Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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
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!
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.
I am a OpenOffice/StarOffice user, they are fine for me and the saved money are "invested" in something else I like.
But, you may absolutely "need" the extra features, just do your research and check if the features you want are not available elsewhere.
Unless, of course, one of your requirements is that it must be a product from Microsoft...
On a side note, I am wondering if you are a Microsoft evangelist :-)
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
KOffice is looking pretty impressive aswell lately.
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?
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.
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.
In what world has the .NET platform been quietly dropped? From what I can tell, MS is still pushing it like crazy.
You can't win, Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What are you talking about, "failures?" When was .net dropped? That MS didn't build Windows out of it is not a failure and it would be stupid to do so. People regularly, begrudgingly even, talk about nice and easy it is to develop applications in .net. MSN? Who do you think is running their Windows Live ambitions? That they aren't trying to get people to use walled-garden online services that are losing popularity isn't a failure. They are adapting to the market. And Windows on mobiles? Excuse me, but hasn't the share of WM on smartphones steadily increased year after year? Hell, there is even a Palm (rumored?) running Windows mobile. If that isn't raging success, I don't know what is.
Yes, that Windows and now Office were delayed is crap and heads should roll (not so much for Office) but the things you are calling failures are everything but.
Knowledge is valuable. Ignorance is dangerous. Censorship is unacceptable. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10
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
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.
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.)
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.
Meanwhile, back in the Capitalist world..
Nothing costs nothing
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.
A thousand pardons sir, I had no idea you took your MS Office versioning so seriously and personally.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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).
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?
Not rumored, there's a Treo (PalmOne) that runs Windows PocketPC. This points out perfectly the terrible state of PalmOS 5 (PalmSource, or whatever the name of that company that bought them is). Why nobody is using PalmOS 6, I don't know; I imagine there is some good reason though.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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
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).
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.
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
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?".
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?