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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...)
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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