IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community

Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."

Comments

Good news, and yet...

[downix]

This reminds me of an issue we have at work. At work, we run OpenOffice now, it gave us flexibility and yet fully functional... except for one guy, the Editor. He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.

I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that. Until we can woo this kind of person, however, I fear that OO, and any open standard wp for that matter, will never truely break into mainstream, because he is the Editor, in charge of a whole department.

Re:Good news, and yet...

[Lumpy]

We "wooed" employees by saying, "this is our new company policy. all computers will be changed over to this new standard effective XXXX" 95% had no problem, the 5% that did whined big time. but we had finance on our side so in the big shirts meetings when the whiners whines got to them they got shot down by the director of finance saying, "It will cost us $180,000 to switch back to MS office, replacing that employee with someone that is professional enough to understand business means change is not only cheaper but probably a good idea anyways."

It shut all the whiners up fast when they found that replacing them is far cheaper than catering to their whining.

You unfortunately have a high level whiner. so you need to have even higher than him do the smackdown.

Re:MS Word is worse.

[Macthorpe]

MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*. How did this get modded informative? That doesn't happen at all, and you can take that from someone who just installed Office 2003. There's no trace of a service or process related to Office, and physical memory usage is the same as it was before.