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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.'"
There is the price, but then there is the horrible Ribbon interface. I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it. I recently installed Microsoft Office 2010 to recover emails from a corrupted system (Needed to open PST files, copied the mails to an IMAP server. No more Office needed... That what Trial Versions are great for!). Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.
Interestingly, when installing 2010, it asked me whether I wanted to enable OpenDocument formats. I was torougly surprised by that. That's another admittance of Microsoft that OpenOffice is a treath.
Except that MS should focus on LibreOffice now... didn't they got the memo?
Or is it because they know Larry Ellison hates Microsoft...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Funny, I have yet to find anyone (except me...as I just hate it) in my workplace (research institute) who does not like the new ribbon interface.
Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.
Well... that might be for your self aggravating ego; for the majority of users it means an interface that gets out of their way.
quoting from TFA:
After doing a little digging, we found that these quotes are actually from case studies and press articles from the last four years,
What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not /. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I'm not an open source zealot, don't use Linux, have no particular dislike for Microsoft, but Office hasn't really been on my radar for a long time. I used Word for years, but when I got a new computer a few years ago it didn't come with Office installed so I downloaded OpenOffice to see what it was like. Never went back -- there didn't seem to be any point. I'm sure there are many, many things that Microsoft Word, Excel etc can do that OpenOffice Writer, Calc etc can't do, but personally I've never hit that hurdle. Office may still be required for some business tasks, but for my own business and personal use, OpenOffice will do me fine. Thank you to the wonderful people that made it and released it for free!
Typically Microsoft would keep messing with file formats, binary blobs dumped into the files, fonts/menus etc in every release to keep increasing the "spoiler" features and increase costs to OpenOffice and other competitors who are trying to keep up with the interoperability.
I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature. And most of the core functionality that could be saved and restored in Office97 format cleanly in MsOffice is done equally well in OpenOffice. Though it won the battle in getting OOXML certified as another "standard" format, the battle raised the visibility of interoperability issues and a few customers started actually separating "microsoft compatibility" from "interoperability". So they are setting the default save format is Office97 even on newer versions to keep their escape avenue open.
Another important strategic mistake it made was ignoring the web based office tools. Microsoft knew there were millions of pirated copies of MsOffice is being used everywhere. It turned a blind eye to it thinking, "these guys would never actually pay for an office suite. If we crackdown they might go to OpenOffice. So let us keep them in the tent, as a way to deny market share to the competition". When the web based office tools started coming out, they saw it as a pathetic little pipsqueak not comparable to the full power of a desktop Office tool. But it siphoned off a large portion of the bootleg users who were looking for a legal option to do simple editing without having to pay for a full price MsOffice suite. Now compatibility and interoperability with these web office tools is an issue and it is tying down Microsoft. It is not able to play the usual, "make enough changes to the file formats and the api and the look and feel and leave enough bugs in there to make everybody look bad compared to the defacto standard microsoft ".
Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions). The hardware has become very powerful and a virtual machine running an WinXP 2005 image in a protected sandbox actually runs faster than the original machine it shipped with. People are recyling their old Microsoft Windows licenses and Office licenses using VMware.
I think Microsoft will still milk a few more billions of dollars from MsOffice. But it is not going to grow as fast as it did. If they suspend all new development on it and just milk it for profits, they might actually make more money than trying to add more bells whistles and hidden mines and bombs to thwart interoperability.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think that your hypothesis has merit, in the sense that Google Docs is probably a bigger longterm threat(particularly to home user sales: once a corporation buys a bunch of sharepoint licenses, I suspect MS stops worrying); but I'm not sure that releasing this video will be much of a strike against Google Docs.
Google's Docs thrust seems to be coming in two directions: one is the casual user pitch, by subtly linking it to their other offerings("view as HTML" for PDF results in a google search is now called "quick view" and, once clicked, dumps you into Google Docs, rather than the old static HTML version. Similar linkages are to be found in Gmail and so forth). I suspect that this will be fairly effective, particularly since Google Docs(while it doesn't even try to go toe-to-toe with Office's feature list, has a few absolutely killer features for casual users: Anyone who isn't a gearhead or a cube drone with a good IT team has historically been without both document versioning and an offsite backup. Docs gives you both, for free, relatively intuitively). The sort of people who are brought in by this pitch probably won't even see this MS video, or know of its existence. They might be brought into Microsoft's "Live" camp by MS doing similar linking to Hotmail; but that pretty much depends on which email service they've been using for years now. The video might have more value against Google's second pitch direction, the "$COMPANY_AND_OR_STATE_ENTITY Has Gone Google" advertisements, which are explicitly aimed at getting organizations to switch. Here again, Microsoft is probably pretty safe from Google among their giant corporate customers, since(if you buy enough add-ons, server products, and IT support) you can already get all the features of Office, plus things like versioning, backup, and availability on any computer in an enterprise; but any company/organization that was seriously using OpenOffice is much more likely to not be wedded to Microsoft to nearly that extent. They could, easily enough, say "OpenOffice is kind of a hassle; but the sticker shock on a proper Office deployment is killing me. Hey, Google has something that costs about as much, per year, as I spend at starbucks in a month, and nothing to install. Interesting..."
Look at the comments on the site where the video was linked to. Most of the comments were negative toward OO. However it seems that the biggest issues are compatibility (with M$), ease of use (complaints from people who had learned WP and SS apps on M$ Office), speed and support. Since the 'world standard' for WP files seems to be M$.doc format and this is always a moving target the compatibility complaint is real. Ease of use is an issue, and OO does need to improve in this area. Having more 'training' documentation, perhaps some YouTube videos for this would help. I don't know how much of OO is still built on java, but getting rid of this layer and re-writing EVERYTHING in some good HL language (C, C++, etc) would help with the speed issue. I'm guessing that the Java runtime layer is taking a godawfull time to initialize and suck up all the resources it needs. Finally there is support. There is decent on-line support for OO, but it's all over the place. You might have to google all afternoon to find the right URL to find answers to your questions. I don't know if you can buy OO support from Conical (Ubuntu), but there is an oportunitiy there for them to fill.
I use OO writer at home to write documents, and their spredsheet mostly to view excel files (which it does rather well, once I allow it to convert them to native format). I've had tons of problems with fixing format of documents imported from M$ word however. Once I get the format right on the screen it doesn't always print the same way. It's a WYSIAWYG problem. (What you see is ALMOST what you get). Mind you, OO (OK from now on LO) has promise and maybe now that it's been forked from Scum/Oriface it may improve as a true open source project. Gnu Cash took a while to get as good as it is, now it rivals the commerical product. Hopefully LO will improve to this point.
Sun owned the trademark before, it didn't hinder development then.
Oh yes, it absolutely did. Sun proved to be a major hinderance to the development process -- so much so, in fact, that a fork was created and actually became the go-to choice for some Linux distributions.
It was called go-oo, and if you've installed/used "OpenOffice" in Debian, Ubuntu, or a few other distros, you actually used Go-OO without realizing it.
The real litigious bastards...
It shouldn't come as a surprise that MS is willing to whore themselves out to the lowest common denominator.
Yes, how dare they make their software more usable and less opaque to the users instead of the other way around! That's clearly the antithesis of good software design.
My office of approx 50 people is about 50/50 OO.org and MS Office. The more technically-minded people took to OO.org. We still save in the MS format for compatibility. For the most part, the MS Office users have not migrated simply because they "think" it's going to make their jobs harder. There have only been a handful of incidents where there was a compatibility issue. Culturally, the two camps feel they are superior to each other, so it is an interesting social experiment and mimics the dichotomy you see on /. posts.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
I'm not sure that's a reasonable question. A more reasonable question is, does it replace the features in Outlook that you actually use?
Well, no. Frankly.
As far as I can tell, and maybe I was just using it wrong, there's practically zero integration between email and calendaring in Thunderbird... you can't send an event invite and ask people to reply with "Accept" or "Decline" like in Outlook. When scheduling, you can't see their calendars to find out when the most people are available. You can't look up the status of meeting resources like conference rooms or projectors. You can't go back and look an hour later to see how many people accepted and how many declined, or easily move the meeting to another conference room if it turns out you get more respondents than you expected, or send a quick ballot asking if people want to meet at a restaurant instead of a conference room, or any of the million of things people do seamlessly in Outlook every hour of every day without even thinking about it.
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