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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.'"
Since the video is little more than quotes from people heralding the stark beauty of Microsoft products when compared to various open-source (and sometimes generic open-source) products, you might wonder where the quotes come from. They're old success stories, most of which are marketed as "Case Studies" on Microsoft.com.
I looked up the quotes in the video and apparently wasn't the only one to notice. Taking the first three quotes your years are 2007, 2009 and 2006. Some of them are more recent than others but I get the feeling that Microsoft needs to dig further back to find quotes deriding open source. I've used OpenOffice.org for a very long time. In college (~2002) I even used StarOffice on the school's Sun machines. And OpenOffice.org used to have some really really shitty aspects. But a few years back, major revisions have made it a lot better. Enough to cause Microsoft to come up with new ideas for their Office Suite. And I'm forced to use MS Office at work and I'm okay with that. It's becoming a contender. And as "tech debt" or "IT debt" begins to be realized for Microsoft and what it did to our history of proprietary format documents, I think OpenOffice.org is only going to look better and better. Yes, there's some cost with OO.o but there's some cost with MS Office as well.
It doesn't always happen but sometimes open source catches up to and even surpasses proprietary software. I cannot say OO.o will pass MS Office but it has made up a lot of ground in the past 2-3 years. A good example of this is the Linux 2.6 kernel and its steadily growing stability and features compared to Windows that remained largely stagnant while this occurred.
With the serious changes to the interface of MS Office suites (not saying they're bad, they're just some of the most major updates I've seen from MS), I think now is going to be the hardest time for Microsoft to find current quotes from customers criticizing open source. Because flipping from MS Word 2007 to OO.o is probably going to be as difficult for users to adapt to as flipping from MS Word 2007 to MS Word 2010.
My work here is dung.
Of course, now that OpenOffice is finally becoming a contender in mindshare (as well as technically), they go and change the name, and potentially lose all brand recognition.
For all the people who get exposed to this new video by what ever means, if they never heard of OpenOffice before they sure have now - thanks Microsoft :)
Perhaps this is a result of your area of work, or the place work / study etc?
I know some people who don't like the ribbon, the vast majority have a clear preference for it. Obviously neither of our anecdotal observations prove anything on a large scale. I'm surprised that you've managed to avoid fraternising with anyone of a dissenting opinion in, what, 4 years?
Can I remake this video with the names changed around ....It makes more sense that way
Familiar Interface : Yes OOO has that .. Office 2010 does not ...
Malformatted documents : Yes OOO to 2010 does that, whereas 2010 to OOO does not
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Expensive support : a) what support is needed for either, b) both seem equally expensive to me
etc
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Microsoft can be really proud of XBbx. It is a real success. But everything else they are doing is crumbling like a sinkhole under them.
Windows: Macs just climbed to 10% of US sales. That's a huge event, considering that no software vendor can consider losing one in ten of every sale. It means that even despite Windows still near-dominence, Macs are in some ways on equal footing with them. And then of course there's Linux, which continues to grow in mindshare and has the price that can't be beat. Not to mention the security compared to Windows. Plus the libre vs. dracon mindset.
IE: Internet Explorer is now losing ground like crazy to Firefox, not to mention Safari and Chrome. And it's no wonder. Anyone who ever used IE and then *anything else* would find that *anything else* is better in every way except for compatibility with retarded websites that never bothered to program for anything except IE. And have you noticed that those retarded websites have gone from very prevalent to almost nonexistent?
Office: See above story. Then there are things like iWork for the iPad which costs $10 per app. MS doesn't even comprehend that space.
Windows phones and tablets: Well, they're just coming out with these, so its hard to draw conclusions yet, but... they're just coming out with these?? Usually when Microsoft releases something because everyone else is doing it, they have a really hard time doing it at all well. May I draw your attention to the Zune?
Bing: How many of you use Bing? How many of you use Google? 'Nuff said.
IIS: Still nothing compared to Apache.
Exchange server: Still a contender, but the open source tools are very robust now, and the licensing for Exchange is punishingly expensive. If enterprise still wants to buy commercial products, then solutions like OS X Server cost a tiny fraction of Exchange for most of the functionality.
Then you may notice that we see story after story of Microsoft closing down projects which were going to take over the world and which seem to have died a slow and long-overdue death. Again... you gotta wonder how much longer they're going to wait before they give up on the Zune. I'll bet they are losing tons of money on it, but keep it alive just so they don't have to face the humiliation of shutting it down.
So what does Microsoft have going for them? Yeah, Xbox. And while PS3 has at least jumped on the Wii-controller bandwagon, XB seems to still be missing the boat. But maybe they'll catch up here. If I were MS, I would want to spin off Xbox as the one branch of the company that might survive.
Don't get me wrong. They're still a huge and very powerful company. But it seems like they can do no right anymore. How much longer can they keep investors interested in holding their stock?
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly. The idea that the ribbon makes things easier for hard-core Excel is laughable.
Outlook? There are tons of email programs, and Outlook is the very worst email client I've ever used. If you'd said PowerPoint or Excel you might have had a valid a point. But Outlook? That's a laugh!
I don't use Powerpoint Or OO's spreadsheet myself (no use for a spreadsheet at home), but I'm not even sure if OO has an equivalent to Powerpoint, and Excel is head and shoulders above Lotus or Quattro (I have to use all 3 spreadsheets at work). If OO has an equivalent to PP, someone please correct me.
Free Martian Whores!
Interoperability : OOO loads more formats the Office 2010
Just a little niggle here, but this is the kind of thing that F/OSS advocates bang on about while totally missing the point of the real world.
Nobody cares if OO.o will open ObscureFormat 2.1 (which was only ever used in one product, was last sold in 1992 and never even ran on anything more recent than Windows 3.x).
ObscureFormat 2.1 is the one that gets attention because some developer somewhere discovered some ancient document s/he wanted to open, and so wrote the code to import it. Which is great for that developer, but don't for one minute think of it as a selling point because it isn't.
What people care about is:
If the answer to either of these is no, they'll buy Office and damn the price. This is what helped get Microsoft a monopoly in the office products market, and it's what's kept users on the upgrade treadmill for fifteen years or more.
Let's be brutally honest here at the expense of karma. The ribbon was created to accommodate the growing population of MS office users who do not have the mental capacity, focus, or experience to utilize the existing menu structure that has been used on all substantial GUI based computer programs for 15+ years. It was preceded by a toolbox panel in the OS X versions of Office which was actually useful since it allowed quick access to basic formatting options but also kept the pull-down menu interface intact for the more advanced commands. But MS actually decreased their program's functionality and efficiency with the ribbon.
Very few who were actually competent in the advanced Office features prior to the ribbon liked the change, because it meant that they had to go hunt for options that they knew used to exist. People who were never very familiar with Office loved it, because there were no large menus to get lost in. MS is happy because now your grandmother can probably work out how to use Office and you still will (unhappily) pay for it as well.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator. Office is no longer specialized software... it's for the masses. However, if you want to write a 5 page memo without images or plot a few points on a graph, it allows you to do that with little initial setup. But if you want to write a 300 page Ph.D. thesis or work with an array of more than 65K points, you'll need to explore other options... unless you like the M in S&M.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly. The idea that the ribbon makes things easier for hard-core Excel is laughable.
I would generally agree with you. It is just as laughable as thinking that Microsoft should be placing most of its attention on catering to 'Power Users'. Power users were able to obtain expertise in the previous UI, and they will be able to gain expertise in the new ribbon UI.
Good UI design is primarily about making it easy to use for the masses, and hopefully catering to power users too if possible. I am one of those 'Power Users' and I love the ribbon when working with Word and PowerPoint. It is much less useful in Excel and Access, but it doesn't get in the way after learning the new UI.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I know some people who don't like the ribbon, the vast majority have a clear preference for it.
I'd bet that there's a correlation between dislike for the ribbon and how may features of Office the person uses. The person who only uses Word, for example, as a Notepad replacement (as ThePhillips called it) can still use it like that and might spot some interesting things on the Ribbon that they find useful. The person who was already making use of a wide range of features finds that many of those features are now harder to access (especially if they don't want to have to keep moving their hand between mouse and keyboard -- the Ribbon is heavily biased towards mouse use) and doesn't get those nice surprises of discovering features they didn't know about.
That fits the anecdotal evidence just fine. The majority of Office users are probably just punching out internal memos, reports, personal letters and the like, all using simple fixed templates. The majority of /. users who use Office, though, have probably explored deep into the menus and make use of esoteric features, because that's what geeks do. The 2007 interface was a poke in the eye for the power users, but Microsoft are unlikely to care because those making purchasing decisions tend not to be power users, and they probably expect the number of new users coming in at the bottom end to dwarf the number of users lost at the top end. And they're probably right.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Give the OO users half the cash from the cost savings of the software license and then see how many people think MS Office is superior.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Heh. That isn't brutal honesty, it's rampant insecurity.
If you're smart, then a new interface isn't a challenge. If you're focused, then a new interface won't interfere with your work. If you're experienced, then you'll know that even after 15 years you can find better ways to do things - and that the more you've invested in the previous method, the more effort the change will take. You'll also have noticed that resistance to change is strongest from those who fear their superiority is being challenged. The smarter they are, the more excuses they can come up with. The less confident they are, and the more pathetically emotive their language becomes (the ribbon interface is "whoring"? Seriously?) .
People focused on outcomes rather than self-aggrandisation tend not to bother with excuses or complaints. Stick with familiar tools for the duration of the project, or set aside some time to learn a new set of keystrokes. Either way, stay focused on the things that matter.
Office has never been specialized software, and certainly not for thesis work. The 65K limit was removed at the same time the Ribbon was introduced. You probably shouldn't be doing a Ph.D. if a new interface is more than you can cope with, and with that disregard for actual facts you really should ask yourself if research is the kind of thing you're suited for.