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Why Microsoft Is So Scared of OpenOffice
GMGruman writes "A recent Microsoft video on OpenOffice is naively seen by some as validating the open source tool. As InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues shows, the video is really a hatchet job on OpenOffice. But why is Microsoft so intent on damaging the FOSS desktop productivity suite, which has just a tiny market share? Rodrigues figured out the real reason by noting who Microsoft quoted to slam OpenOffice: businesses in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe that aren't already so invested in Office licenses and know-how. In other words, the customers Microsoft doesn't have yet and now fears it never will."
younger people means less MS Office users when those people grow up which means smaller market share whether by install base or brand name recognition. If I was in my teens/20's right now and I had an option for running pirated PS or GIMP I'd go with GIMP. Same with office I'd rather go and download OO right off the site then spend days trying of warez versions which could possible have infected my computer.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Once Open Office (particularly Calc) can compete with Microsoft in terms of performance, stability, and features, then and only then will Microsoft need to worry about Open Office.
Probably 90% of people use Office for basic word processing and the occasional basic spreadsheet, for which a ten-year-old version is overkill.
A Honda Civic cannot compete in every way with a Hummer.
And yet, a lot of people find it does well enough for the price.
I'm sure many would like a Bugatti Veyron too. But since the support costs are too high, they usually go with a less expensive car without such high required costs.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Microsoft using the old "total cost of ownership" line is what they usually use on customers.
It is easy enough to test which one results in more support calls. Have some departments use Microsoft Office and have other departments use OpenOffice and track who asks for more help.
Oracle is in the enterprise space with their database products and Microsoft knows they will push OpenOffice to try to keep Microsoft out.
Having customers that don't need to talk to Microsoft is what Oracle wants.
Ahh, invest some time and learn for example following tools: Tex/Lyx for documents, presentations, papers etc R/ggplot2 for data manipulation, tables and plotting Python for other things you want to compute you get quality stuff and you never want to use any office suit again
Since Oracle seems determined to destroy OpenOffice themselves.
A few of the quotes in the article are about poor support of open source products. But Microsoft don't have very good support either. Depending on license you get limited support or have to pay per incident. You usually just end up searching the internet to solve your problem whichever product you use. So what am I paying for again?
I abhor the use of macros in Excel because companies that use Excel usually ends up building datamining tools or some complex spreadsheets that calculate whatnot related to their business. They are usually a big mess of macros and VBA that ends up being supported by the internal IT-department and is one big headache. And just to make it more fun they can have some badly implemented Access "database" coupled to the spreadsheets.
Being able to do macros and/or script applications is usually a good thing since it can automate a lot of tedious work, and if properly implemented it wouldn't be a problem, but the majority of "applications" in Excel is just horrific in my experience. Usually someone makes something "nifty" then it spreads to the whole department and suddenly it's something that has to be supported and the feature creep sets in.
That's my experience anyway.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Once Open Office (particularly Calc) can compete with Microsoft in terms of performance, stability, and features, then and only then will Microsoft need to worry about Open Office.
I have found Calc indispensible for it allows me to cut tables from browsers and paste it into a spreadsheet, and have it import perfectly. This has been of huge value to me. This does not work at all in Excel. Furthermore, I have found Excel to be a nightmare in its insistence on being "clever" and knowing better than me what is or should be in my document: insistently turning text that it thinks looks like email and web addresses into live links (something I have never wanted in my life), destroying text it thinks looks like dates into a non-recoverable form, its apparent inability to mix numbers (as text) and numbers (as numbers) in a single spreadsheet without nightmarish manual work-arounds, etc.
I have used Excel since before it was Excel (i.e. when it was still MultiPlan) and have found long ago that it passed the point of adding value and (as with most MS products) began adding misery instead. I happily use Calc and loathe having to fire up Excel now.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
When I started working at my last job, we were initially using Openoffice for almost everything except for any documents that needed to go to clients, because documents that we created with Openoffice would not reliably open with the same formatting by clients who were using Microsoft office, particularly if indentation or outlining was used. Programmers such as myself did not generally need to have Office installed, since virtually all of the documents created by programmers were intended for internal only. Ultimately, however, it was realized that even documents that might initially be thought to be internal-only were often needed to be looked over by clients for review, and so eventually everybody had to install Office and use it for everything, simply so that we could compatibly communicate with the company's clients.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
OpenOffice Writer is about as good as Word.
However, Excel is seriously better than OO.org Spreadsheet. Especially Excel 2010. We've replaced an expensive CrystalReports report builder with Excel and everyone is super-happy. It consumes data from OLAP database, it can easily run various analyses and it's even possible to export spreadsheets using Web.
Slashdot: where everybody who disagrees with you is a shill. Because companies pour thousands of dollars on arguing with a half dozen slashdotters.
For the one percent of people who actually _need_ them.
For the other 99%, Open Office is fine.
The problem is that 1% of the users need feature X, while a different 1% badly need feature Y, while yet another 1% find feature Z indispensable.
Many people who use your logic don't realize that this seemingly insignificant 1% adds up very quickly. Plus, these 1percenters are usually the ones who are vociferous and evangelical.
I actually tried to encourage my wife to use Open Office about a year ago. She needed to do a fair bit of document editing and rewriting work, and I gave her a (fairly powerful business-grade) laptop with only Open Office installed and told her about all the virtues of open software, and how Open Office is as good as MS Office, and after a short learning curve, she will not even miss MS Office.
Mind you, she was using Open Office mainly for straight-forward document work - document editing, proof-reading, rewriting, reformatting, etc. No macros, no formulaes, no fancy stuff.
Never worked. For a brief initial period, she was fine, and even pleasantly surprised by Open Office. Then, she started finding small issues with layouts, small features that were not present, etc. Then, she started facing deadlines and small issues with her clients.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I ended up installing Office 2007 for her, and so far, so good.
As a neutral observer, I find -this- kind of anecdotal evidence compelling, and the reason why so many Open Office proponents are simply missing the point. In a business context where everyone else is using MS Office, Open Office had better support MS Office documents to a perfect degree, and offer the same toolset that MS Office provides.
Otherwise, the only potential market will be markets (mainly government organizations) where everyone uses or is forced to use Open Office.
So then it doesn't actually do macros better. It just supports it's own document format and macros better.
I know you might consider this to be what you meant however what you typed makes it look like you believe macros to be better for some particular reason such as being faster, easier or better documented.
I don't think fixing bugs is quite the kind of thing he's talking about.
I think what he means is "I can have a Microsoft-based solution set up by any two-bit MCSE I can hire for peanuts very easily. Seriously, I can put out an advert and have more replies than I know what to do with from people who will work for relatively little. If the person I hire messes up - maybe they misconfigure something, maybe there's something odd that requires specific steps in order to work properly - I can have people queueing up outside my door to fix it within 24 hours. I just need to open the Yellow Pages and dial the first number I find in the relevant section.
I can't do that with Linux because there are nowhere near as many qualified, experienced admins. Let alone anyone who I can hire for peanuts. And don't tell me that one Linux admin can do the work of four MCSEs, I don't need the work of four MCSEs, I need the work of one."
A recurring theme in the criticisms -- perhaps the most painfully misanthropic -- is that, since staff are trained to use MS Office, they simply can't figure out Open Office, and everyone who's switched back to MSO from OOO has seen support time and staff frustration drop like a rock. (Of course, going from MS Office 2k3's traditional interface to MS Office 2k8's "Ribbon" caused absolutely no confusion at all!)
But why is this? Why are people trained eat the bread and sip the MS Kool Aid so utterly helpless when faced with an alternative that doesn't look the same?
Well, it's because people with minimal computer skills teach other people with no computer skills that, in order to make this word look blue, you click this button in this place. Not "look for a color changer and select blue". No, it has to be under THIS menu, with THAT name, and looks like THIS button.
We don't teach people how to use computers or even software. We teach them very specific, contextless mundane steps.
What saddens me most is that I was able to document this twelve years ago and it's still the same today.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.