Slashdot Mirror
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."
The MS video features this gem: "New employees lacked OpenOffice.org applications' use skills that significantly increased employees' adaptation period and adversely affected their operational efficiency." -- Igor Gentosh, Head of Systems Integration Department, Kredobank JSC
Uhhmm ... so is that the reason you went and changed the entire interface in Office 2007 to the ribbon? If anything OO preserves skill investments.
OO is basically Office97+, which was a great version. OO is just fine for the non-templated letters that pass for "Office suite" use in most offices. Not that it doesn't have better templates (and page formats, too).
The only major deficiency is the non user-friendly macro system.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The ONLY thing I've seen Office do better than Open Office is macros. I'm a huge D&D nerd, and HeroForge won't work with Open Office.
But that's a very specific thing, and other than that I haven't come across anything, so I just don't sue HeroForge. That isn't accurate of the general population I'm sure, and others may find faults with Open Office that I haven't, but that's just my personal experience.
And you would still be in the minority.
I know a lot of people in their teens or twenties who are extremely interested in, shall we say, the visual arts. They love making music videos and video editing, logo design, website design, etc. One of them is finishing up a degree in marketing degree, the other is finishing up high school now and is already accepted into a design school, another is younger than them (friends of brothers etc) yet highly interested in web development. Never has the word "GIMP" entered any of their vocabularies. Never.
OpenOffice they are familiar with its existence, which it still didn't stop them from, for example, going out and buying the Mac version of Office when they bought their cool new Macs a year or so ago despite recommendations from me that they could at least wait and get by with OO for a bit while their wallets recovered from the purchase. And I don't mean clicked the "Sure, sell me Office too!" box, I mean literally drove to the store and bought it. (I was visiting one of them at the time.)
Yes, it's anecdotal but it's also real. They don't care about ideologies; they want to use the tools they will use as professionals, and that is determined by business and not their own inclinations. So long as kids (and schools) continue to look to business to see what they should be acquainted with, businesses will have a ready-trained new workforce and little incentive to move away from what they all know.
The company I work at has Office installed on everyone's computer. I generally use Excel, since that's the default for spreadsheets on my PC (too lazy/apathetic to change it). However, whenever I have to deal with some complex data, I will always use Calc. Why?
I will log a bunch of program output from my software (such as memory allocations), and I want a simple way of sorting them by file and line number, then I can see the ones that I really want. I could write a tool for this of course, but I would rather take an extra minute to do it by hand, as this doesn't come up that much. But importing arbitrary data (not comma separated but separated by words/spaces/newlines/various) is a pain in the ass in Excel. It involves saving it out as a txt file then importing. Calc will simply pop up a box asking what your delimiters are.
I've never had Calc crash on me, and I honestly don't know what the problem is. In fact, I've never seen any reason to use Office over OpenOffice. Granted, I spend more of my day in Notepad++ than Office, but still. People keep citing macros, but that just seems like an abomination to me anyway. Good riddance.