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Desktop Apps Ripe Turf for Open Source
Amy Kucharik writes "Two new reports on open source validate office suite application alternatives like OpenOffice.org and StarOffice and their push into the mainstream against market giant Microsoft Office. "
As much as I know we all hate MS funded "research" I just can't trust the number of times that an application is downloaded as market-share. Sorry, that just does not compute...
Hell, I have downloaded Firefox on countless occasions (usually to test a new version). It never lasts more than an hour on my machine. Does that count as a piece of market-share in the browser war when I don't actually use it?
I have downloaded OpenOffice multiple times as well (on multiple computers) to test and to tour the features newer version have to offer. Again, the install may last a few hours while I test the features that I require. So my 25+ downloads counted towards the 16+ million?
I am glad to see that somewhat viable alternatives are coming into their own and getting media attention but I don't know if we really need to be associated with false numbers just to get the word out. It doesn't exactly give us a leg to stand on when MSFT fires back about the artificially inflated numbers.
Its true, a local newspaper by me just got all new
Sun x86 based systems and they all came with OpenOffice. (I was a bit baffled why they didn't have StarOffice but such are the mysteries of life.)
If all we ever do is try to emulate the M$ Office and other popular desktop apps, We'll will never be able to offer a superior product. It's time to add non bloating features that outshine the commercial software.
More than just application quality, price, ease of use, etc. will be needed to get OSS into big corporations. Many of them have spent significant $$$ on add-ins and custom development in Word, Excel and Access. If OpenOffice supported VBA, it could be a slam-dunk, but integration with applications such as accounting systems, scientific data acquisition, or just automation of Word and Excel for productivity would need to be rewritten from scratch.
Those apps are a big part of my business -- I'd happily migrate them, but nobody's the least bit interested in the Pharmaceutical industry in moving away from MS Word and Excel.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Why is it that whenever a story about Linux desktop application suites comes up, they always bring up OpenOffice and StarOffice? Are there not other good examples they can use?
I don't mean to bait flame here, but aside from OpenOffice and StarOffice (which essentially do the same thing), what other good, solid business apps are available for Linux? All I ever hear about are the same two.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
*Forget* about Desktop, its a straw man! Nobody gives a shit about desktop computing any more; the days of cubicle-bound misery-computing are numbered!
.. and you can do a hell of a lot of computing/real-work with such devices.
..}
The real realm for application prosperity, *especially since Linux has a lead above and beyond WIN32*, is Embedded.
Yes, thats right folks, give up the Desktop War of Straw. Computers getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller
{If you've got the temerity for bold app design, I might posit, oh and some cheap host-hardware to throw in that $400 software/hardware combo you're selling to your customer
In short: Desktop is Dead. The New In is Embedded.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The format being as open as it is ( you can read, in the code, the format if all else fails ), you can do a great many things that just aren't possible with ms office.
I think the question to ask would be, is the normal home or business user going to need or want to do those "great many things"?
There's a lot of stuff that may be pretty damn cool if you're a geek or hacker type, but I think you're going to have to find more relevant selling points if you want wider exposure than those limited circles.
I have met many professionals that are biased on the desktop programs they use because they are the "industry standard" and want to feel like a professional. I good example is photoshop, I have had several graphics designer friends say they wont use anyother graphics package regardless of features because "its not photoshop..." How can opensource apps with their underdog persona get around this?
The above observation is a good point since frequency of download does not equate to frequency of use.
The greatest lack of credibility for Linux going mainstream is the lack of an AOL client in Linux. If Linux really had a huge following or interest in the consumer market, then AOL would have already launched an AOL client for Linux so that millions of tech-ignorant consumers could dial into AOL from their Linux desktop.
The success of Linux continues to be restricted to the business market and the engineering market. Soccer moms driving around in environment-destroying SUVs still will not touch Linux with a 10-foot poll.
Most newspapers don't use an office suite for actual wordprocessing. The stuff they need from a word processor is so specific, that office doesn't really help them.
On the other hand, they get office documents ALL THE TIME in the mail. At the paper where my wife works, they actually have to share Office installs, because there is no budget for a mostly useless office suite for every computer.
When the Phbs in management there realize that there is a free alternative that, since they DON'T ACTUALLY NEED TO PRODUCE CONTENT ON IT, is FAR superior to MS Office, you're going to see an OO.o boom in an important market sector.
I've actually pitched it a few times, but the buerocracy is so monolithic. Everythign has to go to corporate.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
For me, and probably hundres of thousands of others, cost is the initial factor, "I can't afford application X, and I don't really like to download warez anymore. Maybe I'll dig up that Linux CD that Robert gave to me in highschool. It's got free apps on it." Then you start using the programs and think, "This is kind of cool." Then you start understanding the reasons why it's free of cost and again you think, "Wow, cool!"
Ok, so that's sort of a mix of cost and morals. Just my two cents.
I don't know how StarOffice is these days, but OOo is bloatware and it shows. Since when do I need more than 128 MB RAM and a coffee break to start a word processor?
I really prefer the approach taken by AbiWord. They made a good word processor, without the bloat. It continues to be light and snappy now that they have added support for various features and formats.
Now, AbiWord is only a word processor, but with other projects providing spreadsheets, databases, etc. you can still get all the pieces of a complete office suite. Add some coordination and cooperation and you can get everything nicely integrated and uniform, too. Or use KOffice; a bit lacking in features last I sampled it, but well integrated and relatively light.
It's not that I don't recognize the hard work that went into OOo, it's just that I think the development approach is fundamentally flawed. Same goes for Mozilla, BTW. First they made a huge effort to build the Mozilla application suite, now Firefox and Thunderbird are working hard to strip off the bloat. KISS.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I doubt it though I may be wrong...anyone correct me?
In the mean time, do you have any contacts that may have access to a high speed connection (students, employees, family, friends). You could give them instuctions on what to download then they could burn it for you.
Alternatively, if you email your address to
andyfaeglasgow@gmail.com
I would be happy to mail you whichever distribution you want.
Andy
..in Business 101 when they said that cost leadership wasn't a valid strategy. Not that offering better features for less cost isn't an even better one.
The trend is right IMO, large enterprises have the push to make it a standard. Then it will dribble down to smaller companies and finally to end users (think: employees).
I think you will find that 99% of the users are completely satisfied with the feature set of either MS Office or OpenOffice. The key issues are mindshare (Office. Oh, you mean there's some other Office?) and compatibility.
Having large enterprises on your side is a great strength in that respect. If [Fortune 500] can't read your (obscure enough that OpenOffice chokes) Word documents, you have a problem. If you can't read [Fortune 500]s OpenOffice documents, you have a problem. See?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
(no, this is not flamebait...) I'm a big fan of OSS, but I don't have the thirty minutes it takes for OO.org to load on my 1ghz machine. Microsoft's products simply work. They load in a decent amount of time and have very few bugs that infringe on the way that I choose to use them. Sorry, but if the OSS group wants to get into my suite of office applications, they've got to work much better than they do now.
Right when I installed OO I went to open the word processor. It's actually called a Text Editor. WHAT? Notepad and nano are text editors, this is supposed to a Word Processing suite! Further, the interface looks like Office 95 - honestly, people are visual and the interface makes me feel like I should be sitting in a tiny bricked wall office with no windows and a flickering flourescent light overhead. Sure, some may like that, but it's not most people. Finally, the product seems slow on WinXP - yes, it may be my setup, and your mileage my vary, but Word is snappy on my box so it doesn't matter.
This is exactly the sort of things people were saying about Mozilla 2 or 3 years ago:
"It's called mozilla, and has the build number in the bloody titlebar - who is going to use that?"
"The interface doesn't integrate with my Windows desktop, the menus behave differently, it looks bloody awful with those skins, and it's the GUI is so slow!"
"It's huge and clunky and takes forever to load."
"The usability of the interface just isn't there. Ctrl-T to open a new tab? Who is going to guess that?"
Are all typical sorts of comments about the mozilla project back then. Reality is that, for the longest time, mozilla was regarded as a huge, clunky contraption that was, at best, aping IE but badly. People claimed it was taking forever to develop with no real visible improvement, and in many senses they were right. Mozilla had been open source and worked on for a long time at that point, but in terms of what you could see it wasn't that impressive. The catch was they were mostly working on backend stuff, and cleaning up old Netscape code, reorganizing things, and generally just building up a structure to springboard off. That took a very long time, but once the background work started to get somewhere, and XUL started to get fast, and integrate with native toolkits etc. things started to fire up. All of a sudden there was a lot more emphasis on the frontend, and firefox and thunderbird sprung up as separate projects and started getting fast innovative GUIs with the sort of usability you would expect.
StarOffice was open sourced a lot later than Mozilla. A lot of the early work for OpenOffice.org was doing simple things like (for instance) uncoupling the applications from that awful fake desktop (does anyone remember that from StarOffice 5?!) so they ran as separate applications, cleaning up the code, and generally making things workable. New file formats were created and "missing" features were added. Right now OpenOffice.org is still in the sot of stages that mozilla was at in the milestones shortly before it went 1.0. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is getting much better native toolkit integration, a focus on cutting down startup time, and some work on starting to clean up the GUI. That is, the beginning of the work to start to provide a really polished application suite is happening now. You could think of OpenOffice.org 2.0 as equivalent to Firebird 0.1 if you like. An awful lot of very hard work has been going on behind the scenes, and finally the start of something a little more visible to average users in the way of polish is occuring. And OpenOffice.org 2.0 isn't even out yet...
It worth remembering that while everyone now praises Mozilla and Firefox as a massive success story of a truly slick and usable open source application, a very short time ago it was considered a poor clunky application with slow GUI and poor usability.
Give OpenOffice.org a chance - it is still in the process of gearing up its usability polish efforts. Sure, for now it is not the most slick looking application out there, but if you look at what it can do, and the rate that it is improving, you would see that it really is a very impressive open source project.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
The windows and mac users I know are often quite fond of downloading little extras for their favorite OS, many of which appear to be written by just random geeks who got excited when they noticed that the OS provided some API that would let them do some nifty thing.
So the "pretty damn cool" stuff for geeks can trickle down.
--Bruce Fields
There's a lot of stuff that may be pretty damn cool if you're a geek or hacker type, but I think you're going to have to find more relevant selling points if you want wider exposure than those limited circles.
You aren't thinking then. Imagine, you use openoffice today, but who's to say something better isn't coming out nextweek? Well, given OO's open format, you can switch fairly painlessly ( given the programmer knows his job ).
Neatness does indeed become relevant in the long run, often that's what switches people over.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Oh my god! It's a new plague and it's . . . it's . . . it's upgrading peoples computers to advance its political agenda !!!
Firstly, may I point out open source isn't (supposed to be) political. Secondly, why on earth would someone install software on other computers without asking permission first?