Microsoft Admits OpenOffice.org Is a Contender

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Microsoft has unwittingly admitted that OpenOffice.org is a rival, by launching a three-minute video of customers explaining why they switched to Microsoft Office from OpenOffice.org. Glyn Moody writes: 'You don't compare a rival's product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don't make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor. [Microsoft] has now clearly announced that OpenOffice.org is a serious rival to Microsoft Office, and should be seriously considered by anyone using the latter.'"

Comments

LibreOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget, guys... it's called LibreOffice now!

Re:Comparing

[Pojut]

I think TFS laid it on a bit thick, but it does have a point...if a company doesn't feel that another product similar to their own is a threat, they completely ignore it. Making a video with people talking about why they switched from the competitor's product is hardly the same as ignoring it.

Oracle

[bsDaemon]

Now that OpenOffice is in the hands of a company which isn't being criminally mismanaged and which has a well-known vendetta against Microsoft, maybe this is out of valid fears for real competition. On the other hand, Microsoft has a way of waving Linux and other FLOSS projects around for misdirection whenever they need to conjure a competitor to refute claims of their monopoly. Microsoft "admitting" that OO is a competitor would be like North Korea "admitting" they have nukes in order to try and bum rice off of the west.

Re: Fixing the False Choice in Ribbon discussions

[TaoPhoenix]

It's worth skipping my mod points for this issue. I'll reply to you out of the 5 possible posts that are relevant.

I hate the Ribbon. But I banked on Rule ____ of the net that says if there's a purpose for someone's potential small project, it has better than even odds of existing.

Classic Menu for Office

http://www.addintools.com/

It's a plugin for Office that puts mostly similar menus back.

So the comparison becomes:
A: Office 2007 (or 2010?) with Old Menus
vs
LibreOffice (OpenOffice.org / branding squabbles with Oracle)

Having tried to use OpenOffice...

[mongoose(!no)]

I've tried OpenOffice* several times. I'm still running MS Office 2004 on my Mac, and I've used MS Office 2007 at work. While Outlook has some stability issues, and people really need to learn that Excel isn't a substitute for a well programmed GUI when it comes to FORTRAN frontends, Microsoft Office still beats the pants off of OpenOffice. Being cheap and trying to be legal, I decided to install Open Office rather than upgrade my copy at home. It's just not the same. Open Office feels clunky. I know they can't copy the look and feel of MS Office, but that's not an excuse for not making things intuitive. On top of that, the compatibility with MS Office documents is really bad if you try any sort of formatting. In a world where MS Office is still king, that's just not acceptable. On it's own OpenOffice is alright, but in an environment where people are switching between MS Office and OpenOffice or working with people who use MS Office, it's just not good enough. I've mostly switched to TeX for typed documents and but I still open Excel 2004 at home when I need a spread sheet program, not OpenOffice. Maybe this video mean's MS is scared of OpenOffice, but MS Office still has the momentum to keep the lead for a long time.

*I'm going to keep calling it that, as that's the name on the splash screen when I load it.

Re:Outlook

[guruevi]

These days practically any e-mail client with a large user base will do:

Evolution
Kontact
Thunderbird
Apple Mail

Of course a real sysadmin would allow people to also get their mail through an open protocol like IMAP and not only the proprietary IMAP version. Same goes for the proprietary CalDAV and LDAP.

Re:Outlook?

[91degrees]

Outlook? There are tons of email programs, and Outlook is the very worst email client I've ever used

IAWTP. Thing is, people don't care so much about that. They like outlook for its calendar and meeting functionality.

Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr

[Magada]

It's more opaque, not less. The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose. By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.

Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".

Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.

Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr

[Maxo-Texas]

I tried OO 1.04, w2.x and they sucked. I had a general goal to be operating system agnostic. So I went to Vuze, Audigy, Gimp, Firefox, etc. Word didn't work on other operating systems. But OO sucked too much and was too painful to learn.

Then, as of 3.0 AND windows 7, suddenly a bunch of my hundred page word 2003 documents wouldn't print. No reason- just hung. Various fixes were tried. WOuldn't print.

I loaded the documents into 3.0, formatting was mangled. Not a lot, but too much for me. OO was drawing little grey boxes around everything which was confusing. But then with the little grey boxes, I could see the problem. The overlapping boxes of tables and graphical elements were confusing Word 2007. I fixed a few of those over in word "blindly" since i couldn't see the problem when in word and the document printed one more page. And some things took several tries before they were really fixed- each attempt cost me a few pages plus toner.

This was painful so I decided to fully reconvert/reformat one document to OO. I had my long term OSagnostic goal and I had a lot of word 2003 documents that wouldn't print. Fixing them in word was going to be a long slow manual process.

It took about 8 hours to convert the document, I learned a lot about OO in the process, I understood the little grey boxes, formatting menu, styles and it printed wonderfully. I also found features in OO that I really liked which were MISSING in word (visual cropping! was the one I remember most. In Word, I type the cropping value, exit, see the effect, then go back in... in OO it displayed cropping in real time).

So... I decided to convert another document. It took 2 hours. The next took about an hour. convert, save, strip all formatting, TOC and Index, reapply proper heading formatting, reinsert TOC & index, add back in the sections, columns. It became a process. By the time I finished, the last two documents took me about 40 minutes each to convert.

I have only used 2007 for short word documents since. I'll even type things up in OO and then take them to Word at the last minute. Even after 18 months, I still stumble over the new ribbon interface. I wasted 40 minutes looking for "auto adjust row hieght" the other day in excel.

So I'm OO and there for life. Once you go OO, it's free. Why convert back unless there is some critical feature gap? And word does have some features OO lacks-- to me they are mostly noise. OO has just about everything up to Office 2003 at this point.

Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr

[Anonymous Coward]

There's bound to be other commentators leaping down on this, but I'll put my £0.02 in.

Are you saying that MS removed the old interface and replaced it with one easier to use for beginners?

Yes. Let me be absolutely clear - in Office 2007, there is no way to revert to the Office-2003 style menus except for using third-party add-ons, as other users have commentated.

But why the heck would they remove the old interface entirely? Maybe it's the "Design of Everyday Things" talking, but why wouldn't they keep the old one for more sophisticated users. There's nothing wrong with having an easy interface for casual use and an advanced one for the advanced users. It's actually a very good solution in this kind of case.

If this had been the case, I'd expect you'd have less hate from power users against Office 2007. If I were able to just select an option in Tools -> Options that did this, I'd be using 2007 at home (as it is, my copy of office 2003, cold dead hands, and so forth). However the option was completely denied us.

This makes the (IMO) stupid design decision of auto-hiding menu items (introduced in Office 2000? XP? It's certainly in 2003) look relatively painless. That was another example of Microsoft hiding functionality which detracted from the usability of a product.

I had heard that Office 2010 would allow a 2003-style interface, but a quick search suggests this is also via add-ins - anyone know whether this was the case out-of the box?

Also, anecdote time. A while ago I was testing Office 2007 (pre-SP1) and had need to use a custom Excel add-in I'd built myself under 2k3. Not only could a substantial amount of ferreting not show how you added add-ins to Excel, but the Help file was a direct copy of the 2003 help file content, referring to a menu that no longer exist. It's things like this that novice users won't find, but bug the hell out of power users.

Re:Microsoft DOES have a good point here....

[devent]

I don't know how much of OO is still built on java, but getting rid of this layer and re-writing EVERYTHING in some good HL language (C, C++, etc) would help with the speed issue. I'm guessing that the Java runtime layer is taking a godawfull time to initialize and suck up all the resources it needs. Finally there is support.

That is so much BS. First, OO.org is not written in Java, Java is only used to connect to a database and for some plugins. Seconds, I am using Java applications all the time, like Eclipse and Visual Paradigm and I couldn't care less if Firefox were written in Java, because startup and speed of Firefox is the same as all other Java applications I ever had. Try using Lotus Symphony with is 100% Java, it is the same speed as OO.org in startup and usage. DBGL (dosbox game launcher) is another Java application and it runs fast as well.

I'm sorry but that a Java application is always slower than a C/C++ application is so much BF I could vomit. That is just not true anymore and this myth is based on the very early JavaVM. You can also try a 3D Engine in Java http://jmonkeyengine.org/groups/tag/projects and see for yourself how "slow" the 3D applications and games are.

Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr

[jez9999]

Yep. What MS have done in Outlook 2010 is incredible. In my experience, it's gone seriously downhill from 2003. The only reason I still use it is because it's so deeply tied into MS's proprietary Exchange server, and other Outlook clients' proprietary 'email' format, that I'm locked in to it at work. A couple of examples.

I used to be able to insert a signature with a single shortcut in 2003. In 2007, they forced the ribbon on me and the shortcut disappeared. It was then 'Alt-N G'. Unbelievably, they changed it AGAIN in 2010... and STILL prevent you from defining your own shortcuts. It's now 'Alt-N A S'. I wouldn't be surprised if they changed it to 'ALT-F U C K Y O U' in the next revision.

They also decided that the Outlook 2003 e-mail editor wasn't good enough; rich text and layout aside, there was a shedload of MS Word functionality users were just missing out on. The decision made was to basically send a Word document instead of an e-mail, which did 2 things. First, it made Outlook e-mails utterly incompatible with any e-mail client that wasn't Outlook. Second, it killed off the possibility of doing proper inline responses. I'm surprised more people haven't noticed this, but you used to be able to press 'unindent' to break the 'quote line' to the left of the quoted part of a reply. From 2007 when they implemented the MS Word e-mail editor, you can't. So, you see people using bastardized inline responses by colouring their response text red or something. Or just completely giving up on inline responses. Thanks, MS.

Honestly, I would be using something else if I could. And if I ran a business, I'd try to find a more standards-compliant (and preferably OSS) alternative to Outlook.