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!"

Comments

Perhaps it is...

[julesh]

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. :)

Re:Perhaps it is...

[Bert64]

Perhaps openoffice should gain a configuration tool, like the "make menuconfig" of linux and the ability to load features as modules...

That way, you could build a minimalist version and add the features you want, while leaving off what you don't.. It would be very usefull for secure environments too, where support for such things as macros will need to be removed.

Eh

[NitsujTPU]

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.

They are probably right...

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:10 years behind? Sounds about right

[1u3hr]

MS hasn't been able to introduce a single feature into Office that hasn't made me wonder why I should care.

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.

Access

[CaptainZapp]

There's one area where Office still wins - Base sucks compared to Access. I also don't do much powerpoint, so can't comment there.

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.

Re:Not sure I understand them

[bentcd]

We get the same ad campaign in Norway, and I find the message conveyed amusing to say the least. What Microsoft is actually telling us is "if you're still using our software, you're such a dinosaur". Added to the implicit insult directed at their existing customer base, I don't quite see what good they think this campaign might be doing them :-)

Re:No flight simulator either

[zcat_NZ]

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?

OpenOffice.org

[ajs318]

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.

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 ....." 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.

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.