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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?"
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
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.
Dumb question perhaps, but how many people do you think need/want/use that level of functionality?
I'm a contractor. I've worked in literally dozens of teams in about a dozen companies. I have never, never, never seen anyone bother with this level of interactivity for documentation. We generally have breakout discussions with a nominated individual to take notes write up afterwards. Sometimes this is a techy, sometimes not. It's just not needed.
For the remaining 99.5% of users, this is not an issue. It's not even a consideration.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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
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 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.
Apple doesn't have an office suite. They have a pretty decent presentation program and something for making newsletters and brochures. I've only played around with it (rarely do ANY office type work, and then it usually involves graphs) and it seemed only suitable for light usage. Office for Mac is buggy in my experience and less complete than Office for Windows, on the other hand I think Office for Windows is great (I like the OS integration there).
This sounds very very good.
... can use styles in Word, decent formulas in Excel, make a (technically) good PowerPoint, use Outlook to the max.
Some comments.
Will ordinary secretaries be using this? No
Will PHB-es be using this? No
Will CxO's be able to comprehend this and use this - in theory yes, in practice, no.
The only ones that will be using this are technical project managers and programmers. Thus about 0,1 % of the Office users and non-typical Office users that use non-typical Office functionality.
Think again when upgrading.
My wife is teaching MS Office to schoolkids. They get MS Office for 4 years. And they touch only 40% of what is in Office 97 - and not even deeply.
So, Office will have raving reviews. See what Microsoft can do - ow, amazing technology. But will we all use it? Come on... Who'se ma, uncle, PHB, CxO,
I know you all can. But they are using their 10% - and they will keep on using their 10% no matter what Microsoft puts in...
Mark
Dumb question perhaps, but how many people do you think need/want/use that level of functionality?
We really ought to automate these OO discussions. But, in the meantime...
The short answer is "not most of the people who read /., who are not the intended market for high end office applications". If you want to type a college paper, bash out some technical doc and be able to open files other people send you, OO is fine. I used it to write a 20k word dissertation the other month and I really can't complain.
But lots of corporations use various Office integration solutions, and OO just doesn't do that. Sharepoint is bundled with a lot of MS small office packages, and offers some quite useful functionality for building Intranets with no programming. (It's hideous under the bonnet, but the idea is not to look under the bonnet.) I've tried, say, changing the templates with emacs instead of FrontPage 2003, but when you scramble the page to the point where Sharepoint stops working, the recovery files live inside Frontpage 2003. The hooks to save shared documents with version tracking are inside Word and Excel. And so on. This technology is potentially attractive to any company that doesn't think everyone sharing everyone else's C drives and putting files wherever they feel like is a really neat idea.
And, TBH, I'm not aware of any OSS that lets you throw together an intranet with shared documents, task lists, announcements and other dynamic elements as easily as Sharepoint.
Virtually serving coffee
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
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.
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.
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