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Office Delayed, Too
turnitover writes "And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?"
I like to recieve my Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition early to warm me in the cold months, but releasing an unneeded Office update is welcome as late as microsoft would dare.
Well, at least since I'm using Open Source in my Office no work is delayed there anymore. :-)
SCNR
Couldn't say admit once and for all that they're thinking MS-Windows and MS-Office are now mature products and that they won't release new versions anymore ? :)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Microsoft Office was at it's best with Office 97. OpenOffice might not have all the features of Microsoft Office but I don't care because I'll never use them. Moreover, nobody is going to take away the download for OpenOffice 2 and decide we need a shiny new version. I also resent being called a dinosaur by Microsoft for using one of their old products that I found to be reliable.
I looked, I made the switch and there is no going back.
Simon.
Always underpromise. It's not important to overdeliver, but it's very important to underpromise. And hedge. Always hedge.
Always tell the truth. It doesn't have to be the whole truth, but it is important that what you say be 100% verifiable.
LOL. Is that a joke? Even the current version of Office is a lot more powerful than OpenOffice. No, Office 2007 being delayed is NOT going to make anyone turn to openoffice.org. It's a nice product for the average user, but its not a serious competitor by any stretch of the imagination.
lol.
Not much, they'll still have a reputation for eventually shipping, as they always have done
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets?
They'll get over it
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
No; they don't trust any software they've not seen advertised (whereas if it's advertised, it shows the company is making lots of money, so it's products must be good)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Really?
I didn't know it took so much work to update the logo. =o
You mean it will ship in the year its for? Why can't people just do this. I've got some magazines on subscription and I get the March issue in Janurary. Way to confuse people. Can't we just realease the March edition on the 1st of March? What about newspapers? They come out on the same day and no-one gets confused by that
SolarVPS - Quality Windows and Linux Virtual Servers
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Unfortunately, at our office we don't really look at that right now.
BUT... We barely even look at Office 2003 either. The only useful part about that one is that I think Outlook 2003 has vastly improved design against worms and spam.
I mean... Come on. What features do people need from Office 2007!?
The new UI requiring massive relearning and costs for our middle aged crowd, means it has to have almost revolutionary new features as well, beyond the UI, for an upgrade to be worth the effort.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Of course it will be out in 2007 !! its office 2007 not office 2006!! :p
Don't worry it's AJAX Office to the rescue, oh wait, no it isn't. I don't see why this would make people turn to Open Office either, unless Open Office is promising and delivering the features in the now delayed MS Office 2007, which to the best of my knowledge it isn't. In my personal experiance OOo is still playing catch-up, and essential features, like the spell checker still need some fine tuning (it never seems to suggest the word I meant). OOo's real hope of beating Office of course may be by improving and making more intuitive the basic features, used 99% of the time, beyond those that are part of MS Office, like an adaptive spell checker. Unfortunately this doesn't seem like OOo's goal either, they just seem to be trying to catch up with MS Office in the number of features offered, which they may never be able to do in full, even with these delays.
Philosophy.
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Will this diabolical delay put a damper on daily productivity!? Will competitors claim the keys to the corporate giant's coffin!? Has Microsoft finally met its match?!
Stay tuuuuuned and find out!
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software?
Nothing. This happens all the time, and nobody really cares.
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets?
It means they have to buy other software and/or hardware this year to keep the budgets high (you know, if you don't use it all this year, you'll get less next year). This is cool for the guys who get new toys, but of no real consequence.
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
This will do nothing for openoffice.org, unfortunately. The only exception may be people who want to buy the new office, and doesn't want to buy an old office just to upgrade next year. They may try openoffice in the meantime, but don't count on it. They'll probably just pirate the old one instead.
-C
-- If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
Not until there is reported improvement in load times. For God's sake, how can one be expected to wait for 47 seconds for OpenOffice.orgs's writer to load a 1.7Mb document with 23 pages and 6 images? It's insane! I will not say what the other application takes but I'm sure every slashdotter knows what I am talking about.
In an earlier post (someone to provide the link?) someone stated that Vista was NOT build on .Net technology...
I am wondering whether Office 2007 will be...
;-0
Roel
P.S. Will Microsoft rename the product Office 2008 so that they can still ship early
Is a slip in the product release going to convert users to OpenOffice? No. Most users have already got the level of functionality they need from Office already. They won't need the extra features until they have it in their hands, and only then may they suddenly decide that their business practice can't survive without it.
The comment has already been made that OpenOffice is a decade behind MS Office. And that's fine because most users don't need the level of functionality of MS Office, they just need something that works. But those businesses who do use the additional level of functionality aren't going to miss what they don't have yet.
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets?
Since when do companies have a burning urge to upgrade to software that isn't even out yet when their current software meets all their needs? The short answer is that the budgets will be spent on other things and the IT departments will be happy they won't have to spend money and time upgrading.
Stop announcing when you plan on releasing software. Follow the Carmack Model and tell everyone Office/Windows/Etc will be done when its done. I'd rather have working software instead of a beta that got rushed out in time for xmas.
But I am sure you enjoy that fact that Microsoft Office loads quite faster than Openoffice.org. This feature, I am sure, you appreciate. Right?
What I find interesting is that Microsoft had so many large failures recently and yet they seem to manage to get away with them without too much negative press. Remember how the whole .NET platform was going to revolutionize the way computers worked? Quitely dropped. Their MSN ambitions, Windows on mobiles - both have performed well below expectations. And yet they rarely receive bad press in the mainstream. I guess as long as their two cash cows, Windows and Office, continue to deliver amazing profits, people will see them as successful, and repeated failures will be ignored.
It's not likely that open office will be a success until they have a native os x port.
Its well known that while Mac users do not have as large a market share as linux users, we set the direction of the industry.
I'm afraid that open office just doesn't cut it. I'd much prefer to give Microsoft my money, then put up with the slow & ugly oo.org.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
No.
long answer;
Not a chance.
that you meant office 2003, as that is the newest version, outdating office xp.
-schwal "Hanging is too good for punners, they should be drawn and quoted"
But I am sure you enjoy that fact that Microsoft Office loads quite faster than Openoffice.org. This feature, I am sure, you appreciate. Right?
This is a big advantage. IMHO this is what OOo should be focusing on more. Anyhow, the point shouldn't be which one is faster, but the features/price factor. OOo wins big on this one and alot of people could just switch over without missing any features at all. The problem I think with OOo adoption is more that it is competing with Office pirated edition more than it is competing with legal copies of Office. If Office comes preloaded, sadly, little will take the time to switch over...
This week's MS criticism levels have been high, thanks to Microsoft breaking deadlines again and yet another IE hole.
But Vista was no easy job:
1. The core programming API is transitioning to WinFX (from Win32 which has stayed so for like 13 years! If you count Win16 its even staler). This is a _huge_ win for Windows developers.
2. 50% of the time spent on Vista is for testing.
3. New Driver model, lots of kernel changes. Device support is a much bigger problem in the Windows world, there are just too many.
4. 3D Accelerated GUIs (OS X does this, but the scale is different as you will see.)
Well, to those not exposed to Windows this is like having Java has the standard way to write software in Linux.
To keep this post still on topic, Office 2007 will make little sense without Vista. Atleast to look gorgeous. If Vista is late, so will Office be.
What is this Office stuff everyone's always on about, anyway? Is that like some pre-school version of LaTeX and Emacs?
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
no, it won't. Stop trolling over commercial products because you don't make money.
Actually - I tried OOo2.0 for Windows (that I got with Ubuntu CDs BTW) and I _was_ amazed how fast it is in both loading and processing. I'd say that it is faster than MSOffice2k3 (again - both in loading and processing times). But still I do have a problem with OO - after a while all my menus are gone (empty). I guess I will figure out how to turn them back on but as for recommending it to people around - this provokes a second thought for a while.
But it _is_ speedy anyway - amazing what Java (right?) app can achieve.
Sure, this may well be true but look at the background processes Office loads on startup - its no wonder Word etc loads quicker. Surely you appreciate the fact that there are less annoying/bloaty/redundant features (did someone say Clippy?) in OO?
Sure, OO isn't perfect but for something free its bloody good. For the majority of tasks people would use MsOffice for OO is a perfect substitute. With every release OO just gets better....
KOffice is looking pretty impressive aswell lately.
Where are OpenOffice's collaboration features which rival the office system?
Now, this entire setup requires eating the dogfood, drinking the poison, going the full hog, whatever, BUT, with office 12 + sharepoint V3 + LCS:
1. I am assigned a new project. I open our intranet, go to the projects site, and instantly create a new site with about 4 clicks.
2. I add my fellow team members to said site.
3. I write a design document and add it to a document library.
4. "Jim" loads up said document and looks at it. He has a question. There, IN OFFICE, is a sidebar showing that I'm online, and that I wrote the document. He clicks on me to chat in realtime about the document.
4a. Jim raises some good points, which I can't answer, so with 2 clicks he opens a discussion group about said document.
4b. Through 10 versions (tracked), and many discussions, the team comes to a final decision. We close the document discussion site and merge our changes back into the base document on the project site.
5. We start into the project. Frank now has to go onsite, with no internet access for 3 weeks. He takes his notes document off of sharepoint and saves it locally (this is what requires V3).
5a. Frank comes back 3 weeks later, plugs in, and is asked if he wants to resync with the project site. He does, and we see his updates.
6. 9 months later, the project finishes. Admins click it into read-only mode, so that we have our documents, chats, discussions, lists, etc, but cannot change them.
7. 6 months later the site is backed up and purged off of live storage.
Throughout this experience we can collaborate on documents through LCS + sharepoint + office12, take things offline, click-create project sites, etc.
Tell me an opensource solution which matches this as seamlessly.
I'm all for openoffice, and run linux at home, but office12 is something special. Is it worth the price? Possibly not. Are the entire front + back office system's features matched ANYWHERE? No.
Yes, you can run *nuke + jabber + openoffice + openxcange +..... but do they work together? Can I set up a *nuke site which links into jabber and openexchange and openoffice, so that I can see inside a document whether the creator and other relevant people are online, and have versioned discussions with them?
I'm sure all the company which have MS Software Insurance (which includes all upgrades for 3 years - and which is now mandatory for volume licences AFAIK) will be happy to have that news. ...
No included major update for them
Last time I had a MS rep on phone the major argument for their licence price increase was that insurance - for now we could never use it for what we bought.
Now been delayed to Jan 2007. I reckon this is a tactical slip. I think
:-)
:-)
they're really telling the OEM's there's NO BLOODY WAY it'll be ready in time
for the 2006 Chrissy buying season. I reckon they already think internally
it'll need to slip more than that.
My prediction :
MS Vista will NEVER ship. I think that Microsoft's plan to increase customer
lock-in by "fully integrating" all their products (OS + apps) has resulted in
a total project size that is greater than the state of the art can support.
We all know that once a project gets to be a certain size that the
communication and thrashing can end up with productivity actually going
backwards. I suspect this has now happened to Vista.
Everyone else is going components to simplify development, whereas for lock-in
purposes MS are trying to go the other way. I reckon that if Bill let go of
his megolomaniacal urge to own the whole world they COULD finish it; they
have enough good people, but if you tell even good people to go bale out the
ocean with a sieve you're gonna fail.
Every MS OS has slipped by more than the last one. I reckon they've now
slipped off the "real" axis of the graph and are headed for infinity. Expect
further slips in Vista and associated apps.
In a sense I'm already right - elements of Vista have been falling off the
ship for the past few years (for example, the database file system). There's
nothing like being able to put a bet on something that's already happened
So there it is in writing. MS say Jan 2007. I say they'll NEVER ship it.
Let's see who comes out closer
It'll mean that they won't happen until it's out, and money will be saved that can be spent somewhere else.
Businesses don't upgrade just so they can use the latest and greatest; my company (a large multi-national) is still perfectly happy with its Office 2000 site licence. It sees no reason to upgrade, and why would it? The licence is still valid, and the products do what is required of them. I'm sure we'll upgrade eventually, but we wouldn't go to OpenOffice (or a previous version of MS Office) just because Office 2007 was a bit late; we'd simply wait.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Nope. From the OpenOffice.org about page: The source is written in C++
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
... and this is a bad thing?
Surely releasing a product with a year in it's title in that year is a good thing? What's the point in releasing Office 2007 in 2006?
Must be an MS thing I guess.
Common sense is not so common
This will give ajaxWrite more time to implement "The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word".
I remember eagerly awaiting the release of OpenOffice 2.0, only to have it delayed a number of months (and waiting in limbo since there wasn't any clear launch date after the delay). When it finally did come out, I found it a bit too bloated (takes FOREVER to load on my system) and thus I just stuck with the original. Seems Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org have more in common than first meets the eye :-)
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
If you read the article it clearly says that Office 2007 is being RMT'ed in 2006, but won't be in the stores until January. It's not a delay in schedule, they're just now announcing the delivery dates. And a ship date was never officially mentioned before anyway.
Not all the people still happily using Office 97, which still does everything that many people need.
Excel is the linchpin of MS-Office. Corporate finance analysts around the world are deeply wedded to it with workbook templates that mesh with core financial planning, forecasting, and reporting systems. Why? Because predicting the future requires flexible models and what-ifs that mesh with detailed historical results.
.... ?
So when will adapter add-ins be available for Open Office from PeopleSoft, Hyperion, JDEdwards, Oracle financial apps,
Open office stuff may work fine for casual emailers and memo writers, but it is the bean counting that runs the show.
Back_2_tech
I despise the Office Suite. I really don't think it's set up to manage large sets of software. But, I also don't think OpenOffice.org is ready for this environment either. I've been using it recently since I don't want to shovel money at Microsoft, and it really doesn't work quite as well as office does, and I actually have more trouble with it. It pains me to say this, truely, since I really want it to be better.
In any case, given the choice, I'd rather not use either of them. I want something better to come along. Pretty soon, I'll have a Mac in my hands, and I'm going to give Apple's office suite a look. How does this compare?
Most well run companies base there IT planning around business cases,
and business cases generally fall into three catagories:-
1. Do this and the company will make more money.
2. Do this and the company will spend less money.
3. Do this because you have to.
Upgrading to something like Office 2007 is definately a type "3"
business case and most companies wont upgrade until either support
is withdrawn or the current version wont work on the latest hardware
or OS.
My current client a well run, well known mega corp is still runnig
a version of "Office 2000" which is "Copyright 1983-1999" according
to the about box.
I have never heard anyone gripe about running such an old version
and the company is doing as well as ever.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
I like OpenOffice, I used version 1 extensively for my final year project write-up at university even though I actually won Office XP from MS in a launch competition. But I tried to use Impress 2 recently and it is quite good for some things, but made my life so hard in so many things that should have been easy that I switched my presentation over to PowerPoint 2003, which I found to be rather good, even if it wouldn't open files saved as .ppt in OO.org. Gotta love employee purchase schemes. Genunine Office 2003 direct from MS for less than £20 delivered, w00t!!1!
So why don't Apple help out in the porting effort? Linux companies like Novell help gnomify the program to behave better on the gnome desktop. OS X is a small proprietary technology and it's understandable it's hard to keep a port without funding.
I think this Web 2.0 application right here, which was recently bought by Google, will probably be the best of what the competition has for a solution to your problem. Once again, we see that Microsoft no longer has a monopoly on such ideas. This is why I hope Google continues to improve Writely, and why I hope they'll eventually buy this web app, too. Mark my words, Google is gearing up for a direct assault on Microsoft's "cash cow!" And if Google works on ODF support in Writely, I am willing to wager it will be far more open than Microsoft Office, too. These kinds of developments are PRECISELY why Microsoft wanted to kill Netscape, why they now want to f___ing kill Google, and why they have been so desperately trying to make their new Windows Live portal *THE* platform of the web. In order to maintain their dominance with Windows, they know that they must find some way to make the Internet dependent on their proprietary technologies and platforms, so that they can continue to dominate and lock people in. Time will tell if Google will be able to beat them or not... But mark my words, Microsoft is DOWN, but *NOT* out. They are still a force to be reckoned with, and last time I checked, they still control more than 90% of the desktop OS market, and more than 70% of the web browser market. DO NOT DISCOUNT MICROSOFT.
No
Um, Apple has not chosen anything of the sort.
This sig has been deprecated.
That said, what are the chances of OpenOffice.Org actually improving radically? As much as I admire the people who put effort into improving it, the project gives me the impression of something like Netscape 4, which was like the engine of Netscape 3 with lots of band-aid features stuck over its face that made it act slower, inconsistent with itself, unstable, and generally buggy. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like there's so much legacy code and design in OpenOffice that it's difficult to implement important changes. In essence, and I'd be happy to be proved wrong, it seems like a big ancient application built on legacy design that's only going downhill and will inevitably be overtaken by others if it hasn't been already.
I've been put off OpenOffice for some time now because it won't (cleanly) compile as a native 64 bit application. I was looking forward to the 2.0 release because I'd been led to believe that the incompatibilities were being ironed out specifically for that release, and then it would compile as a 64 bit application, but on release that unfortunately wasn't the case. Searching further, I discovered that the OpenOffice code was apparently still so messy from the Sun days that it simply hadn't been feasible to port to a 64 bit app in any reliable way, and probably wouldn't be for a long time to come.
If OpenOffice had nice and easy-to-maintain code, I would have thought that a 64-bit build would have been as easy as a recompile -- perhaps with a couple of unforseen bug-fixes here and there. The problem is that something as basic as native 64-bit compilation is yet another thing that was never in the original design brief, and trying to patch it in later is a horrible task. I'm not an OpenOffice.Org developer, so if someone knows otherwise about this I'm keen to know.
OpenOffice is convenient to have right now because it provides an 80% replacement for a lot of what MS Office does. Many people looking to switch might be able to use it as a drop-in replacement if their requirements aren't too complex. It's still a mammoth and heavily complex system with considerably dead weight, though, and unfortunately it's not particularly bug free.
Personally, I've found it much easier to go with the more light-weight open source office apps, which aren't trying to be mammoth applications. Lately I've been using the likes of AbiWord, KWord, Gnumeric, and so on, and I've found them to be much more responsive, integrated with my system, and generally more stable than either OpenOffice or MS Office would be. (Actually I can't test MS Office on my system because it's not Windows, so I'm comparing it with MS Office on a typical Windows system.)
The lighter-weight open source apps don't do as much as OpenOffice or MS Office, but they do enough to keep me satisfied. Unfortunately this isn't an option for most people who are locked into Microsoft Office for things like specialised code and plugins and various desktop integration stuff, but then neither is OpenOffice. eg. Supporting something like OpenOffice at my current work is completely out of the question, simply because it won't integrate with our document management systems, despite ODMA (Open Document Management API) being an open API that's existed for ages and is supported by the bulk of DMS products. (MS Office doesn't cleanly support ODMA either, but it's popular enough that it gets special attention from the DMS vendors.)
Isnt this article just playing whoring on slasdot?
I mean what kinda question is that?
From a business point of view, upgrades are a really bad thing. You have to pay again for something already bought, and you have to retrain. The only time my company has ever bought an Office upgrade has been when people send us documents we can't read in the old version.
I believe Office (and windows XP for that matter) is in as 'finished' a state as it needs to be, there isn't anything major missing... or if there is its not anything most businesses would find a cost-effective buy.
In the real world, upgrades are driven by Microsoft EOL-ing the previous version, not by desire for new features, which is why Open Office won't benefit.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I think they're referring to the fact that native applications run under Apple's Quartz windowing system and not X11's (good riddence IMHO). A seperate windowing system runs alongside for your X applicatons, but it is definately NOT part of the Mac OS, and the contrast makes X11 seem so mind-bogglingly bad that people are dying for Cocoa versions of UNIX apps when the apps are already running at full speed.
Picking a release date, or even a date to gun for, is a bit of an art for a commercial software vendor. Basic tradeoffs are, of course, scope vs schedule vs quality. You can imagine that in commercial organisations with significant revenues to protect there a strong desire from the sales and marketing groups to release, early with lots of functions. Quality is often the first thing to go (not that anyone will ever *say* they want a low quality release).
:)
... ho hum, all my fault again I suppose.
Given the scale of Microsoft's operations and the unique role these two packages play in their portfolio I would say that everybody should breath a sigh of relief with every small sign that the don't want a crap release - they are spending there money to make sure that they don't waste yours (or at least any more of yours than they've already planned on pocketing
I write this after just upgrading to FC5 - which dumped my NVidia driver and caused a lost morning whilst I rebuilt the driver according to instructions sourced from an unwarrantied source on the net. Well perhaps I shouldn't compare, because Fedora isn't the stable, supported RedHat version
Meanwhile, back in the Capitalist world..
Nothing costs nothing
"Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org" I downloaded the latest openoffice and it works 90% of the time...The rest of the time either it takes yeons to open a simple word document or just simply hangs ! But the older version of openoffice works like a charm though ! Note:- I always download stable versions
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
At the rate the various free and easy to use competitors are popping up, I will say by 2007 an office suite would become as redundant as Outlook Express is for most people today.
vaporware
When it finally arrives, the faithful will take to it like flies to shit while others like myself will simply ignore it. Many big corporations will take years to warm up to it, even though Dell will soon be selling Vista and an Office 2007 license with almost every other PC that people buy from them.
it is delayed - because everything is so tied into the os that they can't do it any other way
Why would a company switch to OpenOffice.org just because Office 2007 is late? N offence to OOo (I use it at home) but it isn't in the same league as Office 2007. OOo is nice when you want to save money for just a standard Office productivity package however with but when you want/need the features of Office 2007 you simply can't pick OOo. You just have to wait.
I have seen very few companies switch to OOo, just like I have seen very few companies switch to Office 2003. Why? Office 97/2000 does what they need so they stick with it.
Office 2007 being delayed won't help OOo in any way at all.
Just for fun, I tried to run some company macros in OO. They didn't work at all. I hadn't expected them to of course, but I was just curious. Does anyone know if any macros work between MS and Open offices?
This is a big advantage. IMHO this is what OOo should be focusing on more. Anyhow, the point shouldn't be which one is faster, but the features/price factor. OOo wins big on this one and alot of people could just switch over without missing any features at all.
Maybe what's needed is something which works like Firefox and Thunderbird. Where all the bits typically needed by a tiny minority are extensions.
The problem I think with OOo adoption is more that it is competing with Office pirated edition more than it is competing with legal copies of Office. If Office comes preloaded, sadly, little will take the time to switch over...
Unless they need to read OOo/ODF files.
No, they don't. The key factor here isn't MS price/OOo price, which is infinite, but rather (productivity gains - TCO for MSO) compared to the same for OOo.
In this race, MSO wins hands down. And 100% of that is attributed to Excel. The rest may be replaceable, but Excel is the rock solid foundation that almost all companies I have ever come across run on. ("Rock solid" in the meaning "fundamental to business", not in the meaning "developed spreadsheets are correct, stable, documented and bug free", obviously.)
Excel, as it happens, is the best software ever written for the mass market. Don't belive me? Well, give counterexamples. There is no other software around with a large user base that offers as much functionality and power while still being so easy to use and learn and with so few bugs. (Not zero bugs, so don't bother with silly KB references about those that are there.)
The problem I think with OOo adoption is more that it is competing with Office pirated edition more than it is competing with legal copies of Office.
In a corporate environment in the western world? Nope. Are you suggesting that companies don't actually pay MS? Then what is the fuss all about?
In these large corporations they have millions of existing spreadsheets, documents and presentations. I recently installed Open Office 2 on SUSE and found (a) word documents don't always look quite right, even with all the truetype fonts available (b) powerpoint presentations often just won't load at all, OO complains of "wrong version". This was just a small selection of my own documents all created with MS Office 97 which I bought for a small sum at a computer fair years ago. I've kept Office 97 and bought a license for Crossover, mainly to avoid having to help my wife with any compatibility issues.
Apple should port GTK and part of the gnome libraries to OS X, with native looks and feel. It's so totaly 90's to have to program every software title for every imaginable platform when there are mature open source libraries that would be nice if they got some tweaking. Kind of what Apple did with carbon.
Coocoa may be nice but it is a vendor lock-in, which for many of us is important to avoid if possible.
Well known to whom? Really, I think this is one of those myths that is created by a group of people to feel special and then since they all believe it (in order to feel special) and only know others who do, they believe it to actually be true. It's not, get over yourself.
believe me most componies here in lithuania already have both MS Office and OpenOffice installed on most desktops. The only reason to keep MS Office on them is it is still widely used while sending odt (ope office docs) files between organizations has not become a prefered format yet
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
No
What about NeoOffice?
It's nice to have choice, but two groups working on the same thing seems kind of wasteful.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
Will Office 2007 also be divorced from Vista?
Now, I have a Mac friend who claims that this all just ripped off from Apple's Pages word processor. Since Vista is a shameless OS X clone right down to the colors, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. However, Pages currently fails the same test as MS Office: They want me to pay money for it. Anything is too expensive when I can do everything I have to do for free on NeoOffice (OpenOffice.org with increasing amounts of Aqua). If you haven't looked into OpenOffice.org, this delay might be what yo have been waiting for to save that money you have been giving Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) all those years.
Just like SQL Server, it looks like they are going to drag out the release long enough to defeat the poor fools who bought "software assurance". As of today, MS is still claiming that "Office 12" is going to be released in 2006. At least that's what they say here P.T. Barnum was right, "A fool and his money are soon parted."
No.
What you have to remember is that MS isn't really a software company. It is a marketing company that just happens to produces software.
As long as they can spend money on marketing and advertising to convince PHBs and Joe Sixpack they they are the only game in town they will keep on cleaning up.
Could just be marketing to tie in with Vista. With a new OS at the same time MS marketing gets to do "New shiny! And a new shiny Office version" rather than "New OS - with last year's Office that you might already have". Perhaps they'd just prefer to go big-bang with the rationale that selling lots of two things together might be better than lots of single things individually.
If you install Office, it adds some preloading components to your windows startup so that when you start an office application there is already some of it cached.
-- The Heineken Uncertainty Principle: You can never be sure how many bears you had last night.
I don't entirely disagree with you-- Excel is probably the best written part of the Office suite, and it is used so widely because it does provide very useful, well-implemented functionality, but I can still think of counterexamples:
Lotus Improv
Quantrix
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
why does any one want to upgrade to openoffice if ms office is comming out in 2007 , ms office 2000 i smuch better then openoffice. they dont need to downgrade to openoffice.
So what happens to people who bought Software Assurance? The last Office was 2003. So if the next office is not released until 2007 doesn't this mean that the people who have been paying 1/3 cost of an upgrade per year for the last 3 years expecting to get the next upgrade within the next 3 years have now been screwed?
There is a silver lining to the delays on their Office and OS Suites.
The delay gives the whole world a few extra months to save up their money before Microsoft modifiy's their licensing plans again.
I like-a do-the cha-cha.
We're @ MSO 2002 and that's really only for new corporate builds - we still install MSO 2000 to folks who want it. There is absolutely no reason from a corporate perspective to worry about upgrading office and if MSO 2007 doesn't come in until 2008 and then of course gets the serious bug fixes 2Q2009 then who really cares? Our MSO 2000 and 2002 installations will be upgraded to 2003.
In other news today, Microsoft announced an all-cash buyout of game developer 3D Realms. Said a Microsoft spokesperson of the transaction, "We believe the acquisition of 3D Realms will be a great boost for our company. Their expertise in development cycle ambiguity meshes well with our new 'embrace and extend' philosophy concerning release dates."
Industry insiders also note that the name of 3D Realms' most-awaited project, Duke Nukem Forever, already matches the Microsoft naming scheme, which consists of the name of the product followed by the year it is to be released.
Well known to all of us who are following Apple's lead in using Intel processors instead of silly old...
:-)
Uh, hang on a minute...
Damn, if Apple are going to use Intel maybe I'd better look for something else.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
This won't make anyone want to switch to OpenOffice or anything else. My company still has plenty of copies of Office 2000 floating around. I don't think there are a lot of people out there who absolutely need Office 2007 to get their work done. Is there some revolutionary feature, besides maybe improved security in this next release that will make everyone run out and buy it? Or is it just another shiny product to put on the store shelf?
To quote the MS person: "There is no slip in schedule, just a change in delivery for the benefit of consumers and retailers." Now how someone can say that with a straight face is beyond me.
Hobby Robotics
I think the correct answer is, "No."
Disclaimer: I use OO and like it, but I just don't see it going to the mainstream. I don't have any logic, that's just my gut feeling.
Its well known that while Mac users do not have as large a market share as linux users, we set the direction of the industry.
Yupp, as an examlpe Apple was the first company to fully use the x86 cpu.
How convenient that you used "large user base" in your implicit definition of "best". I'll have to call fanboy on that. There are, I'm sure, many examples of excellent, useful, easy to learn, full-featured, near bug-free software out in the wild. LaTeX comes to mind.
Imendio are currently in charge of a GTK2 port for OSX, and, as far as i know, Cocoa isn't a total vendor lock in because you can compile against GNUstep on *nix, though probably not without quite a bit of tweaking.
1) It is my understanding that the Mac BU is an officially separate entity. Does that really mean that there is no chance that Microsoft would "borrow" people on the Mac team to help push Vista or Office for Windows 2007 out the door?
2) Recently, the Windows and Mac releases of Office have been staggered so that they are released on alternating years (or 1 - 1.5 years). The Mac BU is quoted as saying that they "typically deliver new versions every two to three years" but that "[m]oving to universal binaries will naturally impact our schedule". (Isn't that wonderfully non-committal.) The last version effectively shipped in June of 2004.
Alternating releases between platforms has its advantages for MS: you don't have to hold up one release to coincide with the other and you have more time to ensure that the new version for one platform is compatible with the latest version for the other platform. Does the delay on the Windows front mean that we are likely to see the 2 versions come out more concurrently? Might MS delay the Mac version as the result of the delay in the Windows version?
So why don't Apple help out in the porting effort? Linux companies like Novell help gnomify the program to behave better on the gnome desktop. OS X is a small proprietary technology and it's understandable it's hard to keep a port without funding.
One reason might be Open Office's ties to Sun which AFAIK controls the project. This fact has scared a lot of companies out of either making a as great a contribution as they could have or even scared them out of making a contribution at all. Another reason might be Apple's desite not to piss of Microsoft whose Office suite is available for the Mac and is an important part of making the Mac an option alot of people who use Macs in corporate environments in a forest of Windows boxes. My own Mac would be pretty close to useless for use at work without Microsoft Office which is the only fully featured, native and mature Office Suite available for the Mac and it isn't (at least in my humble opinion) a bad product. True, there are alternatives but none of them really measures up in every way. The one that comes closest is probably Open Office which has been ported to the Mac but it isn't 100% native it runs on X11 which only makes it an option as a last resort. I would feel alot safer as a corporate Mac user if there was an 100% OS.X native Open Office port but that has been vaporware for years and is regarded as the Mac-users equivalent of Duke Nukem forever. Another thing I have been wondering about is what will happen when Microsoft decides to scrap MS Office for OS.X? What would Apple replace it with? It would have to have top notch Microsoft inter-operability or the usability factor of the Macintosh/OS.X package will take a considerable hit.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Wow, my first thought was that "The Office" tv show was gonna be delayed. I only watch that and Battlestar Galactica whose new season starts in October. Imagine my concern.
It's a catch 22. Microsoft has been blasted in the past for releasing software "too early" in people's opinions. Now, they want to make sure it's completely ready before releasing, and people are complaining that it's "too late".
What is it people want? I always thought that people were asking for robust applications that are fully ready for prime time. I actually commend Microsoft for taking this approach as opposed to their old "get it out there and we'll fixe it later" approach.
davecb5620@gmail.com
I don't think so. Those who are happy with Office 2003 will continue being happy with it. It's such a relief to not have to upgrade to yet another version of office--at least for a while.
Look at how you are narrowing down the market MS is going after to make a point. Lets start backwards: In western societies, sure you will not see pirated editions in businesses. Go a bit South East and you'll see a whole new ball game. That being said, sure Excel and Access is alot more flexible and mature than OOo's offerings. But, you have to weigh in how much of these features are actually used when you decide to choose MS.
You also need to remember that you are getting yourself in an endless upgrade path. It's like renting a house instead of buying it. You would rent, but only if buying was not a viable solution.
What annoys me most about the windows user's way of thought is that they almost never make a mature sound decision based on their needs. To go a bit further, it is like Gimp vs Photoshop. Sure, your digital photography pro will fork the money over for his tool, but any amature or average user will NEVER need more than what GIMP is offering. Yet they still pirate the best. It's sad, but the only thing that comes to mind when I think of it is lemmings running at the sea shouting "Look, Shiny!"
Um, open office is a turd. I had the misforture of using it at my last job. Yuck.
I'll have to call geek on the assertion that LaTeX is "easy to use". Might be easy to use if you're a geek, but otherwise... not really.
Who makes the decisions on whether to pay more for Microsoft Office instead of Sun StarOffice (the commercial version of OOo)? And what kind of collaboration on documents do you need that a wiki and an IRC channel cannot provide?
The drop down menus on top are gone, instead clicking one item in the menu bar switches the toolbar to the items of the former drop down menu.
Where's the text? Or am I supposed to be able to read the icons? How does Microsoft plan to justify what could be mystery meat navigation?
Could it be at all possible they've delayed this to avoid releasing major software right smack in the middle of the scheduled PS3 launch? The timing of this might suggest so, and imho it's a prudent move given the media blitz the PS3 launch will no doubt be generating at that time.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
I too would prefer working software late to broken software early anyday. But why can't they do both? Heaps of other companies manage it.
No, the problem, as multiple other posters have said, is that MS is spreading their resources too thin. Call me cynical, but i don't expect vista or office 2007 to be any less broken or flimsy than any other microsoft product on launch. Then again, i gave up expecting much at all from microsoft a long time ago.
But you have to look at the target audience. Do you really think the kind of person who uses a tool like LaTeX has any trouble with the concept of semantic mark-up and the use of a few macros?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Will the delay make anyone look at OpenOffice? Probably not. I can't imagine anyone being so desperate to upgrade Office that they'll switch to OO instead [1]
In fact, I haven't sen any compelling new features in the past few versions of Office, the only reason people upgrade is to keep up with the Joneses.
1: I mean, there are valid reasons for moving to OO, but MS delaying Office 2007 isn't one of them.
Customers don't care if the release is delayed. Upgrades aren't for customers, upgrades are for vendors.
Don't laugh...
Windows 98 was originally Windows 97 (and I think I still have a beta image around somewhere) but after the delays they changed the name. We just _may_ see Office 2008 instead of 2007.
While I'd agree with the general sentiment that Excel is the strongest of the MS Office applications, I don't think it can take 100% credit for MSO winning the race here. We had some discussion about this in another thread the other day, where I cited some serious usability concerns in OOo Writer as a major disadvantage against Word, for example.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
From the point of view of someone who has never used any kind of spreadsheet, the learning curve for LaTeX is probably the same as that for Excel. There is a nice tutorial "The Not-so-Short Guide to LaTeX" online that will have you typesetting basic documents within minutes --- including italics, bold, and section headings. More advanced features require more time to learn --- the same as with any sufficiently complex application. Basic LaTeX is no more difficult to learn than HTML.
Oracle on the Applications side - anything that is a new release is so full of bugs and unworkable they end up paying the early adopters to implement (in free consultant hours after all is said and done) - it has patchsets galore.
SAP - same thing. Patches and the like are a regular occurrence. TBH I don't know how bad their new releases are in comparison to Oracle, but I'd wager they're on about the same page.
Almost every enterprise level, and every gaming company release buggy packages.
Please name a couple that manage on-time bug-free releases. (or relatively bug free)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Open Office really isn't that great. It's a good transition piece of software that will hopefully get people away from Office's closed formats, but I can't see it being used for the long term. However, right now, it's the closest thing to office as far as support for their file formats. So it's playing a very important role. Trying to be an open source version of Microsoft's garbage.
There is a much more fundamental problem that needs to be cured before we can evolve to the lightweight likes of abiword and kword. People using their office suite for things they shouldn't. It's that simple. It is almost like the whole business world learned one piece of software and decided they would do _everything_ with it. In college I had to take an Office class. The entire book was written in Word. It was possibly the most poorly published book I've ever seen. Square peg in a round hole. There are much better tools for that sort of thing. What about when people send you a single picture as a word file. Try to do their whole payroll on a spreadsheet. Create webpages in Word. Use their email as ftp. Don't even get me started on Powerpoint...
To get back to the point... If people actually used their Office productivity suite for what it was meant for, then they wouldn't be tied so tightly to Office. But they are dumb, and their entire way of using computers are based on a house of cards. And they will be stuck with Office. Hopefully they will find a way out with Open Office and evolve to Abiword and Kword.
If the "business" people I've dealt with are any indication, then that trend isn't going away. Their attitude is "but we've always done it this way". Just because you've always done it that way doesn't make it the right way...
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I think now I understand why you predicted 2001-2005 was going to be the "Year Of The Linux Desktop". You are all facking idiots.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The whole thing is rather silly given that probably 99.9% of people who use Office right now could probably go on using the version they currently have until the end of time and never miss Office Random-Year-of-the-Future. I mean, Office right now does everything the average letter-writer could need and more. MS has been banging on it long enough that there are no major features it lacks. Anything they add now is gilding the lily, adding random little features nobody will ever miss for the sake of changing the name and getting more money out of consumers. Who needs 2007 anyway?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
MS will make you upgrade to this version of MSO the same way the did the last time around. One component or another of the office 'suite' (or not-so-suite) will save files in a format that the previous version of that component can't read, like they did with Visio. You won't be able to upgrade one component, or at least it will expensive and awkward enough that just a wholesale purchase of the new suite will be the only practical option. So, most businesses will just cough up the dough and rollout (or rollover as the case may be).
Yeah I know there's a free visio03 viewer app before all the ms-shills pop their furry little heads up out of the prairie-msdog-village to defend poor flagging microsoft. But, I don't recall it coming out at the same time as office 2003, nor was it announced with the new version of office. That said, I don't think ms planned on the incompatibility, it was just the usual ms-incompetance(TM).
Too bad openoffice really isn't quite up to offering a better alternative. It can't just be 'as good' or do a few things better that MSO does - it has to pull way ahead to give people a reason to break their addiction. I don't think OOo will beat MS at their own game - I think they need to find a new way to approach and streamline making documents and managing them, or something along those lines.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
is that they will slightly delay their expenditure on "upgrading". In my fantasies I imagine that the introduction of Vista and the unneeded cascading "refresh" of all associated applications (and the expense of doing so) will be recognized for the rip-off it is, and will therefore drive interest in Open Source software. But the sheep are timid. PHB's are too lacking in vision and boldness to discard the comfortable confines of old habits and forge ahead into to the unfamiliar but superior framework.
No one using anything more recent than Office 97 will look at OpenOffice.org for the same reason they won't look (too hard) at Office 2007. Exactly what will Office 2007 bring to the table except for higher system requirements? Word 97 or Office 2003 is already feature-complete and relatively stable. No one is oging to be taking up Office 07 for a long time.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I'm disappointed that I went through the entire thread and no one mentioned the real reason why Office 2007 is delayed:
They had trouble making a 3D model of clippy to match the new Vista resource hog^W^W interface.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Why is everyone suddenly so keen to get Office 2007? Are there glaring bugs in 2003 that you want fixed? Wasn't the previous prevailing wisdom that IT managers hated frequent, pointless updates?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it; Office 2003 is good software and works well, so I'd rather wait until the upgrade is really worth it.
"If he were a plant, people would roll him up and smoke him."
Is this really a big deal, Who wanted to upgrade office 2003 does just fine for me.
And maybe MS is doing the right thing and getting the program right before they ship it.
There was a very specific reason for that. That reason is that a program with a large user base will, almost by definition, have to cater for a very diverse user base, and handling a diverse user base is very difficult. Some users will be pros for whom easy access to very advanced features is all-important. Some users will be rank novices so the UI will have to be intuitive. The feature set will have to be large to cater for everyone, and a large feature set makes it difficult to navigate.
I'm quite sure there are very specific pieces of software for very specific target audineces that are great. Medical applications come to mind as an area where I bet there are some really good programs. But that is *a lot* easier than doing it for "everyone".
As for your specific LaTeX example, I only dabbled in it very little while in school 10+ years ago, so I can't say for sure, but I thought it was way out of the league for low end office workers. I have a hard time seeing my mom use it, for instance.
Thinking about this further, I think that what I'm looking for is software that passes the "mom and me" test, where both of us feel that it is a great software. "My mum" would then be your typical office worker, and "me" would be an average slashdotter.
My employer just migrated all of our systems to Office 2003. I have already seen several problems. We have lots of documentation from the past few years created in 2000. I would say I'm having problems loading up 50% of our sizeable (ones that actually use styles, links, etc) documents in 2003. Fortunately, the Open and Repair feature has been able to open them for me (and point out a rather unhelpful list of errors that I have no control over). So this migration isn't a disaster, but it hasn't been seemless either.
Furthermore, while it looks different, I haven't even noticed anything really novel about the new version.
-- "What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?" Probably not! Why would any competent office manager move to a less stable, less featured suite just because the other might/will be late? That just doesn't make sense.
I hadn't heard about Qauntrix but will look it up at home. Thanks for the tip! Seems very interesting.
I thought the date on the box was the expiration date (just like milk). Certainly all experiences I've had with Win2K, etc. have left a sour rancid taste in my mouth.
A relief? You don't *have* to upgrade....
Relief! Now they don't have to keep up with everyone else who is suddenly passing around files in a format the previous version can't read, they don't have to pay more for an upgrade to software that already does the job, they don't have to retrain staff and put up with support requests due to any problems the different interface may cause, or possible bugs that weren't forseen in the new software or even configuration changes that didn't apply to previous versions but need to be locked down. Oh, and everyone won't be slacking off at work checking out the new version of Flight Simulator in Excel!
Twinstiq, game news
Please prove me wrong on this one (cringe). I'm familiar with Office 2003, and Office XP, and Office 2000, and Office 97, and Office 95, and, hell, what was it called then - just Office? Anyway, I've *seen* OpenOffice.org. I've loaded it, toyed around with it, but not put it fully into use. From what I can tell, though, it probably does about 90% of what Office does (in terms of actual normal everyday usage, not number of features). And it's free.
/. community) that'll toot the horn of OSS and say what a grand thing it is, and how information wants to be free, and all that crap. Don't get me wrong, I'm a self-described information communist.
Now, there's some (especially within this twisted
But that doesn't win over the masses. The little detail about being free. Yeah, that's what will win over the masses.
So why aren't people switching? There's a few reasons, but I think one of the major ones at this point is the vast collection of Word templates, Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, etc. that are in existence. I'm even a culprit. I give my time to a family business, and at one time rolled up my first, last, and only Access-based application several years ago for them. The problem is that they're still using it.
So, one of these days, I'll convert it to something nicer, and they'll never buy another Office license again.
That, IMHO, is the next phase of adoption - all those people who have a vested interest in legacy stuff that has become (by accident more than design) a critical part of their infrastructure. As that stuff gets replaced, the door is open for OpenOffice.org.
To use another example, I've spent the majority of the last 8 years in various manufacturing facilities. You would not believe the number of Excel spreadsheets that are a critical part of their production process. And these aren't bank rec's - they're several megs of nasty, crudely-hacked VBA code. The story's always the same - Joe Manufacturing Engineer puts together a little spreadsheet to calculate something that makes his job easier. Then his coworker asks for a little extra feature. Then they add in another. Pretty soon, he's learning VBA the hard way with no prior programming experience. Three years later, his entire job is to maintain this beast of a spreadsheet.
Anyway, the point (if there is one) is this. OpenOffice.org is gonna make it through the next wave of adoption (which is gonna be a big wave) by being free and by the replacement of all these legacy 'pseudo-apps'. The free part's a given. What happens to all those pseudo-apps is anyone's guess, I think. They may very well get replaced by Microsoft stuff and we'll still be having this conversation two years from now when we're waiting on Office 2011 (yes, I did the math).
J
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
And you thought calling it 'Office 2007' was just to make it seem all future-like -- but according to eWEEK.com's Mary Jo Foley, turns out calling it is truth in advertising: Office 2007 won't ship until 2007. What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
I'll take a stab at this...
True, no doubt. But learning HTML well is really quite hard. As proof I give you 1 billion crappy and non-standards compliant web sites.
True. Probably 1% of the Office population will use these features- I sure won't. But since OO doesn't have it, that 1% won't switch. Add another 5-10% who won't switch because it sounds neat and they might use it in the future. Lots and lots of people buy software based on what they think they might use, not what they actually do.
Pick another feature that OO doesn't do well. Scripting, for example- even OO advocates have to admit it sucks. Scientific functions in the spreadsheet, although this may have improved since last time I had to work with it. You just lost more people. This little stuff builds up. Yeah, any given person only uses 10% of Office, but everyone uses a different 10%.
If you really want OO to compete, it's got to have 90+% of every odd feature of Office, or people just aren't going to switch. (I won't get into the slow speed, huge memory usage and general ugliness of OO.) I'm trying to switch, but it's hard even for a geek.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
These things take time. After all, Microsoft Office is evolving. They have to keep it in the jar wait until its ready...
I worked in a co. with a fairly large sharepoint installation, and the whole MS load of crap (exchange, internal messenger server, etc). Even in the 2003 release of sharepoint we had a ton of people using fairly advanced technical features.
How? it was easy. In all the rounded cornered pretty UI stuff was actually tucked a rather usable web interface. It was a PITA to admin, but our users loved it and used it. The system actually TRIES to get you to collaborate using its tools...
I'm not an MS fan - but the collaboration features are used by a lot of PHBs at that co, and a ton of the day to day "knowledge workers".
You can't ignore it unless you've seen it in action - it is an impressive suite and proves that if you own the stack from productivity app to server side storage you can do really neat stuff.
OO is broken as a serious replacement for Excel -- and its for a stupid reason. Since VisiCalc (the very first spreadsheet), the + or - key on the numeric keypad initated a formula field. This has been a bug report since 1.0, and its still not fixed. Anyone who does any serious work with spreadsheets (not as a database lite, but actual accounting / forcasting), blows OO off about 10sec after installation. It is useless to all of us financial types that have 10-key keypads in memory, vs. having to do some weird hand calistenics to hit Shift-+ (= sign).
"It might be cheaper just to buy a single version and upgrade every 2 or 3 new versions instead of having the latest one"
Yes, that's a better choice for many organizations. And there is seldom any need to upgrade everyone at once (too much red tape in my company to do that).
Alternatives to SA:
* You can buy Office via OEM licenses when you buy computers, and buy the new versions only when the machine goes obsolete.
* For years, we looked for volume discounts, only to be dissapointed with MS reluctance to give us a price break. For us, it turned out the best way to put Office on a computer was buy MS Works (with no intention of using it) and then buy an Office "upgrade" to upgrade Works. For whatever reason, MS offers the best pricing to customers who look like individual home users. So we did what individual home users do (several hundred times). Large/volume customers seldom get a deal as good as quantity 1 retail.
Well while we criticize things for being SLOW --
I don't like having to buy a new computer because of software. I don't like the fact that when my laptop was new, MSOffice still ate up all the ram I had. And I don't like the fact that virtual memory SLOWS THINGS DOWN. OpenOffice does the same, but I would rather get badly written software for free than pay for it.
I think this definitely qualifies as insightful.
I'm a technical writer and when I was looking for work two years ago, I actually turned down work from a company that wrote its 200+ page manuals in Word. Why? Because people who use Word for long documents (books) usually wind up spending about 20% of their time trying to work around problems. Word isn't a long document tool, but people who only know Word waste countless hours trying to get it to do something that it was never meant to do. (Just the words "Master Documents" make me shudder)
My parents are an example on the other end. My dad sends me Word docs with pictures in them, and my mom uses Excel to keep lists. Until my brother-in-law set up a gallery Web site, my mother-in-law also sent pictures in Office documents.
It's too bad this problem exists, but until people figure out that Office apps aren't the best tool for every application, it's not going to change.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
"What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?"
Answer:
It means nothing for office managers because they don't think Office needs an "upgrade" anyway. As far as OpenOffice - no it won't make biz look at it because biz has to consider training and college and high school grads are currently trained on MSFT products. If those kids knew how the software worked the way computer classes were taught 15 to 20 years ago then which software package wouldn't matter, they could work with any of them but today they are taught to be drones who only know to move the little mousy and click this then that to perform x.
On the FireFox/IE debate one of the big arguments against MS is that they do not innovate and add new features until the open source community has beat them to it.
On the Office/OpenOffice side of the debate a big argument against MS is that they innovate and add new features and the open source community says it's irrelevant because few people USE the innovative and new features.
At least that is my simplistic "monkey on the outside throwing peanuts" view of things...
As to the actual article, I will defer to the "delay until you can release something solid" approach. If the product really is in so little need of advancement in features as some of you guys say it is then this would be the best approach anyways if they want to combat the "Microsoft releases junk software" image they get painted with, wouldn't it?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Since the vast majority of the features are exactly the same as the version of office they currently have, I can't imagine they'll bother looking at OpenOffice just because it got delayed a year. If you have Office these days, you've already drunk the KoolAid. There's no going back unless something major happens, and a mere delay in the next version is not a major thing. And if there's some spiffy new feature the person needs in 12, they need that feature and it's not likely to be replicated in OpenOffice.
Some issue that causes a move to Linux on the desktop is the ONLY reason I can see for any corporate customer to throw their current Office licenses down the toilet in favor of OpenOffice. On OSX, OpenOffice is not a viable option for anyone other than a fairly tech-savvy individual. NeoOffice/J isn't an option (believe me, I've tried).
Half the people in here doesn't care about this and the other half just hitted the reply button by reflex...
yeah! Let's argue on the Internet...
You're welcome...but note you asked for "better software written for the mass market", and that much I can point to [1]. Quantrix isn't widely deployed compared with Office, either, but anything written for both Windows and MacOS X seems to pass the goalposts originally set.
:-)
If you start adding terms like "must make it commercially" (according to whose definitions?) or "must interoperate with M$ Office tools", well, OK, but it's possible to shift the goalposts too far to be making an unbiased point....
[1]: Note that you're welcome to hold the opinion that Excel 2003 is better than Improv, or that Quantrix is good at some things but lacks some other feature that the vast Office suite integration provides, but I feel that both are at least credible as contenders for being better than Excel in many areas.
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
On my iBook G4 with 768 MB, Neooffice takes somewhere around 45 seconds to launch. Word is ready to type in about 12. 'Nuff said.
Tell me an opensource solution which matches this as seamlessly.
Subversion (with TortoiseSVN client) + ANY forum software.
There ya go.
Why is it that people are OBSESSED with their office apps having EVERYTHING instead of using small apps that do ONE THING VERY WELL?
What processes? I'll kill them and time that.
Anyway, I have OOo's equivalent of whatever you're talking about running at boot (soffice), and even on second load Word STILL loads faster.
A rough time (this is me counting, but I do count pretty consistently)
-Word, 3 seconds
-OOo, first load, with soffice in background, 9 seconds
-OOo, second load, soffice not running, 5 sec
Anyone who would want such a huge spreadsheet needs help. Typically, the problem is improper organization or lack of more appropriate tool. Better tools would be databases or batch processing of data streams. Help them early because the problem only gets worse with "advances" like this.
I've seen worse abuse of spreadsheets. The most God awful sheet I ever saw had tons of macros. They each got data from different sources, one still used a modem to call a local high school's weather station, and the results of each had to be "checked" by hand. That spreadsheet was part of the process used to set the local price of electricity. It had grown, like a cancer, for years. This is what happens without proper IT support. Far from being enabled and helped, the victim was lead down a path of inappropriate tools to a giant cluster.
Had the company used free software, they might not have had to fire their programmers. Someone convinced them that "computer programming was not a core business." That's true, but neither is accounting and the "off the shelf" solution they were sold instead will cost them many times more than their own staff. For all their money they could have had things that work right.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software?
/.ers, this is Microsoft we're talking about. Nothing it's ever done in the past has really hurt it: cheating it's customers, perjury during a federal trial, ignoring the outcome of the trial, price-fixing, using it's de facto monopoly to destroy competition, mounting spin compaigns to cover up its poor design and even poor implementation, etc., etc..
Simply nothing. Come on,
Even if Bill Gates were to kill a female Supreme Court judge and have sex with her corpse on the White House lawn on nationwide TV, there would be enough crooked businessmen, media suckups and boughtoff politicians and judges who so admire Bill that they would overlook this, and continue to buy and use MS products.
Get real: indignation in the FOSS, or for that matter, the business IT community, mean absolutely nothing to the likes of Bill and Monkey Boy.
(Mod me +10: bitter)
I don't think anyone argues that OO isn't a bad Office suite. It's got 90% of the features that 90% of people probablly use today. For the remain 10%, I'd suggest OO is sorely lacking; especially in the area of collaboration.
While, not many people collaborate much currently in thier office suites, that doesn't mean that won't change of course. How many people have spent any time looking into how SharePoint can increase team-working abilities for thier company? The modern office is becoming more disconnected, and increasing relying on technology to keep everyone in sync and operating as a whole unit.
Anyway, my main point is that as good as OO is; it doesn't have anywhere near the features and investment MSO has. In my experience, companies tend to disregard costs of investing in systems that will allow thier staff to work better and allow the company to grow better. Apart from the price, OO has no other real selling points over Microsoft Office.
throw new NoSignatureException();
If anything, managers and sys-admins will look on the delay with relief - one less thing to worry about so they can catch up on other work.
"Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?"
Is that some kind of joke?
Anyone who seriously cares about the difference between Office 2007 and whatever the current suite is will fall into two camps:
1: People to whom the advanced features matter. OO.o can't touch MS Office when it comes to advanced features.
2: People who just have to have the latest and greatest.
Neither of them is going to give two shits about some obscure "open-source-whatever-the-hell-that-is" office suite.
So why don't Apple help out in the porting effort? ...
Maybe because Apple is not much interested in an OpenOffice port for the Macs. See it would be quite easy for Apple to help creating a native port with wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/), even allowing to get a single source for all ports while being native on any port. I think there are other more political reasons why Apple doesn't delve into OpenOffice. Just think if Apple really would try, Microsoft definitely would get very upset and would immediately stop supporting MSOffice for the Mac. And that's something Apple definitely won't risk under no circumstances.
So why doesn't the OpepSource community itself create a wxWidgets port? Maybe because there are very few OpenSource developers for the Mac and the few who are prefer to waste their time in the fruitless NeoOffice. It's obvious that the Mac would gain most of a wxWidgets port so the initiative should come from their side. But I'm sure if such an effort is started it will attract people from any platform. The gain might be not as obvious but there are already a few developers who see the advantages.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
Whether it's improving fast enough for your tastes, I can't answer, but:
1. It's seamlessly interoperable with various eras' MS office documents, moreso that MS Office at times.
2. It's free. Didn't anyone mention that?
3. Yes, OO is slavishly copying MS Office's features. That's a good thing! I know those features are actually there. I have no guarantees with other alternative apps like abiword or whatever, and I have to hunt through hundreds of websites to figure out what else I can use. The time already invested in OO.org and MS Office has got to be enough. No more learning new names, websites, methods, UIs. Nope. Let's everyone just stick with and improve OO.org. If you like, negotiate to fold Gnumeric into Calc, I don't care. These other programs have zero chance of succeeding in the marketplace.
4. I also can't answer whether OO.org needs a re-write. But it's good enough that my wife and my parents can use it (at least as much as they can use MS Office). And no one owns 64bit chips yet, so who cares? I'm talking worldwide, of course. Anyone who currently has a 64 bit chip already has an old 32 bit chip computer and/or the money to get one.
See? OO.org and the alternatives are for people who can't/won't pay. As a free gift, it's silly to whine about it's pedigree.
Surely you appreciate the fact that there are less annoying/bloaty/redundant features (did someone say Clippy?) in OO?
Hmm, let's see if I have Clippy installed. Oh look, I don't. I wonder how I did that.
Oh yeah, by doing a custom install of Office and not installing it.
Sure, OO isn't perfect but for something free its bloody good. For the majority of tasks people would use MsOffice for OO is a perfect substitute.
I can probably agree with that. I don't use OOo *too* often because I have run into too many things where I do notice a difference so can't comment fully. However, for power users there are still several things I can name that Word does that OOo either doesn't do at all or does substantially worse, and only one advantage of OOo, which is its price. (You could view it being open source or using odf and stuff like that as a second; I'm not tied to the free software philosophy (especially where it's distinct from open source) so I don't see these as huge advantages.
What does this mean?
It means that the current upgrade subscriptions can lapse before the new Office comes out, and MS gets to reprice everything to make more money.
You didn't think they were going to deliver on time when they can screw their customers out of more money, did you?
Honestly, I can't see it happening until OO.o gets a lot faster. I've tried all the speed optimization techniques for it, and yet still, on an AMD 64 3000 with 1GB of RAM (600 free at the time), OO.o was still slugging along like a quadrapalegic through mud compared to things like Abiword or even MS Office. I love open source and OO.o has a lot of potential, but I just don't see it going mainstream at its current pace.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
People reject OpenOffice and reject even Mac, because they don't know any different. They have been "programmed" to use Microsoft Windows, therefore, until they are told different, they will continue to use Microsoft Windows. We can sit around all we want and say stuff like "when people get tired of (malware|viruses|spyware|whateverelse)" they will switch to (Linux|Mac). It's just not true. People will switch when they are told to. Nothing else. Until Companies FORCE people to switch, there will be no switching.
You know, I really didnt know that Office 2007 was going to be released at all (this is how much i pay attention to updated microsoft products) Wouldnt it be interesting to ponder if these delays are a FREE marketing ploy? Think about it, What better way than to tell the media that the largest Software company has delayed its latest greatest creation is to get it published into every newspaper, blog, and reach every single technical geek out there? Isn't it remotely possible that they arent even ready to release it and intentionally causing this disturbance for anticipation reasons? The video game market has been doing this for quite sometime by postponing release dates be it either due to other popular titles of the same genre being released and they dont want to compete, or creating more hype of anticipation for the game, but there is a threashold as to how long you can wait before something comes out to replace or exceed the hype. Think about the impact, traffic, free advertising that posting this to slashdot has already created, and its the perfect market for free advertising to geeks everywhere, its enough to make a company postpone their product releases on purpose, i know i would. There is a thin line between "enormous effective mass advertising through delays" and "im sick of hearing about it, and when it does come out i want nothing to do with it" or how about the "I've already got something better, why would i need it?".
What about Pages? I use Pages for everything, then export my final document to Word format for all those "Commoners" that use Word out there.
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets? Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
The will stick with Office regardless. MS Office is a system, CowboyNeal. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Everyone just needs to use ThinkFree.com. Either buy it or use the free online version.
A rename to Office 2008.
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software?
-This is nothing new in software development. Very rarely does something come out exactly when first predicted. Are we suggesting a different standard for a company based on bias?
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets?
-Nothing out of the ordinary here. You have some companies that buy the latest as soon as it comes out, but most do some research to see how it will tie in with current apps before purchase. Besides, that gives companies who do make plugins even longer to verify they will work properly. A bonus and not a negative.
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
-I fail to see how Office 2007 not coming out until 2007 will make a corporation consider OpenOffice, thus the non sequitur remark in the subject. What really drives Office is Excel and Powerpoint to a lesser degree. Does OpenOffice support Hyperion plugins? Last I checked, no. This is what will keep OpenOffice from gaining more ground in the mid to large corporations. If it can gain various plugin support maybe. Office got large and in charge because of an OS it was attached to. Also, Visual Basic is easier to program in versus C or C++. If you can spend a quarter of the time and make the same amount or more money because you have a larger base; well, what are most people going to pick?
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
Regards, Johan Louwers.
Seriously, why is this news?
I just got out of a job that turned thorougly repulsive on me -- imagine trying to do what you love and being cluelessly mis-micromanaged into the dirt instead. I was a lead architect, and I quit in thorough disgust.
I feel quite vindicated with the savaging the product's been getting in the press, too. (Well, okay, it's only starting to get savaged, but many happy tomorrows ...). Maybe they'll actually start ... *gasp* ... firing people who can't do their jobs!
I have a friend at Microsoft, and she has it much better than I did. Her manager flat-out told her that if she couldn't get it done in a 40 hour week, let them know and they'll start cutting stuff. Beats the everliving crap out of "hey, we decided you should go from A to F to Q to N to L to Y to C to F (again!) to H to B!! give us your opinion so we can totally ignore it (again!!!) and do what we decided anyway! Good luck taking breaks -- our roving hallway monitors will classify you as a slacker."
Delayed a year? ... features cut? ... where do I sign? It beats the hell out of (insert mystery game company here). Lucky bastards.
But does Pages use Open Document format ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
No. Though Microsoft needs to make their sales in 2006 in order to fall under the expected budget of many companies who saw it coming...
SO they'll start pre-selling M$ Office before it ships. So you can give them money, and get nothing... for a while... and then maybe still get very little
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Apple should port GTK and part of the gnome libraries to OS X, with native looks and feel.
Yeah, Apple really needs that inferior GUI library.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software?
Nothing. Nobody with deep pockets cares. Just more hype built up for when it eventually does ship.
What will this mean for office managers who have to plan upgrades and budgets?
Woo-hoo! That extra money in the budget this year has to be spent before the end of the year anyway! New Laptops for me! No really, it means nothing. No competent office manager was planning to roll this out right after it shipped.
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
Sure, people are always looking, and maybe a few more will, but a quick look by any real-world test group of people already used to and using Office 2000 or above is going to point out serious reasons against converting.
My company is just now transitioning to Office 2003 from Office 2000. Few large companies are ready for the new look and feel of Office 2007 because the average user is going to need either some training, some time to get up to speed with the new interface, or more likely both.
Lotus Improv never made it commercially,
Oh, yes it did. MS has had to make damn sure they didn't break it with later Windows releases, because a lot of Fortune 500 CFOs still use Improv every day.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
will anyone look at openoffice...No!
I know it's a pig, that's not my point. The point is two groups of people are answering the exact same set of questions and it would make sense to better utilize resources.
Then things like memory management might get improved.
$30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
...and damned if you don't. Sure, I know we at /. tend to love our Microsoft bashing, but really, arn't we sometimes blinded by our dislike for M$? I am sure we all remember the fiasco of Windows 95. What was the problem? It was released too soon. And we sure had a hay day about that. "They should test their software before going into production" or some such thing as that, which is very true.
But now what is happening? When Microsoft actually DOES want their software to have as little bugs in it as possible, we get all in arms about not being able to release software! Come on guys, we can't have our cake and eat it too.
And no jokes on my analogy *points in your general direction*.
It's always funny for me to see how the techies look at things like "features" in products. As if features are what 99.9999% of the average office worker cares about in their software.
To the average office worker, a delay in Office 2007 is a blessing - it means that we can go a few more months without our IT guy coming in to take over our computers for an hour to install a new, upgraded piece of software we don't know how to use (because it doesn't look and work EXACTLY like the last version we've spent years learning) and don't want on our computers. It doesn't matter if it's an upgrade to Office, or Open Office - if it's a "work" program, and it's not the one that we already use, right now, we don't want it! (Now Weather Bug, IM programs, Flash games, etc... that's different. The more of those the better!)
We can argue about stability/features/speed of various versions of Office, but unless our IT department forced us to, most of us would rather keep using Office 97 or 2000 or whatever because it's what we first learned on, and we just can't see any need to learn anything else. We've learned to compensate for it's shortcomings, and we've learned to make it work for us. THAT'S what we want!
Not arguing here, just curious about what is out there. Also, my reading of the article may be wrong. And the article itself may be wrong. It says "People were so used to the way spreadsheets worked that no one actually used Improv" which surely is too strong a statement.
And its notions of data connectivity (and PivotTables) were something Microsoft pretty much introduced to the market.
Legend has it that Lotus Improv for NeXTSTEP was the cat's meow, circa 1990.
it might mean that they are finally growing a conscience and are not making their users (buyers) their defacto QA and testing department.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
Wow, two completely false MS bashing Slashdot posts in one day? You guys are getting good!
Office is not delayed.
applies to a great many open source projects. KDE?
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
Why? People don't just upgrade because they think its time to upgrade. People upgrade when a new version comes out that has more features. I just don't see someone going from Office 2003 to OpenOffice just because Office 2004 didn't come out soon enough. They might only if OOo get some crucial features, missing from O2k3.
But nobody in the "real world" (ie outside of Geekshire) uses Open Document format, so who cares?
Why don't the GTK developers make an output-to-Quartz to go alongside their output-to-X11? No help from Apple required.
Oh nevermind, someone already started it: http://gtk-quartz.sourceforge.net/
He mentioned that the reason Excel developed in the direction it did was that they made usability studies, so they knew how their users were actually using their product.
I find this incredibly interesting, becuase it highlights what MS has done right in the last 10-12 years: a very ambitious effort on improving usability. While their products before then were generally bad and often atrocious, since the release of Win'95, there have been incredible imrovements. (Again: in usability. Not so much in security, obviously...)
Basically, good usability isn't hard (but unfortunately expensive). All you need is a good GUI platform, excellent documentation, training and rules for the platform, extensive user tests and the humility to believe that the users are representative and not complete morons.
Anyone who has ever stuck a new user in front of a "great new revolutionary" piece of software and recorded the user interaction on video will be flabbergasted at the incredible rate with shich the user makes "errors", and the surprisning trouble they have finding their way and completing even simple tasks. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do this in the early nineties, and I'm still today grateful for the lesson.
As for the rest, the GUI platform and the documentation was a weak rip-off off MacOS (6?), which in turn was stolen from... We all know that story. Many companies (but not all, and certainly not small ones) had the money to spend on usability testing, but few opted to do so. Oracle actively told developers that they could do whatever they wanted, as long as they *didn't* follow MS guidelines... My point is that since then, MS has executed tremendously well, and execution is what counts.
I sometimes wish for more creativity from software developers. Every once in a while I get it. Unfortunately, 95 times out of a hundred, the result is just plain unusable. It's like concept cars. They often feature great and innovative ideas, but you *really* want to drive a car that has been thoroughly tested...
"Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?""
Nope. Why would it? Does OpenOffice have features that are lacking in Office 2003 but present in Office 2007? I used to think that there were no stupid questions, only stupid people. You, madam, have proven me wrong.
pants after investing/betting their future on MS IPTV software. They've bought into Microsofts marketing hype so badly that they're using MS OS software in the setup/DVR box, Microsoft software as the middleware and transport, all they way to the backend server OS, databases, etc.
All the while, others already have IPTV implemented and deployed on other platforms, and they have done so for a few years. I don't think the management at SBC/ATT want to consider the idea of being 3+ years late and with limited functionality when the cable companies and other telecom companies are already deploying the triple-play( voice, internet, video ) to their customers.
Hearing that the Microsoft game console developers are helping with the OS has got to have them concerned too. Is there an internal battle over which application is going to get the highest priority in the kernel? It's the sound system. No, it's the video engine. No, it's the networking. No, it's the virus scanner. No, it's the firewall. No, it's the Software Updater. etc, etc, etc.
Then again, Microsoft is not known for reliability, security or performance and yet SBC/ATT still picked them to represent their future, so they could still be just as clueless...
I quit using Microsoft Office years ago. Back in 2001 or so, I think. We were stuck using that garbage for years for our technical documentation. We're talking 300 page books and the like. One day, Microsoft Turd crashed on me eight times. Then I got sick of it, said f*ck the company policy, and downloaded and installed OpenOffice. I opened up the book I was working on, and voila, it all worked! In fact, my experience with OpenOffice was SO MUCH BETTER than using Microsoft Turd that I saved the file in OpenOffice format, installed OpenOffice on all the computers, and began using it exclusively. And guess what? The whole company uses it now, because of the initiative I took. In fact, there was only ONE complaint that I had, and everyone else agrees: Saving takes a long time. Especially on large files. But other than that, the experience is overall a very good one, and nobody around here uses Microsoft Office anymore.
Very true. In all honesty, as someone who uses Linux as a desktop OS at home but heavily uses Office at work, OpenOffice.org simply can't compare to MS Office in most categories.
As with the Excel example given, in many way OOo compatibility with MS Office is superflous at best. Yeah, a guy who barely knows how to write a formula in Excel can craft up something and it opens just fine. But 95% of the spreadsheets I develop have complex formulas (some of them custom written) and a large portion have VBscript code in them. Almost NONE of the spreadsheets I use open correctly in OOo.
It's main advantages are:
(1) It's open source. This is a philosophical thing, and most businesses just don't care.
(2) It's free. Again, this might affect some businesses, but if they've already paid for MS Office 2k3, then they're not saving anything by moving to OOo.
Heck I'm known to many at work as the guy who "always recommends those open source products" (mostly on the server side), but if asked about switching to OOo I'd sadly have to recommend against it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I used OpenOffice.org for the last 6 months, and I have to say that it is complete CRAPWARE compared to Microsoft Office. Sorry OOo guys, but you have a LOT of work to do to make it even 1/2 as good as Microsoft Office, at least the Mac port...
Since when are government offices Geekshire? You need to enter the modern world and get away from legacy MS thinking.
Stop it. This isn't true with Office 2003, and I'm not sure if it ever has been for any version of Office.
Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows uses the Win32 API and COM, so the only part of office that is "pre-cached" is called "Windows". Yes there is the "Office Toolbar" and some other extras that run at startup, but you can easily disable them (or not install them) without any applications in the suite taking longer to start.
OpenOffice on any platform has implemented wrapper API's to facilitate portability, and thus has to spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel to present a similiar interface on every platform it supports. It has to do more by itself, so it winds up taking longer to start, but runs in a lot more places.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Years ago they were unhappy with the results of their builds, so they wrote their own compiler.
You got any more info on this "compiler" of theirs?
Thanks!
Its well known that while Mac users do not have as large a market share as linux users, we set the direction of the industry.
Um, what? Mac's install base far outnumbers that of Linux on the desktop.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Go to any Verizon Wireless store. You'll see the Treo 750 in the smartphone portions of the store. Pick it up, you'll find a Windows Mobile device in your hand. I was keen on having one of them before I found this out because it wasn't 100% certain they were going to do that- and the phone was a vast improvement over the 600 and 650. I'll use a Windows Mobile device if I have to. I won't go out of my way to purchase one- I was used to PalmOS and I'm philisophically against the company that makes Windows Mobile.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Isn't anyone noticing the delay of Vista and how it effects MS Office 12?
Does MS Office 12 needs Vista to be excellent in how it looks and feels?
The tools are there, and they're easier to use than anything out there.
Except most people don't use them.
Most people use Office like it was from 1995, which is why they think it hasn't changed past 1995.
I don't get all this bitching about Microsoft.
They announce delays of both Vista and Office. Maybe for once they are trying to get things ironed out before shipping a product. Maybe Microsoft is trying to release two products that are well developed and useful for the end user. Give em time! If you want to use something else then do so.
_buzlink_
The EU cares, some state governments in the US (forgot which) apparently care too, and it seems that some asian governments are starting to care as well. Not to mention a number of corporations worldwide.
Oh, and I care too.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
As other people said, if you have spreadsheets *that* large, you're probably using the wrong tool for the job in the first place.
This is *so* often the problem with the Microsoft Office suite, in general, though. It is often one of the only applications installed on a corporate PC - so folks try to make it do everything they need done, rather than research and fight for funding for a more appropriate product.
EG. MS Access - really a database product only suitable for prototyping basic concepts, or "beginner level" stuff that's not critical if it gets damaged or lost (a database of your movie collection at home, for example?). Yet, companies try to build mission-critical multi-user sales and contact databases with it all the time, and end up with huge headaches when it gets corrupted or disappears all of a sudden. MS Outlook - Maturing into a very nice email package and scheduler/contact list, yet Exchange Server admins everywhere have to disable functionality or restrict mailbox sizes just to keep users from the tendency to use it as a "filing cabinet" for every document and picture they ever receive. And as you illustrated, MS Excel, mis-used for everything from a desktop publishing tool to a database substitute. Even MS Word gets mis-used as a graphics editor/conversion tool, in environments where people don't have a suitable graphics package installed! I'd say Powerpoint may be their only app that keeps its users pretty focused on only doing tasks it's intended for.
Not until it has basic word processor features such as word count and a 'normal', non-page layout view.
All you need is a good GUI platform, excellent documentation, training and rules for the platform, extensive user tests and the humility to believe that the users are representative and not complete morons.
Or that they are not mutually exclusive...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Are there still "a lot" of Fortune 500 CFOs still using a 13 year old program?
Yep. Improv was that good.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A dumbshit who is in way over his head and wastes time figuring out how to make an inferior tool sort of work for tasks that are way too complex both for the tool and for the user rather than learning how to use a more appropriate tool.
Will this make anyone look at OpenOffice.org?
No. Businesses won't care, because they wouldn't adopt Office 2007 until 2008 anyway.
" It's not likely that open office will be a success until they have a native os x port."
They pretty much do, NeoOffice: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/ It is not 100% OS X native yet but it does interface with OS X pretty good and has the OS X look and feel, mostly. It's not built off of OO.o v2.0 level yet but give it time.
And whats so wrong with GTK? It got ports to evey major languange and most platforms. Something we can't say about cocoa.
Really, it's a GUI library, most of the time you don't even have to program it directly if you use glade and libglade. I can't see why it's "inferior" to Apples current offerings. If Apple want OS X to be taken seriously as a UNIX it needs to have cross platfrom GUI libraries. A port of a major program should take a couple of weeks and not a couple of years.
An example of how easy it is to change such limits can be found here
From your link:
[ after changing the constant and recompiling, gnumeric hangs when scrolling ]
"This is a know problem that I am in the process of addressing.
Sorry for forgeting that it would affect you. There are some compile time
constants that need to be replaced that represent the maximum scroll size.
I've not had time to replace them with something more dynamic."
Sounds real easy, i bet any end user could come up with a fix for that in 60 seconds.
Seriously, not a one made it on time. Which isn't a bad thing, but it misses the question:
On-time, (relatively) bug free.
Blizzard has consistently been late on every product offering since Warcraft 2. I am not complaining but to claim their 3 year Dev cycle is adhered to is laughable.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I suspected an announcement for Office being delayed right when I heard Vista was being delayed. Why? Because the urgency to release this new version of Office is directly related to Vista. The last thing MS wants to do is ship Vista with an outdated version of Office. So as long as this version finishes before Vista, everything is still dandy in the eyes of Microsoft. That said, if they can have an extra year to polish up some features, why not? Releasing the new version of office near Vista will only help Vista sales since people will say, "Oohh, Vista comes with Office, might as well get Vista instead of buying both seperately!" Not to mention it makes Vista seem like it has even more "new" things about it.
There's a difference between production-halting bugs and annoyances.
New releases almost always have production halting bugs. Oracle iStore (formerly web customers) in 11.5.4 wouldn't work because the PL/SQL from the web to order entry was wrong. Just plain busted.
There's other examples that aren't as extreme, but the iStore is a shining example of a busted product that was virtually unworkable. Now, however, it's pretty darn good. What it does well it does very well. It's still arguably busted (code reuse on the advanced pricing engine was dumb, only one store administrator with unlimited permissions is also dumb) but the product can work.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
When has MS ever had a reputation as a company that can eventually ship software? Windows 95 didn't come out until August of that year. Windows 98 didn't come out until June of that year. Windows XP came out in October, 2001. Hell, Office 2003 came out in November of that year. Hardly an impressive track record. Maybe it's just me, but MS could benefit from not using years in the names of its releases.
Not only that, SBC is gonna get blown away by the cable companies.
1 HD stream, max? 25 Mbps, before HD/SD streams, and before Voip?
You must be kidding me. Comcast is getting to 16 Mbps this year, with unlimited HD/SD streams.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Everyone is saying OOorg this, OOorg that.
MS Office and OpenOffice.org aren't really competitors. OOorg only competes with MS Office in one segment of the market; individuals and small business.
OOorg, however, has a big brother for the mid-size and enterprises sectors: IBM's Workplace. And this delay in Office 2007 WILL be a significant boost to Workplace deployments.
And that's gravy for OOrg, because Workplace uses OpenDocument.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
If you're Microsoft, underpromising *is* telling the truth!
I'm a little late to this discussion, but the open source viewpoint is always, "if you can't do it with open source, you don't need to do it." (I've gotten this response about a dozen times while looking for a Microsoft Project-alike for Mac OS.)
It would be great it they said, "wow, that is neat, we should get on replicating that functionality!", but they don't, and that's not going to change any time soon.
Comment of the year
Wow, ThinkFree looks MUCH better since the last time I looked at it. The online version looks very impressive (works in Safari too). I'll definately be checking out the desktop version since I'm looking for a nice spreadsheet app for OS X. I've checked some of the alternatives, such as Mariner Calc and others, but they all had bad display issues (such as gridlines being thick sometimes and thinner other times etc). I can't deal with the non-anti-aliased text in appleworks any longer, and refuse to pay the ridiculously huge price to buy MS office when all I need is a decent spreadsheet (iWork's only missing feature for me) And I'm not a student, so I can't get the student pricing. ThinkFree looks promising.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
I think someone with a bit of inspiration for art should change the Bill Gates/Borg topic icon to have his left eye appear black/bruised....
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
It works differently than the standard Mac GUI, and on Mac that's a huge thing, since part of the appeal is that everything works together. For example, GTK uses modal dialog boxes, and on mac those are mostly replaced with the sheets that attach themselves to windows. Mac users are also accustomed to the things like drawers, a standard toolbar system that can be hidden with the big white button, Universal Access and all the other stuff you get automatically by building for Cocoa. It's a mistake to assume that just because an application is meant for expert users (the kind who would be using unix in the first place) that they don't want the OS X GUI. GTK is a great solution for minor applications where it wouldn't get ported at all without it, but for a major program it had better have the system UI, especially in a system where the UI is so much of the appeal. If the GUI didn't matter, would Photoshop still be owning the mac editor market from the GIMP?
Having been a PC network admin for nearly a decade and a half (and a VAX guy for a decade before that), I havelived through every version of Office. Based on my experience, I would say that more than 80% of users use 20% or less of the functionality of MS Office. Delaying Office won't hurt anyone.
The upgrade cost is atrocious, regardless of the level of your SA. With our Select Agreement, it would cost us around $26,000 per 100 users. As a result, I don't keep Software Assurance on Office, because that is way too much of a gamble for me to spend roughly 20K per 100 users on the *hope* that Microsoft will release a new version within the term of our SA agreement. If they don't, then I would have to spend that money again, or discontinue the SA. If I chose to continue the SA, by that time, I would have spent around 150% of the upgrade cost. I would need to *seriously* justify that to the CFO, so I don't even start spending the SA money on non-Server OS products. Since Office 2003 will be at the end of it's 3 year run BEFORE this version upgrade, I would have wasted money on an SA. No Thank You Bill.
The only reason I can see to upgrade would be a forced switch by clients and/or suppliers or some feature we absolutely could not live without. I don't see that happening anytime soon. But,if they do, I can justify spending the money to the CFO.
BTW..at home, my primary system dual-boots XP (for games) and Kubuntu (everything else) and I use Open Office 2.0. It has successfully imported anything I've ever needed from Office, so it's fine by me.
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the c
You forgot the the link: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
And whats so wrong with GTK?
If you seriously don't know, then I'm not sure I could explain it to you. It's rather like trying to explain the difference between sex and masturbation to a virgin.
If Apple want OS X to be taken seriously as a UNIX
Do you have ANY idea what business Apple is in? HINT: Sun is not their competition.
it needs to have cross platfrom GUI libraries.
They do have cross platform GUI libraries, including Qt, Swing, Tk and several others, and like all cross-platform GUI libraries, they suck.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No I think they are trying to tell people to not use a wrench as a hammer. I do desktop publishing and I know there is no real subsitute for apps like Photoshop, Indesign, Illustator, etc. I cringe everytime I see a document designed in Word.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
This is just another example of C Programmer's Disease. Oh, you don't like the arbitrary restriction of N rows? OK, have the arbitrary restriction of M rows, then.
I never understood why spreadsheets had any static limits. Well, I could see why VisiCalc or AppleWorks (the Apple II version) did, because in the 1980's we were just figuring out how to write the darned things. But in 2006? Get with the program, guys. Did you never study computer science? Are you so unimaginative that you think a C array is the best data structure for all data?
And then, of course, there are the people who ask why you'd ever have more than 64K rows in a spreadsheet. Yes, it's probably not ideal. So what? I suppose you could go buy Access or FileMaker or something (or maybe you already have Access), but that has a very different set of features, a new user interface to learn, etc. If I'm keeping a list, why should I have to redo all my work once it passes 64K rows?
Excel has all sorts of uses. If you want to convert tables of data from one format to another, or do a simple computation, it'll get the job done. I can show my little sister how to import text, make a graph of it, do some simple computation, and print out the result on the printer. But if there's more than 64K data points, she'll be SOL -- all because some moron at Microsoft used an array.
If you seriously don't know, then I'm not sure I could explain it to you. It's rather like trying to explain the difference between sex and masturbation to a virgin.
GTK is a straigt GUI library, nothing more or less there. Very easy to explain what that does. It must be Cocoa which is so mysteriosly special it's impossible to explain what it does. I don't see why Cocoa is in any way better. Of course, you fail to give any arguments.
I don't see why Cocoa is in any way better.
Sucks to be you, dude.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Its not even up to MS Office 97 standards. Its clunky and slow even on a 1.5 Ghz laptop.
Someone learn from Microsoft, for once.