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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.
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.