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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!"
bob hearn claims that microsoft office is 13 years behind clarisworks.
I'll take a word processor from 10 years ago any day over any new word processors, thank you very much.
Back when I first got to PC world in early 1990s, we had some great word processors that were good for word processing. You wrote stuff. If you wanted it printed, you carried it to that Mac person with who did those "DTP" things. People realized the word processors sucked at typesetting. They were tools you used to produce ASCII files with for someone else to process properly.
While modern word processors try to be the ultimate solutions to all electronic communications. Microsoft wants Office users to be able to do everything - and only succeeds at users being able to do some tasks at some level. Want to write a little bit? Can do. Want to typeset? We suck. Want to add tons of numbers up? Can do. Want to do something a bit more complex with numerical data? Not that easy or flexible, come to think of it.
I'm not saying OpenOffice.org is much closer to Microsoft's utopia though.
My point is, I've written some stuff all of my life. I can sit in front of my Commodore 64 and be productive, dammit, all I need is disk space. I don't care if Microsoft comes up with new features. Word processing was finished 10 years ago. All you stack on top of that is glitter.
The only reason I'm not going back to WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS are that I think OpenOffice.org's style-definition stuff is niftier, OpenDocument rocks when you think of the future, and thirdly, I don't think I can find an easy way to get a proper license with the means available. Plus WP's file manager UI is kind of crappy.
If both upped things up a notch we could be in a position by the end of the year of having not one but two enterprise level cross platform email clients, both of which would work pretty well from Open Office.
Anyway, I reckon that Microsoft have realised that Outlook is pretty superfluous for most people. Windows Vista (finally) comes with a calendar app which would be sufficient for most people. Or perhaps they haven't - Vista does seem to be lifting a lot of features from Mac OS X.
I certainly wouldn't say the UI is 10 years behind - it's probably comparable to Office XP in most areas. And of course underneath the surface some features of OO are cutting edge, such as its support for a clean open document format, cross platform capabilities, export options and more. They just have to keep working on that UI, simplifying the common tasks, working on the startup time, polishing the wizards, improving the drag / drop behaviour etc.
Well, I'm just going to fire up my MS Word and use its native PDF generation and native support for mysql backends.
oh wait....
I hate to break it to microsoft, with the glaring exception of a decent crossplatform exchange/outlook replacement, frankly I consider MS Office legacy at best.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I don't mean to come across as too obnoxious here, but as far as any word processors go, my only need for one is writing papers for school. For that, I just use notepad, and apply a basic CSS2 print layout to the file. Then I go back and make whatever minor layout adjustments I need for the paper, depending on the class. This helps me avoid dealing with all that stupid paperclip crap and whatnot that I had to put up with in Word. And I have MSOffice 03 on this box, but I never use it. There isn't a single function in Word that I (notice I said I, meaning me, not everybody else) would use that I can't already have (and have more control over) by just writing the whole thing up the same as I would a web page. I don't use a spell-checker, because I can, fro teh most prat, spel pretty good on my pwn. It doesn't take any significant amount of time longer, and there is an added convenience: If I forget to bring the printout with me (it happens a lot), most of my professors will accept a scrap of paper with a url on it, knowing I'm good for it. With that, the page is styled for both web display (in case they want to save the paper, and my current uni does employ an unusual number of ex-hippies compared to others I've attended), print, and, if any of them have bothered to try, it's also styled with an aural ss that sounds as much like me as mechanically possible (get it? a play on the idiom "as humanly possible"? a joke...), because I was bored enough to write it in.
I realize that this solution probably won't fly for everyone, or even most people, but if you really want a stripped-down, quick-and-easy, useless-menu-devoid word processing experience, and you happen to be up on web standards, there isn't much you can't do with notepad.
Paul: If you're reading this, pick your shoes up out of the hallway. I keep tripping over them. Slob.
Well, this will probably be unpopular in this crowd, but I totally agree.
/. only use office for assignments at college, and mostly because they're forced to. For folks like you, sure OO.o and O97 are more than sufficient. For the "Information Worker" that MS is targetting, they're no longer sufficient.
I work for a large (85,000 people) multinational company, and we simply couldn't get by without the integrated features of Office. I spend all day editing Word docs, Excel spreadsheets and occasionally Powerpoint, and without the tight integration I'd be in a mess.
I know how much of a mess, because 10 years ago O97 didn't have the Outlook integration, and I was forced to keep multiple copies of things on disk, and the review/formatting/comments stuff was really poor.
I suspect that 90% of the folks here on
Oh, and if you are at college writing your thesis, then I highly recommend using LaTeX instead like I did. In terms of typesetting and formatting Word doesn't even come close.
You shouldn't really have to call in a programming team every time someone needs a trivial database. People are fairly capable at defining up tables, fields, connect them together in a visual SQL editor and produce simple forms and reports.
I agree Access has its quirks but why isn't there a good tool for doing the same that does this properly? The answer isn't to have to submit an IT project every time, instead of Access hacks you get Excel hacks. What you need is an easy migration path from "click-and-point" development to an IT supported "real" DB application, for those that need it. Most of them you won't ever need to migrate, the trouble is the business critical ones you do.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you want a decent cross-platform Exchange/Outlook replacement, try porting Exim4, Fetchmail and Evolution to Windows.
Seriously. Unix already had a blinding mail system before Windows ever existed. Exim is an MTA, also known as an SMTP daemon, which is to say that it does exactly what sendmail does {look that up elsewhere}; but it has a slightly nicer config file syntax than sendmail {note, I am biased: sendmail's unwieldy configuration was what drove me to try exim in the first place}. Evolution can use the native unix mailbox system instead of a POP3 server {which is no more than an alternative interface to native unix mailboxes on a remote machine} and a local MTA {an SMTP server is just an SMTP server.} Exim can be configured to look up other people's POP3 servers and deliver direct to them, as though it were a real unix mail server on the internet; or funnel all your mail through one SMTP server as though it were Outlook Express. Fetchmail is a POP3 client which grabs your mail from some remote system and puts it in your mailbox on the local system, so it integrates tightly.
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I don't know about the rest of the Office suite, but for Outlook, my experience is exactly the opposite. When you have a small to medium business all with computers on an active directory domain, it's nice that your email client can authenticate from your logon, and the shared calendar / contacts / etc are done nicely.
I mean, I use thunderbird, and I think office is way overpriced. But, for what it is, outlook 2003 is a pretty good business product. It's relatively secure (compared to past iterations), the shared calendar is easy to use (yes there are open source alternatives, but integration and ease of use are hard to match here), and with Small Business Server, the outlook web interface has a lot of Ajax and DHTML type features which make it look almost exactly like you're at your computer. It's very well executed.
~Will
sig?
Same thing with office suites. Some historical perspective.
After a year of DisplayWrite 2 in the amber screen dark ages, virtually all my office work has been with WordPerfect. Over 10 years ago I was creating quick-and-dirty laser printed trifolds with WordPerfect containing stuff like complex, rotated clip-off forms. Virtually everything was a frame. Essentially DTP. And maintaining merges for mailing lists and formatted committee listings and the like via macros. 20 years ago, we were using delimited dbase output to WordPerfect template merges to run a summer school of over 2000 students.
To me, Word has _always_ been crap. It shows it roots as a text editor. You can say "doh" but my conception, spoiled as I was with WordPerfect, was that the program should be a swiss army knife capable of everything from DTP to a rich macro programming language.
As a clone of crap, I didn't expect much from OpenOffice.org -- and 1.0.0 would crash out fairly regularly on my linux so it fit my prejudices. But now I see my attitude was shaped by WordPerfect. Since Scribus is coming along nicely, I can use that for anything cool. Text is text. They are all good now. And Abiword usually does most of what I want if I know I'm just putting some text/columns/tables/graphics on paper.
In a sense it is karma coming back on Microsoft. I once had a guy argue with me that having fewer features was Word's strength. However, by defining word processing as something simple and distinct from DTP they lowered the bar to where open source projects could reasonably hope to compete.
My wife is an attorney, and she has to deal with documents that repeatedly go through different versions of Word: at her clients, and at the other side, and at the other side's attorneys. All these different versions of Word frequently corrupt documents so badly that Word throws up its hands and says, "I can't deal with this.". (Back and forth between '97 and 2000 or XP is particularly troublesome...)
And the fix is to run them through abiword and save as rtf!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Funny thing...
My mother is a lawyer and I convinced her to move from MSOffice to OpenOffice exactly for the same reason. Many of their documents got corrupted by different versions of Word, or by anti-virus software trying to repair macro-virii infected files.
I'd like to point out that several of her files that Word couldn't open anymore were opened flawless by OpenOffice.
She was so glad that now she refuses to use anything but OpenOffice.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex