Microsoft only offer it cheaper to charities because if they didn't then open source would ne used instead, and they would rather reduce the price just enough to stop that happening.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
True, although the costs of switching are odften short term and the savings long term. Which can be a problem in pitching to senior management. You pitch "OK it's going to save us $200,000 over 5 years for an upfront cost of $10,000 over the first year and $2,000 in the second year." and they only hear the cost part. They see the short term drop in profits and it's effect on their bonus and the share price. Then they say no. In many ways it's easier to sell StarOffice than OpenOffice.org as at least Sun have a marketing department, plus automatic credibility due to being outsiders.
Actually, on the subject of StarOffice. Due to the heavy discount (on purchase, training ("train the trainer") and support costs, remember enterprises like support and training) and free/very cheap consultancy Sun give to public sector bodies in Europe (and I assume elsewhere) it actually works out significantly cheaper to switch to StarOffice than it does OpenOffice.org for such bodies. worth bearing in mind.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
To be fair, Office 97 to Office 2003 (or whatever) != migration in the sense that the article uses it. I think most would consider that an upgrade, not a migration. You point, though, stands in that there is certainly an upgrade cost.
Battling Beasts
(cut and paste from email)
Microsoft SharePoint is Microsoft's take on a Wiki.
Search google for "wikiwiki"/"wiki wiki" for details.
Important: If you haven't delt with wikis before, I suggest taking some time to look at them. Very very interesting stuff. Very practical as an information collaboration and storage/search system.
The differences in Microsoft's approach are basically;
* Document-centric -- specifically MS Office document suite from Word through PowerPoint with very tight integration with the FrontPage way of page design.
* Good for checking or logging existing documents into the system.
* Good for people who basically want a filing cabnet for Microsoft Office documents.
These good points cause problems that are not usually an issue with other Wikis;
* SharePoint is not easy or practical to use if the primary tasks involve;
+ Colaboration in general.
+ Searching existing data.
+ Editing/creating links and subdocuments.
+ Auditing.
IF you deal with folks where Microsoft lock-in is perfectly fine (as SharePoint inceases lock-in), and the negitive parts of the software are also not concerns, go for it. Otherwise, treat it like any other Wiki and decide from the list of available ones not just this one brand.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Has anyone considered making an OpenOffice training video and releasing it on a freely-distributable CD image? If I ever used either of these programs for more than plain text I'd consider doing it. What software would you need to capture the screen video (showing new users where commonly used things are in menus, or walking through and interactive Basics of OOo program)? Just a thought. It'd only have to be done once unless the basic functions changed in newer versions.
And yes, I know there is Documentation and Help files, but some people just want to be spoon-fed or walked-through.
The fact is that if those individuals were forced to pay 200 Dollars/Euros/Pounds for MS Office, I am sure all of them would seriously look at the additional features that MS Office provides over OpenOffice.org and decide then whether or not they are worth that money.
I am not defending OOO's "inferiority" to MS Office, the fact is that it is purely a matter of perception - I personally, for example, do not embed one document within another or use VB programming - therefore OOO's feature-set is perfectly adequate for me and the only problem I have with it is importing some documents that others have created with MS Office.
Likewise, if MS Office is the accepted benchmark for office packages currently, then I hope that OOO evolves to the point where that benchmark is challenged purely on the basus of document compatibility and useful features.
However, everyone should remember that MS Office is a commercial package that most people run illegally. Any comparison should take cost of the respective products into account and whether it is worth buying MS Office purely because of the extra features it has over OOO.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
the one thing that openoffice (or linux desktop) lacks is a good visio clone. sure there's kivio, and openoffice draw, but there are some basic functions that arent there. for instance, the technical 'stencils' arent really complete, especially electrical ones. and i cant even rotate the shapes that i draw. if i want have a gate in my drawing, i want to be able to rotate it.
it'd be great if there's grammar check too...
spell check is there though, but not grammar check
my blog
You have to recognize that there are some cultural differences in this world. One of these differences is that Europeans are increasingly suspect of the intentions, ethics, and practices of Americans, the American Government and their corporations. Europeans, their Governments and Corporations are moving away from American/Microsoft software toward open source alternatives, mostly as a philosophical positions.
My magic eight-ball says "Even if your whole company is a Microsoft shop, you still have to deal with EU people who use KDE on Linux with OpenOffice." and my experience has been that OO opens Microsoft documents a whole lot better than Microsoft Office opens OO documents. If you want to do business in the EU, you better be looking at OO.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This doesn't bother me, except that OpenOffice *also* doesn't give you a dialog box that says something like, "The Revision Tracking Data in this document is too complicated for OpenOffice to understand. Data may have been lost during conversion." or SOMEthing. If it doesn't work, OpenOffice shouldn't pretend that it does.
This is not directly related, but OpenOffice also has a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE bug tracking system. I found a bug relating to the installer a few weeks ago, and damned if I could figure out how to report the bug at all... so I wrote this email:
Comment of the year
Most inter-corporation communication that takes place as .DOC files could as easily be .RTF. The primary problem is not that Microsoft locks people in (although it certainly is an issue) but that people are dumb and/or poorly trained, like the headhunters who want a .DOC resume (and will not accept any other format) so that they can make comments in it. If you offer them plain text or a rtf, they'll say, how can I handle that?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bullshit. I had an unresolved problem with Word and Equation Editor (yeah, yeah... this was before I moved to LaTeX). What pieces of shit. Equation Editor could not showed equations properly. Dots in derivatives showed up as 's. Bars showed up as square root signs. Carret showed up as italic f's. What the fuck? I could move them and view them properly on a Mac if I opened Equation Editor objects one by one. 50 minute support call (and many reboots later) didn't resolve the issue. Not to mention the "Disk Full" problem when saving files despite hundreds of MB free, which I traced back to bad Equation Editor objects which had to be deleted and written from scratch. Completely useless is not overstating the case.
Oh, you don't like my generalizing my experience to all, then don't use your anecdote to generalize it for everyone.
What I write. I'm not a high school teacher - I will be an elementary school teacher. I've used it to determine the grade level of the test questions and directions I'd written for a fifth grade language arts test. If I write an assignment of test, and I run it through Flesch-Kinkaid, and it comes through a 8.5, I need to simplify my test. Unfortunately, some of my 5th grade kids might be on a 3rd grade reading level - so having my test directions and questions at the 8th grade level would be unfair. Its not used to "dumb down" an assignment - its used to simplify and clarify - and its much more difficult to judge the readibility of a text than it seems. Run an essay or composition through it - see what you get. Cheers.
WTF?!? "Windows just works."??? You must be using a different Windows than the 5 or so versions I've tried.
It's true that you don't have to decipher manual pages: since the documentation is hopeless, if you can't figure it out without manuals, you're stuck. But "no configuring bullshit"?? I've spent months of my life that I'll never get back chasing down weird Windows configuration problems. Have you ever tried to hook a Windows box to a network, for example?
Of course, all this is before the frequent crashes. None of my 5 Linux boxes have crashed in over two years. My wife's Windows 98, then 2K, then XP Pro box has crashed weekly through all of these incarnations.
"Windows just works." IHBT.
Why is the world so in love with wysiwyg word processors? They're simply awful. Slow, confusing, labyrinthine beasts which usually produce inconsistent, poorly formatted documents.
I don't want to waste time selecting bolds and font sizes and aligning tabs and battling clippy.
I want to type words in to a computer, using the editor I want to use and a typeface and colour scheme suited for a computer screen, then have those words come out of the printer properly formatted in a professional, readable, predictable way.
I don't want to either spend an hour tidying a document up after I've written it, or distribute documents in the horrible, amateurish jumble of spacings, fonts, weights and sizes that most people seem happy to turn out.
So, I use TeX, and my docs get written more quickly and look better than your OOo/Word/KWrite ones. As I only have to think about what I'm writing, not how to lay it out, the content of my document is quite possibly better as well.
And don't give me the "it's too hard" argument. You could train someone to use a simple text editor and TeX just as quickly as you could train them to use Word for most purposes. I'm no kind of TeX guru at all, but for 95% of what I write there's a ten line preamble and a few \section tags. Then I have a copy of OOo around for the 5% of stuff TeX isn't suited to.
Ok, let me change the question a bit. What is your company going to do when it gets a function that only office 2003 supports and your office 97 can't open it?
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.