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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?"
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.
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!
Office 2004 is the latest Mac version, MS seems to alternate between PC and Mac rather than releasing both at the same time, which results in interesting feature leapfrogging.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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?
Interesting astroturf attempt you have going there. Open Office Write 2.0 starts in about 3 seconds on my P/M 1.4Ghz laptop. MS Word is possibly a half a second faster.
Opening a 1.6MB .doc file in Word took about 2 seconds, while OOo took about 7 seconds to import the same file. Once the file had been converted to Open Document, load times were indistinguishable.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
What does this mean for Microsoft and its reputation as a company that can eventually ship software?
Not much, they'll still have a reputation for eventually shipping, as they always have done
However it will make them think over using software assurance(=subscription) or not since the value of software assurance decreases if MS does not release new versions. It might be cheaper just to buy a single version and upgrade every 2 or 3 new versions instead of having the latest one that is not in time for the current subsription.
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.)
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