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EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003
ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
While I can try out a million different versions of office, and get equal satisfaction. Everything really comes down to standards.
.doc .xls .ppt standards. M$ is still winning the same game, just different players.
Until there is something 10x more superior than
1) Great another competitor, we should support it
2) Its in Java it will suck
3) Java sucks
4) It should be in Perl
5) It should be in C
6) I use vi and troff.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
... does it have enough features to get people to switch from OpenOffice?
"EIOffice 2004 puts a word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet into a single application, not a collection of programs. The integration is smooth and deep, and there's a natural feel to the way it all works together."
Is it good enough to never need OLE?
And yet it still has the fatal flaw of no database program.
Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).
Get paid to code OSS
Please, to all non-MS developers out there: stop chasing Microsoft!
... well, the instant something doesn't work, or just doesn't work exactly the way they're expecting, they'll dismiss your product as a cheap knockoff.
I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.
1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT
2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
My one complaint about EIoffice is the file formats. The last thing we need is yet another file format. OpenOffice/StarOffice, KOffice*, TextMaker*, and Abiword can all save documents in StarOffice format (* these two will have that feature in their next release). We have a rule here at SteamyMobile that you can use whatever office suite you want, so long as it uses the StarOffice format, meaning that in the future, when document search and indexing programs are released, they will all be able to use the same format. If EIOffice could that, we would use it too.
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And if you use C/C++ your application will be easy to make fast, no matter what you're doing.
This is a very silly claim, at least as bad as the one you were responding to, that if an application is written in C/C++ it will be easy to make fast.
Then why do we have so many very-poorly-performing native applications out there.
I have seen enough cases where a well-designed Java app outperforms by an order of magnitude a poorly-designed C++ app.
I am all for using C/C++ where it is appropriate, but C/C++ is no magic silver bullet when it comes to performance any more than Java is. In either language, if you have carefully-constructed libraries, porting can be quite straitforward and if you have a design that plays to the strengths of the platform, performance can be reasonable. Performance and portability are always a matter of design. It does not just happen as a result of choice of platform.
*WORD* is the easy part.
Even powerpoint is almost a non-issue
How about Access/Excel...
So for any clone, ask these questions
Yes, but does it run crystal reports?
Yes, but does it run access (.db7) and have access-like switchboards off of which MANY soho businesses live? [Dentists, doctors, small mom & pops..] The JET engine may suck, but its the de-facto standard for mom and pops.
Yes, but do the macros they use at every major investment bank and packages like XLMiner work?
When there is a suitable ACCESS replacement for small business and something that runs crystal reports and data mining packages like XLMiner run, Microsoft is in trouble.
That last 10% of features will keep many major institutions around until near the bitter end.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
I'll go a step further. .doc often breaks when you move it around, but it doesn't matter because everyone BELIEVES that it'll work anywhere. The reality doesn't matter much (in this case) only the perception of it.
plus-good, double-plus-good
WTF are you talking about?
The sufficiently complex applications *I* have written in Java -- including a mass mail server and a database migration utility -- have worked just FINE on every arbitrary Java installation I've seen. I wrote them on a PC, moved them to a Sun server , and still run them on my Mac. The trick is to write them in pure Java...no native libraries, and when you need a file separator, get it from Preferences...don't assume / (or \, or : for that matter)!
Now, the difference between Java and GLIB/GDK/GTK is that you only need ONE binary. That's one less thing to worry about supporting...one less thing to have to TEST everywhere. Furthermore, I've rarely seen a Java UI crash unexpectedly. GTK crashes all the time on "beta" systems...like Windows.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The advantages of MS Office are:
The advantages of OpenOffice are:
What the heck are the advantages of EIOffice?
So, WTF?