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KOffice Developers Reply to Yates
danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."
Maybe I missed it, but I read the K office reply, and it does not seem to me that the K office person actually addressed the issue at hand, which is the origin of the code base.
In fact, the K office reply was little more then standard PR speak.
What do you do when you need to take a couple of weeks to organize a complex set of ideas that contain lots of notes and textual data but that stretch across five or ten pages and might justify the inclusion of a couple of lists or a photo or two, and that you'd like to be able to sort on or share with others if possible?
Whatever it is, I wish you had done it before rambling on, because you haven't said anything coherent yet. Maybe you should consider taking a writing class - it's amazing what you can accomplish with the English language, sans sparkles, with just a wee bit of effort. Here's one hint: be specific. For example, just WTF are you talking about when you say "...lots of notes and textual data but that stretch across five or ten pages and might justify the inclusion of a couple of lists or a photo or two, and that you'd like to be able to sort on or share with others if possible"? Besides Word's feature set, I mean.
I've seen some of the busiest, most stressed out, and unproductive people I've met working on such documents. Somehow they believe that with just the right font, and just the right format, and just the right pie chart, and just the right figure, their brilliance will shine through. They can spend terrible amounts of times constructing trifles that people toss aside with hardly a glance. They look and feel busy, but produce few actual results, except to fill filing cabinets and inboxes.
Word exists for the world without networking. Word exists because people used to actually print things on paper. Networking was for the glass house folks. PC's were for the people. The people didn't have data jacks; they shared information with each other using paper.
In the age of networked computing, Word is almost an anachronism. There is certainly still a place in the world for the electronic production of paper documents (i.e. typesetting), and for many purposes Word works just fine. Not my first choice, but that's just me. However, positing that Word is intended to function as the fulcrum of some sort of utopian multi-media collaborative document sharing only serves to illustrate that you misunderstand the internet as badly as Bill Gates.