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MS Thinks OOo is 10 Years Behind
greengrass writes "In a recent interview with IT Wire, general manager of business strategy for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft, Alan Yates expressed the opinion that Open Office is at the same level that MS office was around 10 years ago. Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop, isolated user. After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
Here I am, still using Office 97 because it does everything I need. Perhaps next year I'll be able to upgrade to OO.o. :)
Yeah, right about the time of Office 97 is where I thought to myself "Hmm... how much more could I ever use in an office suite?". Since then, MS hasn't been able to introduce a single feature into Office that hasn't made me wonder why I should care. Mind you, I really never used Office 97, since Office 6 was pretty much good enough for me. Now, it's all OOo, since it's easier to find binary installers for OOo than my old Office 6 floppies.
A man who can't pronouce "nuclear arsenal" shouldn't have one -sig ends here.
Well,
... if you want the best, you wouldn't use powerpoint anyway. But for alot of people, powerpoint is good enough. Trouble is, OO is getting good enough too
If you want a word processor, then you wouldn't need care alot about the last 9 years of development (Office 97 had a pretty good WP).
If you do presentations, then Office is a few years behind Keynote, at least as far as slick graphics goes (and what is presentation software for if not to look slick?)
Its about getting the base function good enough
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I would tend to disagree. I would rather use a less aesthetically appealing interface if the program behind it is more stable and useable. Much like when I use Linux I go straight to the plain and simple command line interface if the task is truly important (I do this in Windows also, provided the fucntion I desire is accessable from the command line). Microsoft has shown in the past that integration of more of their applications (such as the email client mentioned in MS Office) has best served to introduce new security holes into applications that normally would not be affected (due to shared paths and resources). Open Office makes for a smaller "target" in this respect, and as posted previously by others, it offers all the functionality most users need in that style of application. Oh, and let us not forget that while Open Office does have a helper as part of the UI, it isn't that obnoxious paper clip. Perhaps if Microsoft would have invested the money they spent on designing that "pretty little interface" into initial code development there wouldn't be as many patches released for MS Office.
Randimal: AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG
Article is already /.'ed, but I'm not sure I grasp the problem with OO.o being behind Microsoft Office.
Here in the UK, MS has been running ads with people wearing dinosaur heads making comments like:
"I'm either here for the 11:00 meeting on the 12th or the 12:00 meeting on the 11th"
- Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?
The thing I don't understand is that all the "problems" the ads show haven't actually existed since around Office '97. A simple PDA with Outlook integration (which has existed for... oooh, some time now) would solve the problem above, for instance. The only reason I've heard anyone in business give for upgrading for years is "we're receiving a lot of email attachments in the new format".
I would argue that, this being the case, OpenOffice doesn't need to get "on a par with Office $NEXTVERSION". It just needs Office '97 equivalence and good import/export filters.
This is really just a duplicate of comments posted so far, so feel free to mod it as such, but I can't help thinking if someone said this to me the snarky response is:
"Say, haven't you been having trouble convincing people to upgrade ever sicne Office 97? Does that mean OO is just one year away from being a software package everyone will feel comfortable with and have no need of new features, right about the time you totally change the interface for the newest Office and require offices to retrain workers?"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It doesn't matter! Cause I only use 10% of the fundamental features of every office suite.
Brutal, honest, truth. I'm not fond of OpenOffice.org
It's ok. It's not as great as people say it is. Organizations that have the money for MS Office and want it, honestly, have a bit better product.
I do most of my writing in LaTeX if it requires any formatting, and coding in gedit. I use Kile, though it's buggy as it gets, just for the completion feature.
If I need a presentation, I use PowerPoint. I find the OOo presentation software to be a bit clunky. It'll open a PowerPoint presentation, but it doesn't look very good on the other side (this is stock Gentoo Linux... perhaps there are other bells and whistles).
OOo seems to run slow and with a lot of overhead. The interface is a little clunky too.
Now, I don't do much in MS office, but if I'm not using LaTeX, and have a Windows box with it installed handy, I'll usually use MS Office prior to using OOo. Usually, I'll use KWord if I need to open or write a doc. Honestly, the KDE presentation tool seems better than the OOo one, but PowerPoint still smokes those two.
ThunderBird smokes Outlook, honestly... if it's compatible with your installation (I'm thinking university Kerberos auth still doesn't work). The guy is right about the lack of email integration, but, honestly, all that ever did was irritate me. It facilitates group writing... lovely.
Most of my writing with multiple authors is handled via CVS, in LaTeX.
For spreadsheets I use gnumeric.
Plots and charts, gnuplot, which I think everyone on the planet uses.
Did I miss some crucial thing that OOo does? It's a nice product and all, but, the truth is, it doesn't match the hype. Firefox probably made a big ripple for open source apps under windows, but Firefox is an awesome browser. Firefox offers a real improvement over IE.
My Linux solution barely involves OOo. I think that I uninstalled it it a while ago so I wouldn't have to wait for Gentoo to emerge the update. I don't really think that the hype is justified, and I used StarOffice back in the day and everything. There's just, simply put, better stuff available.
MS Office is ahead of OOo in alot of feilds. Modular design is one that comes to mind. But they fail to answer this:
While MS Office is '10 years' ahead of OOo, why are you afraid to compete with it head on through Open Formats? I'm betting MS has the resources to still stay ahead for a long time in the future and pave new ways of thinking.
The real answer I guess is that they find this to big a risk for their likings...
Multi-lingual support is better, especially Chinese and such using Unicode fonts. That may well not be a critical feature for many readers here though.
....of Desktop users does need more than an single user text processor? Three percent? Perhaps one?
MS WORD is like MS Outlook, it might have very useful features, but 95 % of the users do not need them. They buy a PC and Word is included, whether they need it or not. And office solutions developed for huge enterprises are probably not the best choice for private desktops.
Access seems to be a real selling point for Office to a lot of people. To a certain amount I understand why; it's incredibly easy to set up a "database-application" within hours.
From a practical, DBA perspective Access is the devil though. It's absolutely horrid as a database engine and I'd bet you that umpteen companies curse Access on a daily basis, since that "clever hack" somebody implemented 10 years ago is unreliable, crashes, is virtually impossible to maintain, corrupts the data and for some unfortunate reason it's "business critical" nowadays.
Another horror is the Access front end when it's abused by end users to connect to a real database. The queries submitted are just dreadful and I've seen numerous times ghost locks on pages, or even tables by such applications, which only could be released by rebooting the database server and that's pretty bad news in a production environment.
While MS SQL Server is a pretty fine product, Access really, really sucks shit from a database perspective.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Well, some 15 years ago my phone number was 5933. By now it would be 0146268933 (after morphing through 215933, 265933, 6268933 and needing to notify everyone of the change.) 4 years ago I dumped the landline and got a cellphone, amongst all advantages (bills including) it has a shorter number.
If the progress goes in wrong direction, time to change the baseline of the "progress" and move on to alternatives.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
It does everything you want, makes Wonderful(TM) papers, all absolutely without any effort. I'm using it for almost everything those days.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
This has always worried me. Microsoft have at one time or another made a lot of fuss about how 'some unknown person could slip a backdoor into Linux'
If some programmers at Microsoft with too much free time can slip an entire fucking _flight simulator_ into a business product and get it shipped past management, how safe does that make you feel about Microsoft products in general?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
OpenOffice.org is suffering precisely because it is attempting to play catch-up to Microsoft Office. The dogged insistence upon keeping the UI similar basically means duplicating one-for-one the same mistakes that Microsoft has already made.
....." Part of the problem is the ruler. In WordPerfect, you indicated tab stops and margins by typing a line of punctuation marks which represented the margins and left-, right- and fractional point-aligned tabs. The "ruler" metaphor was retained in the graphical word processors, but the ruler was moved to the top of the editing window. This avoids cluttering up the text with unprintables {basically good} but now each paragraph has its own tab settings {as it always had, since a ruler could be inserted anywhere} and it is not obvious how to apply tab and margin changes globally to a document {bad}. {I would suggest that a paragraph's own, private ruler should appear in the blank line which precedes the paragraph, with the global ruler above the editing window. But IANAUID.} In the WP days, it was relatively easy to deal with this once you had grasped the concept of the ruler: just block-select the "old" ruler {which behaved exactly as text in the "editing" ways, if not in the "printing" ways} and then block-insert it below the paragraph with the private ruler.
MS Office is a great lumbering beast. It has too many features that ordinary users -- the ones who do document layout using rows of spaces, type out tables of contents by hand and use spreadsheets as a substitute for databases -- are almost never going to use. It needs these features, because it is closed-source software sold for profit and every new version must have something that was absent from previous versions. {Software doesn't naturally wear out like cars or VCRs or steam irons, so alternative and possibly underhand methods are required to force users to replace old software with new versions.} The proliferation of "wizards" should already be sounding an alarm bell: if a task needs a "wizard" at all, then maybe, just maybe, some part of the user interface was badly designed in the first place. But the MS Office user interface is sacrosanct: if MS change it even slightly, then the alternatives will automatically become less unattractive {learning a new UI, vs learning a new UI and paying for the experience to boot}.
If OOo is ever to do anything other than play second fiddle, then it needs to innovate -- do something Microsoft Office cannot do. If the devs are canny, they will introduce a really useful new feature which would be very difficult to implement in Microsoft Office. {Note, I am not above a little "exercise of reasonable force" in the course of achieving this}.
I also think that my abovementioned pet peeves such as spaces-based layout are holding people back in ways they will never realise -- precisely because one of the things they are holding themselves back from, is understanding what they could be achieving. There needs to be a way to tell users "there is a better way to do this" -- and to figure out what they were trying to do, and do it properly. Preferably not by Clippit saying "It looks like you are trying to
It should also be borne in mind that OOo is no longer the only alternative to MS Office. KOffice is maturing rapidly, and has the advantage of having been Free Software from Day One -- there is no legacy closed-source codebase lurking in there to spoil things. As a part of the popular KDE desktop environment, it can easily find its way into many distributions. I have high hopes and great expectations for KOffice. Gnumeric and Abiword should not be discounted either -- they really fly on modern hardware, and Abiword can still hold its own on a Pentium 133.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org have their advantages and disadvantages. From an educational standpoint, however, OpenOffice.org has one key advantage that makes up for the lack of some features: its licensing.
As a former educator, OpenOffice org was (and still is) a valuable learning tool. Because of its licensing, I have been able to distribute copies of the software to students who can't afford to buy a copy of Microsoft Office, even at Microsoft's educational pricing. This especially made a big difference to those who needed to complete assignments at home, but lived too far from school to return to the computer lab or whose jobs required them to work irregular hours. Because I was teaching the concepts of creating documents rather than learning a specific application by rote memory, the students were able to take what I taught them with OpenOffice.org and apply it to Microsoft Office or any other application they choose to use at home or at work.
Those interested in reviewing the lessons I developed for use with OpenOffice.org 2.0 in an educational environment can download a free evaluation copy of my new book "A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2.0" at http://www.conciseconceptsinc.com/