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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. "
am quite nervous about OpenOffice. I don't understand Sun's latest deals with Microsoft but I don't trust them.
Keep working on koffice guys. We really shouldn't be putting all our eggs in one basket.
In a report from El Segundo, Calif.-based consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share and more than 300 million users worldwide.
However, the report notes that OpenOffice.org, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market, with over 16 million downloads and countless CD installations. Even with Microsoft retaining 95% overall marketshare, the fact that OpenOffice now holds almost 15% of enterprise workstations, means it's only a matter of time before John Cubicle brings OO.org home.
Disclaimer: I use OO.
so far. The article seems to think cost is the reason to get excited. I agree, that is pretty damn cool, however, the real reason to get all a titter is because of the open formats used in open office.
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.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I have downloaded Firefox on countless occasions (usually to test a new version
And I compensate because I keep the latest version on my usb stick that I carry around in my pocket. And I upgrade it on all my work machines, my home machines and the friends that I visit. So there.
Free XBox, PS2
This is only somewhat true.
While I have been reading all Word documents with OpenOffice (OO) for the past 2 years or so, I often run into Word features not supported by OO. For instance, I recently received a password-protected Word document that I could not open with OO. I had to use AbiWord (how come the report doesn't mention that!?).
Another missing feature seems to be the ability to view Word document changes when the original document has 'track changes' turned on.
I guess reports like this one help larger, less up-to-speed corporate users by opening their eyes and mind.
Simpy
To think I would live to see that line. What an age we live in. And to think that there are now people posting on /. who will argue about it. Where's my time machine when I need it?
;)
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
- a tool to go through specified directories and copy and convert all files to OO format.
- some sort of central server type connector that allows multiple users to work on the same document at the same time and the result mirrored to all users.
1 is required , 2 would be a selling point
I've downloaded 3 different versions of OO.o as new versions come out, and those get distributed to the 30 or so computers at my office.
Also, last x-mas I gave out copies of the open cd to family and friends, each containing a copy of OO.o.
Perhaps I'm not alone, and that others who do this balance out the figures for downloads that don't result in market share.
There must be some margin of error, but in lieu of a comprehensive survey, download quantity gives a good representation of how widely used a software product is.
Although I agree with your general sentiment, is your 'download and try' that far removed from the guy that buys a piece of shrink wrapped software only to find it does not do what he wants and he cannot take it back. OK, I agree that he does not buy 25+ copies (unless he is more wealthy than he is intelligent) but to a lesser degree, this is the other side of what you represent.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
The interesting this about these numbers is that no one can put a spin on this. For instance, if these numbers were about 'number of PCs sold with Linux pre-loaded', you would have claims that this was only being done to circumvent the MS tax, and most people subsequently loaded the PC with pirated Windows OS.
You just cannot make those claims in this case.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
On the other hand there are people like me, with a full suite of MS software on my PC at work that never gets used. I use OO and Firefox exclusively.
And I'm one of many in our dev team. The IT purchasing people makes sure you get a copy of MS office, but the majority of people are ignoring it and using software of their choice. Not that MS is the only people with skewed numbers. I think we have 3 JBuilder licences for every developer that actually uses it (Go Eclipse!).
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
While the OOo/SO twins get the 'starchild' treatment, IMO it will be of couple other desktop apps that will bring up open source (and that includes Linux OS) apps. These would be Firefox/Tbird and GIMP. I have switched 2 neighbors over to these (1 does pro photog) and they like them. The photog guy is now open to getting Linux installed on his oldest PC (cannot go to XP, dying on 98).
Since all of these work on Windows, these people can learn on their existing WinOS, and switch to Linux when the 'upgrade to XP or else' is forced on them.
Is there any Linux OS that is less than 10 Mb ,and can be run from CD without installing?
,i dont want knoppix.It may be good, but I simply cant download 700 MB image file on dialup.
No
So any options?
Oh yeah iam a windows user.wanting to try linux.or perhaps a new OS.
No, I'm not a Linux geek by any means. I am certainly not a MSFT lover, but I'm a best tool for the job, and most of my job requires MSFT today. On that same thought, I've recently been getting into some open source things, and have even installed Linux pretty recently (just instaleld a MythTV box at my house!).
I've made the switch to Firefox completely - both at work and at my home. Why? It looks really nice, functions well, and was easy to get my wife switched over to as it functions pretty similar to tools she already knows. Hell, I've even switched some of my less technical friends over, and they love it. I didn't do this with Mozilla though - it just seemed "too much".
Now, on the other side, I finally broke down and installed OpenOffice to give it a shot. I thought, will this be the Office breaker I've heard about? No way. I can't stand it - it's clearly designed by technical people and doesn't have the slightest bit of usability in mind. Bash MSFT all you want, but they spend a fair amount of cash on usability, and unfortunately flattery is the best form of competition right now (think about how early versions of Word had the ability to emulate certain WordPerfect functions).
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.
The short short is that products like Firefox and MythTV can make me a convert. They're well designed, look nice, have a lot of functionality, but also keep the end user in mind. OO.org has a long way to go thought before I'd recommend it to one single person as a Microsoft alternative.
"*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!"
Hrm. I think it's got a few years left in it, my friend. Giving up now to fight a future battle only puts you ahead of a curve that's not yet ready to be taken. Ask Apple - they've done a good job of this many times in the past, only to have others eat their lunch (Newton, QuickTake being a prime example).
You know, I wouldn't have agreed with you until recently. I absolutely despise using anything but my wireless device.
I IRC, AIM, surf, take pictures, and read/send mail from it. It's always with me and it's always on. I charge it at night once a day and it's good to go.
I used to carry my laptop around w/me when I wasn't sitting in front of my computers upstairs. Why should I bother when I can do everything I need right from the wireless device?
What most people don't realize is that Star Office's code base is 15 years old. Open Office and MS Office aren't emulations of each other, they've just both evolved around the methods in which humans naturally prefer to do word processing and the like. How else would you design a word processor for use with the average person? Saying Open Office just copies MS Office is like saying that is all Corel did too. It seems that, like the typical MS, they saw good proudcts out already, they also saw a market advantage to selling their own Office Suite, so they took all of the good ideas from the other Office Suites and combined them. As with most software applications, it evolves through time, some of those evolutions involve borrowing ideas from other suites that are admittedly implememnted better. You don't really think that MS came up with spell checking or mail merge, do you? But sure enough they have those features. Also, OOo is very usable in its current form, and the biggest issue people complain about (it's UI and load times, which are mostly interrelated) is going through a major overhaul right now. By the time 2.0 is released you should have no reason to stick with MS Office. The OOo gui used to be so horrible simply because they used to have to implement their own widgets and even emulate an entire desktop environment at some points because there was no standard back in the day, now there is more of a standardized base, and its being implemented using it.
Regards,
Steve
As a teenager I gave countless copied CDs with Office or Windows on it and it only helped MS. Now I do the opposite. I have Slackware installed (might try some gentoo or Unbuntu soon though) and use solely OpenOffice and when people come to me for help or for software I point them to FOSS alternatives. Open Office works great with it's own format. It just has problems with closed formats. I think being polite and asking people to send me thing in RTF is a good way to save 300$+ on my OS/Office suite.
From my experience more people turn onto OpenOffice.org for its one-click PDF generation than anything else. People who publish newsletters, invitations, or just some documents they want on the Web site. Adobe Acrobat is $170 on Pricegrabber, but it's generally $250 retail in stores, so I've seen people wow'ed by OpenOffice single click Word->PDF conversion.
They are not switchers, they continue to use Office (MS Office 97 in some cases), but keep OpenOffice for this feature when they need another PDF.
I think they get cited mostly because the run on windows. Windows is actually pretty cheap (in high volume OEM channels see how much you can save off a Dell by buying grey market components) that's about the cost of Windows to Dell. As a result most people are willing to pay for Windows, it's MS office that gets to be expensive.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Hrm. I think it's got a few years left in it, my friend
.. computers that don't need a fancy interface, but still nevertheless get a hell of a lot of work done ..
I didn't say its going away. As far as 'app traction' goes, its dead right now; the Big Thing is Embedded. You know
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
However, I use MS Office V.x for Mac over OpenOffice. Why? I find that it works better than on windows and I actually like using it over other applications. But mainly PowerPoint. Keynotes is nice and I could survive with Apple Works for my word processing and spreadsheet needs, but still I find PowerPoint for Mac extremely hard to beat. Same with Word for Mac. It just seems cleaner than Word XP or 2000. Excel I don't use often enough really to go one way or the other.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
While it's not right for everyone, I am a major advocate of lyx (lyx.org, doesn't seem to be working right now). It's completely content-oriented for the user, all formatting/TOC/Listing/Indexing is automatic. The output is suitable for print (the thing is basically a latex frontend) and it can output into DVI,PDF, and PS. It works great for scientific/mathematical work with a very comprehensive and robust equation editor. Personally, I don't like to muck around with formatting. The finished documents are very professional, and I think it's the best publishing system available for linux (besides latex of course).
What about the lovely Antiword app?
:-D
I hate to open OpenOffice/Abiword just for read a shity text writen for a moron in Microsoft Word, Antiword cut the bloat and show me just plain text
Try it and be happy
Saludos amigos \o/
- Slayer_X
http://www.slayerx.org/
Lima
You keep using this word "validate". I don't think it means, what you think it means.
If some organization was actually validating these products it would be great. I tried OpenOffice on one of my real-world MS Word documents awhile back and it crashed (no I don't remember which version). I imagine it works fine for simple documents, but then again, so does WordPad.
I still think that the goal of MS Office file compatibility is a losing one. They should try to produce a better product instead. Anyone who believes MS Office file compatibility is critical, isn't going to risk getting fired to save a few dollars.
On the other hand, many users don't need to edit old documents or share them, and those are the users to target with a superior product IMHO.
OSS needs an image shakeup; I use firefox, gaim, openoffice.org on my windows xp machine not because they are low cost, but because they are BETTER!!!