OpenOffice Bloated?

cygnusx writes "ZDNet's George Ou has been writing a series of posts about Open Office bloat. Includes some interesting system usage comparisons" From the article: "Even when dealing with what is essentially the same data, OpenOffice Calc uses up 211 MBs of private unsharable memory while Excel uses up 34 MBs of private unsharable memory. The fact that OpenOffice.org Calc takes about 100 times the CPU time explains the kind of drastic results we were getting where Excel could open a file in 2 seconds while Calc would take almost 3 minutes. Most of that massive speed difference is due to XML being very processor intensive, but Microsoft still handles its own XML files about 7 times faster than OpenOffice.org handles OpenDocument ODS format and uses far less memory than OpenOffice.org."

Comments

I've used OpenOffice

[Deathly809]

And from what I have seen it does run a bit slow. If you try to open a file from the web might as well go get a drink. Maybe its just my computer?

So why isn't it more popular?

[Anita Coney]

Americans LOVE bloat. All you-can-eat restaurants. Trucks with HEMIs and lift-kits only driven on pavement. Giant houses with even larger pole barns. You'd think it'd be a little more popular.

There is a fax available!

[Luscious868]

There is a fix available here if you run Windows:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/

For those running Linux, you'll also need this:

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/

Re:Consider the Source

[fimbulvetr]

You must be comparing this to how people complained about kde being slow and bloated and the kde people devels turned it around so it ran faster and took less memory. Oh wait...that hasn't happened yet.

Re:Consider the Source

[fonetik]

Wouldn't it be better to read the article, no matter what the viewpoint is, and apply a bit of scientific method to it? Rather than dismiss it out of hand because of who owns what and what he wrote previously? How would you like it if after making an effort to be fair, and did the experiments to see where performance or user experieince differs in the two packages, only to have it posted on slashdot and dismissed on the spot because 'Slashdot is biased towards the OSS community, so they probably lied.'?

It's the same thing as if you are on the left and you see something on FOX News, you can dismiss it with no further thought and you might be correct to do so. A lot of things have been shown to be wildly inaccurate at best or frequent lies by omission on that channel. But I would think that true "critical thinking" would be figuring that out for yourself, or at least watching it and confirming or denying the group opinion for yourself.

It would be a shame to overlook something that may need to be addressed just because it came from a source that you don't like. If Open Office really is that slow, it's a valid mitigating factor in not using it. If it's misleading, find out why. But I think it's just as foolish to ignore something because you don't like who told you it, much less, to expect everyone else to ignore it too.

Tis true....

[jmorris42]

> nothing makes me aware of how much I need to upgrade my processor like starting OpenOffice.

That was the old deal between Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft would release software that would be ever more bloated and slow to drive sales of new hardware. But they haven't been keeping their end of the deal at Microsoft these last few years. XP was more bloated than 98/ME but not by enough to justify a 3+ GHz Processor. Of course ANYONE who makes a deal with Microsoft eventually gets shafted, it is just in their nature.

But still, Intel can't afford to overly annoy Microsoft even after they got shafted by them yet again by Microsoft picking IBM/Power for the Xbox 360 over Intel.

But I am suprised they aren't quietly pushing OO.o on exactly the ground you mention, that widespread adoption of it would be just the ticket to drive a round of hardware upgrades.