Slashdot Mirror
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.
"Written in Java so it can run on both Windows and Linux"
hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?
How myopic.
But the web site doesn't have any trial versions.
Its hard to put down $150 without seeing if it will actually open up my spreadsheet and documents.
The review had an eval copy, but no such animal on the web site. Too bad; Do you have to wait for a warez copy to figure out if its worth buying? Makes me think they have something to hide.
Believe it or not, I think real Excel compatibility is the hardest to achieve because there are so many different macros (VB Script), charting features, and other goodies in Excel that its easy to get "locked in".
I'm sticking with OpenOffice.org for now. Just MHO.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Re: Java GUIs being slow
They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse on my PIII500Mhz on Fedora Core 1 and it runs very nicely. Some changes coming down the line in Java 1.5 might actually make it even more responsive, for some things even faster than typical C++ applications (the run-time optimizer cannot easily be duplicated in statically compiled languages.)
Does that mean that it sucks as much as MSoffice?
My main complaint with MSoffice is that the UI was apparently designed by lunatics. A free, open-source clone of MSoffice is a start, but it will still suck just to be backward compatible. Why doesn't someone put together an office suite that transcends this junky interface?
To their credit, it looks like they've improved on MSoffice in some details, but as long as their goal is still be look/feel compatible with MSoffice, it doesn't make me excited.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Aye, it looks like a lot of the "useful new" features offered by EIO are already available in OpenOffice, such as suggest-as-you-type.
I think the big clincher for me would be how it interprets MS-Word shapes and drawings, as that's the only problem I've ever had with OpenOffice.
Me fail English? That's unpossible!
I take it you've never used Eclipse? Eclipse is very responsive and fast on a windows machine.
IIRC, Lotus Development Corp v Paperback Software Intl demonstrated us in 1990 that copying the look and feel in exact form is copyright infringement.
In Finnish, 'ei' means 'no' or 'not'. So this is regarded as 'not Office', which is quite apt considering people often talk about 'Office' when they mean Microsoft Office.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Corel tried writing their word processing software entirely in Java 5 or so years ago and it failed rather miserably, but that's most likely because they were way ahead of their time and java was not the fastest platform to be running software on at that time.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.
I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.
...if it's worth $15, much less $150. A real review would be nice. Does it really handle all the things the Office products handle? How is the integration? I, personally, don't care, but my users do.
/. effect for me, and I got there pretty quickly after the story was posted.
I would dearly love to have one suite that would run on Linux, Windows and Macs, *and* interchange documents with reasonably current MSO products. I can't tell if this one meets those criteria, other than not supporting Macs. Sadly, they aren't alone, there.
OOO does OK at supportoing the MSO standards, but isn't there, yet. ABIword and Gnumeric are great apps, but don't interchange docs that well (my fallback is simply to have apps on all three platforms that interchange documents).
Then there's the nightmare of scheduling software, but that's another issue.
BTW, neither the review nor the EIO site exhibited
I disagree. To effectively overtake a product with a commanding lead in the market you practically have to make a clone of it and sell it cheaper. Anything different is too different for many people and they won't switch.
Many times people just want something better not different. I want a better government not a different one and so on and so forth.
did you forget to take your meds?
you missed mine.
.abw for abiword, .swx for oo.o, something else for kword,
.owf (open write format).
in my opinion there are too many office products to compete with MS. they need to work together, especially a common save file format.
we have
IMHO they should work together to come with an open format common for all office programs, eg, something like
i know each support other formats, but sometimes there is a feature or two difference, leads to incompatibilities
just my $.02
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
What is the market for this thing? Its not going to compete against MS Office- no db just to start- and it can't compete with OpenOffice - price alone- so who's going to use it?
While I am not the biggest fan of OpenOffice (disclaimer I have tried OO and deinstalled it in favor of MS Office- flame away)I would use it in a second over this thing because OO is free and OO really does have some nice features.
B O R I N G
From their whitepaper...
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
I remember that too. At the time the high end CPU was the Pentium Pro 200. Today's CPUs are so overpowered for simple word processing I think we can afford the overhead. For a long time I was skeptical too about Java, but look at Jedit to see what's possible in a full featured text editor. Sure, the memory usage is a little high (25MB w/ an empty document) and it launches slower than a native app, but still, it runs great on a modern CPU.
"Supported Browsers
* Microsoft Internet Explorer
* Sun HotJava
* Netscape Navigator Platforms Tested Linux
* Microsoft Windows 98
* Microsoft Windows ME Microsoft Windows NT
* Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP "
For one, half of those are OSes, not browswers. For two...well, IE is there. Not Firefox, Opera, etc. This just makes me wonder.
EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? If it has everything that MSOffice has what added benefit is there to switch? You mean corporate buy-in? How many millions are they going to give in kick-backs for businesses to switch? How many arms are they going to twist? Can they play as dirty as Microsoft? The best products don't succeed just because they are the best. It is all in the "marketing".
The good news is that the "winner" in the computer world is hardly ever the guy with the best product. Instead the folks that win generally end up being the folks with the cheapest product that is "good enough." If usability or innovation mattered then the early Macintoshes would have destroyed their DOS based PC competitors. The problem is that most people aren't really willing to pay extra for innovation or usability. They simply want something that will get the job done at the lowest price.
Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Free Software doesn't innovate or anything like that. In the long run the ability to take existing software and innovate on top of it (instead of starting from scratch) is going to be a huge win for hackers everywhere. Once OpenOffice.org (or whatever) becomes wide spread then all sorts of cool things are going to be possible just because anyone with a crazy idea as to how office suites should work will actually be able to try those ideas out. Most of these ideas will be crap, but the wider range of ideas will still almost certainly be a net win. The fact of the matter is that Microsoft has been lifting ideas from other software developers and implementing then in Windows and Office for years. You would be hard pressed to point to a single major feature that Microsoft actually pioneered.
Microsoft has made a living by being "good enough" and less expensive, and for years the dominated the desktop despite the fact that Windows (and DOS before that) were pathetic knockoffs of other people's innovation. Now Windows is finally getting to be pretty good, but Linux is cheaper, and for an increasingly large group of people it is becoming "good enough."
Hey. If I write a word doc and send it to you, can you open it in your copy of Word?
Sure you can. If it's any of the versions written in the past 5 years. And if I save it as an older version, SANS cool new features, the past 10 years. Which means hundreds of millions of computers can open that document
That makes it a standard. Not an open standard, but a standard just the same. In fact, the reason most people would give for why they use Office is that it's an "Industry Standard."
Lots of closed standards become popular. GIF, MP3, AVI, PDF -- the list goes on. On the other hand, relatively few of the open source standards have really taken off. There's a simple reason for that: unless there is a strong marketting force for your product, nobody will find out about it, nobody will use it, and therefore nobody will care what format it's in.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have.
If you think that, you aren't going to compete on any platform. When I run something on Linux, I expect that it integrates tightly with the Linux operating system. None of the cross-platform dreck that has come out of Sun (OpenOffice, Java), does that--they all treat Linux as a second class citizen and ignore Linux key bindings, user interface conventions, etc. WORA is useful for a small niche market, but most developers couldn't care less.
I am grateful that they are telling me that this is a cross-platform Java office suite because I then know what I can expect from the UI.
When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in?
You're right: consumers don't. But consumers might care about getting lower cost software, better features, more reliability, easier extensibility, etc. Languages can help there: much of the reason why Mozilla and OpenOffice are such behemoths and such a bitch to extend is their choice of language and object system.
Java is a much better language to write large end-user applications in than C/C++, but Sun, unfortunately, nixes that advantage with their insistence on "cross-platform support".
C# offers similar advantages at the language level, but, unlike Java, it emphasizes the use of platform-specific libraries. That's why you are going to see lots of Windows and Linux software in C#, and unlike Java, users neither will know nor care that it's written in C#--they'll just get better, more robust software more quickly. (There is nothing magical about C#--any language could have taken the place of a Java-like language with platform specific libraries--but C# actually seems to be taking off.)
Java has a shitload more overhead than C/C++ (JVM and all).
True, but the lion's share of this overhead is paid for once during startup. One of the lessons of windows is that people are willing to wait extra time for something to start as long as it works well once started.
If you mean overhead in terms of memory footprint.. Medium to large java apps chew up about the same resources as their C/C++ counterparts.
And there isn't anything you can do about it.
Partially true. You can tweak the JVM parameters so that you either pay most of the start-up overhead up front, or as you go. For server apps, up front is always better. For other apps, it kind of depends.
Java is a poor choice for application development no matter how you look at it.
Entirely incorrect. The larger a C/C++ application becomes, the more prone it becomes to a gamut of bugs which are not possible in Java. (More prone because the larger the application, the more difficult debugging becomes)
Another big plus with Java, and maybe this exists with C/C++ and I don't know it, is the way the rigidity of the language has enabled fairly advanced tools to be created. I nearly never have compile time errors any more because my development environment of choice, IDEA, catches them all before I've saved the file I'm working on. For someone like me who loves the XP-style of coding where you write a test case before you write the class, this is a huge boon. When I'm done writing the test case, the IDE has highlighted all the method calls I've made which do not exist in the target class. A couple mouse clicks will take me to the class file and insert a stubbed method definition. The IDE takes care of the form, allowing me to concentrate on function.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Look at their site, they have a science editor package that can be used to write science publications, reports etc. looks cool..
Just wanted to point out to all that didn't RTFA, this product is from China. Incase you proof check here.
Now I know slash is full of good 'ol Mickysoft haters, but do we realy want to be celibrating a product from a country that's eyeing our technology jobs probably more so than India? It hasn't started yet, but most people agree that off-shoring develpment jobs to mainland China will happen soon. And this is basicaly their proof of concept that they can do it.
So, maybe its for the best not to give these guys any more publicity then they allready have.
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
All of the Java applications I've used are very sluggish. IBM Update Connector is a prime example of this. It takes forever for the software to analyze the machine being updated and to check for updates over a broadband connection. I usually avoid Java applications because of this.
I have 2 very extreme examples of the importance of correct design for speed.
First Example
A colleague wrote a COBOL program that took about 4 hours to run, I changed one "word" defining the access type ACCESS-IS-RANDOM to ACCESS-IS-SEQUENTIAL AFAICR (As Far As I Can Remember). That reduced the run time to about 70 seconds.
Second Example
One would expect an assembly/C program written for a 16 bit processor would be much faster than something written in interpreted BASIC for a 6502 8 bit processor.
However, I wrote a colour printer driver in Acorn's BASIC for a BBC model B (dual processor), that took 11 minutes to print out a colour picture. I was told that an application on an IBM PC took 2 hours!!! to do the same thing.
I did 0 to 4 passes for each line depending on the colour of the pixels, I bet the other application changed ribbon each time the colour changed - maybe even changing the ribbon 3 times for the same pixel. I don't know for sure, but it took a second or two to position the ribbon for a different colour.
-Nivag
The question is then, does anyone actually know how to write Java correctly?
Every once in awhile I figure I'll give Java another chance and try running a Java app. Every one I've ever seen runs like a three legged dog. Based on comments I've seen I get the impression that the runtimes vary widely, and those who are claiming how great it runs must be using something other than what I'm running-- in which case they are rather out of touch with their users. I don't know that in fact this is the problem, as I am not interested enough to diagnose what's wrong-- all I can say is, if what you say is true, most Java authors don't know how to write it "correctly."
Even badly written C++ apps at least run on your machine with characteristics that are pretty similar to those experienced by the developer. Consequently, the developer's experience is a little better connected with the users, and therefore the result is a little more tolerable.