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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."
Perhaps the reason that OO uses more private memory than does MS Office is that MS Office links to all the MS dll files, while OO bundles its own internal libraries with it?
And from article/blog/whatever: "Now to be fair, OpenOffice.org is free and is cross platform, but does this really matter to the 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows?"
If it's legally free to use and does the same task, why wouldn't 90% of the users in the world who only use Windows *not* care? People always look for what's cheaper, sometimes even if it's not better (note how MS became the company it is today...)
Most of the bloat I see results from kludging together work from multiple sources that are not communicating well. Can't they solve this by switching to a faster parser? Or is the format itself flawed? So many questions, this doesn't bode well. Speaking of bloat, why do linux distros come on 5 CDs with multiple versions of every possible thing. Have options is nice, but the fragmentation is getting out of head.
I'm not sure I can see the conflict of interest here. Does Intel have an office suite of their own they're trying to sell? Or did they merge with Microsoft recently? :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
My company uses OpenOffice on literally hundreds of PCs. I use OpenOffice exclusively, save for the rare time we in IT use MSFT Office to open up a document for a user. (No, OpenOffice is not perfect at converting but that's OK with us).
OpenOffice is free (as in beer) and easy to use. The drawback? It's so friggin SLOW, SLOW, SLOW.
Real world use, real world PCs, real world users. OpenOffice is painfully slow. I have tested OpenOffice on dozens of PCs, users and my own, PCs and notebooks. Slow is as slow does, and OpenOffice does it slowly.
Kill the QuickStart process THEN try to open OpenOffice. UUGH! SLOW!!!!
Hmm, you didn't provide any hardware/software specs OR timing/memory data (so others could confirm your work), but your results are nonetheless "informative". It must be because your results were in OO's favor.
Just go ahead and admit it, they both suck for different reasons. We need a third player.
These articles are complete garbage. No mention of methodology is made. What files were loaded, what conditions were they loaded under. Was it the same machine, or a very similar machine. What distro, what JVM, and on, and on, and on. Sounds like another MS shill to me.
... open office being slow:
... 500$ vs lackluster speed, good compatability, and 90% features of office.
Java, now I'm no language bigot, but Java is slower than C (but more portable without changes in code).
It's a replacement for the most bloated piece of windows software and has most of the same features.
I use OO presently, it's not a speed demon thats for sure. However, A) It's free, B) Keeps me from having to run a windows emulator for word docs and scuh. So it's a win win. The equation would be
Shadus
The responses on ./ and the response from the F/OSS people will demonstrate whether Open Source is superior to Microsoft (or any closed-source company). If people just justify the results and claim that OO is still better just because it's Open Source, then in reality Open Source will lose. I think this is a time for the community to notice the problem, admit the problem, and then try to fix it. If the problem can be solved to the point where load times/memory usage is on par with Microsoft, then the Open Source community will prove that it is competent and able to produce a superior (or even equal) product that has the other advantages (freedom, lack of restrictive licenses, etc) that Open Source brings to the table.
Or... people can just whine and show the world that they're a bunch of babies who accuse people of being shills and just ignore the problem.
I, for one, hope the former occurs. I'll admit I'm not a good enough programmer (yet) to do anything about the problem now, but I hope the Open Source programmers who are capable will tackle this problem and fix it w/o making petty excuses.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
... an article possibly designed to sink Open Office
Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But what I find odd is that a simple, easily-measureable property like speed is treated as a religious issue and/or examined for conflicts of interest at all. Why not just measure it in a series of comparative tests as scientifically as possible?
And then, if Open Office is found to be lacking in speed, fine, no problem! The result simply becomes very valuable input to OO's design and development team, and in all probability will get dealt with very seriously and rapidly and to the benefit of its users.
There really shouldn't be an issue of contention here, if we're truly techies.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What about the source? Ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy. Who wrote the article should not have bearing on judging the validity of the article.
You clearly don't know what an ad hominem attack is. The ad hominem fallacy is where you say "Ou is an idiot, and I have reason to believe he's also homosexual. Therefore his article is rubbish". That is indeed a logical fallacy and an invalid argument.
On the other hand, to say "Ou has a well-documented history of writing negative articles on the subject of open-source software" is to state a fact, not to make an attack; and to continue, "therefore it is likely that his approach to the subject will be biased, his evidence selective, and his conclusions unreliable", is perfectly reasonable.
To be perfectly blunt, the provenance of an article is significant. If Linus Torvalds says "Linux is better than Windows", that means very little: of course he thinks that, and nobody really thinks twice when he says so. But if Bill Gates were to say the same thing, then it would be an incredibly significant statement, and people hearing it would immediately put great trust in those words: if Bill Gates says the competition is better, it must be really good!
Similarly, if an OpenOffice.org developer were to announce that their software was, in fact, not as good as MS Office, then that would be a significant announcement that should be given much credence. But when Ou, who has a long and easily verifiable history of writing articles that disparage open-source software, says the same thing, his words should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.
That's not an ad-hominem fallacy. It's called "critical thinking".
Just because the design of OO.o is completely braindead, that's no reason to handicap the competition to make it look better. If Excel is smaller than Calc, say so. If Word is smaller than Writer, say so. If Word+Excel+Powerpoint combined are about the same as the OO equivalents combined, then say that, but most of the time people want just Word, or just Excel, or just Powerpoint.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
There are a remarkable number of OO.o/FOSS appologists here. The answer to this surprising result seems clear to me:
Microsoft makes good software!
Okay, call me a troll, but I've tried a lot of free software over the years and I almost always find it lacking. Microsoft's stuff, on the other hand -- most particularly Office and Windows -- is remarkable when you consider how much they do and how efficiently.
One of the biggest areas in which FOSS is lacking is the boring optimization and debugging that's vital for world class software. The truth is that Microsoft is huge and has lots of money, so they can afford to spend time on that important finishing polish. There's an old saying in computer science: The first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product.
As far as I can tell...
1) OOO IS slow - under Windows and Linux, enough so that competing "offices" like KOffice are kept alive despite reduced feature sets.
2) Office runs faster, but for that matter, so does IE - is it any suprise that MS can write software for its own OS which takes every possible advantage of its native environment to run with speed?
3) I use OOO whenever I can, because open standards means I know I'll be able to access my data in 10 years, unlike the struggle I've had with old Office/Wordperfect/XyWrite documents I've had to try to convert.
4) OOO is "bloated" in the same way my big multitool is bloated - you can't be small, fast, and everything to everyone on every OS
Using plain ol' text since 1968
I didn't realize how much I hated OpenOffice until I used Word for a while last night. OpenOffice takes about 20 seconds to start on my Linux machine. The latest version of word takes about 3, on a Windows computer with half the RAM and a slower CPU. I've not managed to crash Word in quite a while, while OpenOffice crashes reliably if you paste a figure from, say, Matlab and drag it the wrong way (I have about 20 of those Sun "thank you for your crash report" emails in my inbox right now). And god help you if you want to add captions to your figures, or use "styles", or insert an equation, or do just about anything a good word processor should let you do. As it is right now, I'd rather use Word under VMWare than a native version of OpenOffice. For now, my favorite by far is LaTeX -- even with its arcane syntax, it is a hell of a lot better than anything else out there.
Is it time yet to admit that Excel is an excellent piece of software? It has managed to stay true to its core competencies (calculations) while gaining many new audiences. I have used it in the past year for stock analysis, dynamic web queries (a simple Crystal Reports), and site wireframing. While many look at the insecurity of macros, they are enormously useful for the financial community and advanced data analysis.
The great thing about open source though, I bet there is someone *right now* using the test files provided by this author to improve the Open Office parsing routines. Gotta love it.
Old tricks indeed. The only 'trick' I see here incompetence -- on the part of whining developers who write cross-platform code and then complain that Microsoft's platform-optimized code runs faster than theirs.
Netscape complained for ages that Navigator couldn't be as fast as IE because of 'hidden DLLs'. Pooh. They (and the early Mozilla 5 team) never bothered to read MSDN -- DLL rebasing, page fault reduction: all of this is documented there, but you have to be willing to actually read about and use them.
Today, Firefox uses them and Firefox's load times are almost as good as IE's (if slightly less due to the XUL overhead). The Moox builds, which optimize more aggressively, start even better. Even the Seamonkey devs clued up, current Seamonkey builds start MUCH faster as a result.
Go somewhere random
This article is missing the point of OpenOffice. It doesn't take scientific results to find out OpenOffice is slower to open files than MS Office. Anyone using them will see the difference in a big way regardless what data they use. The fact that it's slow to open files and uses more memory is the primary issue with OpenOffice. The fact that MS Office can't retain compatibility accross versions is the main issue with MS Office. The point here is that OpenOffice is the first software in years that is on par with MS Office. They are both 'comparable'. People may argue on which one is actually better, but for the first time they are both pretty damn close in what they can or cannot do. Why is it important? Because on every single other aspect OpenOffice wins hands down. It's free, while MS Office costs hundreds. It's open source and totally customizable, while MS Office is closed. It's free of patent issues, while the state of Massachusetts found MS Office's proprietary format isn't. That's what counts. We finally have a real alternative, that is for ever free, and documents created by it will always be able to be read by any application implementing this open standard. So sure, shout out all day long that OpenOffice uses too much memory for your taste, but at the end of the day, it still wins.
I don't want to be an apologist for OO but you can't deny the fact that MS has had about 10 years long to get MSO right than the OOo people have had to get OO right. Now that isn't to say that we should or will have to wait ten years till OO is as good as MSO is today but we should cut them a bit of slack if the software isn't a slick an lean as it could be. In a very short period of time the OOo team have gone from nothing to something that can rival MSO. Assuming the pace of development continues OO will, I feel, be as good as MSO in two years.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
This is one area where Open Source has its weakness.
Cutting down and optimizing existing code is not nearly as glorious as adding new features.
Micro$oft, on the other hand, can afford to have a whole team of programmers who's only job is to optimize and slim down the code.
As much as I hate MS, they did get a lot of things right in Office (except for that damn paperclip).
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
This only holds true for vague, relative and subjective statements like the one in your example.
A better example would be if Linus Torvalds said "I ran a test that demonstrates Linux booting 25% faster than Windows on the same hardware," and Bill Gates responded with "My tests show that Windows boots 15% faster than Linux on the same hardware."
Yes, both speakers have motives that are worth questioning But the proper response is not to dismiss both claims because of the speakers' biases but rather to take a closer look at their methods and their results. If you find problems with their tests, then you can dismiss their results. If not, then you must accept the results and attempt to reconcile them with any conflicting data you have encountered.
It doesn't matter how reputable the source is. You should always check their research before you accept their claims as conclusive.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
Off course, and not only the GUI, but many functionality built into m$ office is actually part of the OS, while OO is a complete suite, with all the code into the app itself. It's the same that happends with IE. IE loads faster than Firefox, because IE is allready loaded as part of the OS, with the actual explorer being just a frontend, if we preload Gecko, Mozilla would load faster (Konqueror is a good example of this).
Anyway, We use Free Software beacause it's Free (As in Freedom). If a certain app has technicall problems, we should be working to improve it, not write bad reviews about it.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Because they don't care about "legal". Often when I tell someone about OpenOffice, they tell me it's neat but they already have MS Office at home - or at least word. If you tell them "but it's free", they often say they got the MS products free too - illegal of course. They figure why get some free knockoff when they can get "the real thing" free. The ones who paid for MS often got a student price or something, and they really have no incentive to switch until their existing version won't work any more.
The problem is that everyone has Word or Office already weather they paid for it or not. In that context, OOo has nothing to offer - the other benefits are too abstract for joe sixpack. It's a case where MS benefits from casual copies floating around.
The situation is the same for others: Mechanical Engineers tend to have a pinched copy of Autocad at home. Artists have a pinched Photoshop. Animators have a pinched copy of Maya. This hurts adoption of GIMP and Blender - sorry, there is no great GPLed CAD program (except for QCAD for 2D). I'm sure there are plenty more examples. If Longhorn can prevent people running illegal copies of all this software, we'll start to see people switch - assuming MS will allow them to run the legally free stuff.
Then there's the old standby, "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
I know a lot of people who'd prefer bloated, slow and free(as in beer) to less bloated, faster, but $379.95 at newegg.com. Many of those people don't even know there's an alternative to MS Office. I hope they read C/Net.
TW
You're running Excel *and* Crossover Office, *and* Excel is not a native app, and you're comparing it a native app. And you think it's informative that the native app is faster?
So... I should load Macromedia Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flex, Coldfusion, Studio, JRun, Freehand, Authorware, and Contribute every time I want to edit a flash file with MM Flash?
Or should Photoshop also load up Illustrator, GoLive, and Premier?
Naw... there's no bloat in OO.org
Some of this is also arrogant assumptions on all sides. The pro-MS camp is going to test Office under Windows against OO.o under Windows. However, OO.o is a port. It wasn't written for Windows, so there are bound to be some performance issues. Likewise, the pro-OO.o camp will post their various figures proving otherwise while running OO.o under Linux or some other *nix. All the while not taking into account that "Joe Average" at home isn't going to be running the optimal OS for OO.o. I've even seen some weird responses on the ZDNet site. Like the guy who compared OO.o running under Linux with MS Office running under Wine and providing memory usages stats from that. That's just plain silly. Wine has a LOT of overhead, so it's unnfair comparison in much the same way that comparing MS Office on Windows to OO.o on Windows is. The real truth would be found in comparing MS Office on Windows with OO.o on a *nix and then providing the caveat that each Office suite is made to run well on a particular platform. That's the most realistic view. Of course when the AJAX based Office suites pop up all over the place, this will all be moot.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I'll begin by saying that I mostly use Linux, and I use OpenOffice even on Windows when I can help it. One reason is that I don't want to give money to Microsoft, but there are other reasons as well, including my belief that Free Software is the key to the advancement of IT in the future.
But this situation is pure hillarity. OSS fans have their list of reasons why Linux (or some Linux app) is better than Windows (or some Windows app). Two reasons near the top are that Windows is slower and more bloated. These reasons are sited often and are part of the OSS mantra.
So I find it incredibly ironic that now that the shoe is on the other foot, the tables are turned, etc., that these very same people are dismissing "bloated" and "slow" as unimportant.
No, you idiots. "Bloated" and "slow" are ALWAYS bad, even when they apply to an OSS application. That means there's something wrong with OpenOffice.org, and if you have half a brain in your head, you have to accept that it's broken for that reason. That doesn't mean you should stop using it or feel disillusioned. And defending your beliefs in the face of this embarrassment just makes you look stupid and inconsistent. HAVE SOME FREAKING STANDARDS, and have them ALL THE TIME, not just when they make your favorite thing look better. It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.
The Excel team at Microsoft have always been a bunch of hardcore performance-and-utility fanatics, and the quality of Excel reflects that. In my opinion it's the only component of Microsoft Office that's worth anything, and I dearly wish it was available as a separate program so fat incompetant slobs like Word could be left to scrounge for users on shareware sites.
To maintain performance and compatibility, they refused to get drawn into the COM morass for many years... they interoperated with but didn't depend on COM. At one point they were even using their own compiler. Setting OOO Calc up against Excel is like comparing a donkey to a thoroughbred, and never noticing that the rest of the horses in the stable with the thoroughbred are broken down old screws.
To what extent is this just the proper natural evolution of a large scale application?
Step 1: Functional demo, very lacking in features and stability. This would be StarOffice up through the 5.x series, and the OpenOffice 0.x series.
Step 2: Dramatic increases in stability and completion of all the major technical functions, but with a somewhat clunky or non-intuitive interface. OpenOffice 1.x.
Step 3: More user friendly and natural interface, but performance is not yet up to par.
Step 4: Performance optimization.
Each step is the natural evolution from the prior state. The initial state is an idea, which leads to a functional demo. The functional demo gets poked at by a few outsiders who say, "This might be a good idea, but it doesn't support features X, Y, and Z, and it crashes all the time." That feedback leads to the incorporation of new features and advances in stability. Then a larger group of outsiders uses it and says, "Yeah, this is getting good - it does everything I need it to, but the interface is a little goofy, so I'm sticking with my current solution for now." That feedback leads to user interface improvements. Those improvements lead to a much larger group using the software, and more people using the software full-time, those people say, "Wow, this is really well done, but look at how much (CPU|RAM|disk space|bandwidth) it uses." Which should, inevitably, lead to performance optimization.
That sounds like the natural sequence to me. In fact, that whole process - release, listen, refactor, wait till the end to performance optimize - has always been a big part of successful projects and is now becoming a big part of standardized software development models like those that come under the Agile umbrella. It would be worse if there had been a lot of unnecessary performance optimization that had lead to an unmaintainable code base.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I agree, with some qualifications.
Excel is a pretty solid program. What I don't like is how some people use it. Because Excel has some database-like features built in, it leads people to attempt to use it as if it were (and in place of) a real desktop database, leading to really ugly, bloated spreadsheets and finicky cross-sheet references that break at the drop of a hat and are a major pain to track down.
I work regularly with a gigantic spreadsheet like this which is used as an internal financial planning and forecasting tool. The reason I've heard for originally using Excel is that they wanted something that would make graphs. Beginning from that premise, they piled all the data into a spreadsheet, and added sheet after sheet of subtotals forms, reports by week and month, reports by person, etc. It's truly hideous. In order to add a new person, you have to (by hand) modify each of the sheets, update the subtotal lines, etc., while in a real database program this would be relatively simple, if it even required any additional effort at all.
Excel is a great spreadsheet program for doing spreadsheets. What it's NOT is a desktop database, and far too many people are laboring under the impression that it is.
If Microsoft would quit loading all the query and PivotTable type features into Excel and concentrate on being a better spreadsheet than it is already, I wouldn't have any complaints. Even so, I suppose I grudgingly have to say that Excel is probably the least-offensive MS program out there.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."