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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."
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.
Ballmer is that you?
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
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.
No, you were told Oracle was bad and and their commitment to OOo is a coin flip. Libre is just a way to settle the "who will support the open source nature of the program now?" No talking points needed for bad recall abilities.
Whether or not this is obvious, there's an interesting point here. This ad will be circulated far wider than its original target market. This suggests that this will help Open Source here in the US.
Indeed, one of the key uses I have for this sort of thing is SELLING FOSS. My approach is to look at this carefully and determine how one can use it. While this is less useful than the old Get the Facts campaign, it does provide some fodder for FOSS consultants. First, the fact that Microsoft is attacking it is significant. Secondly, the problems discussed are real ones for some customers. Understanding the problems and how to avoid them is key to make a migration work. Saying "don't let this happen to you. Use MY services!" is a very powerful thing.
Moreover it addresses a number of issues, including "who will fix it?" ("I will if you pay me to!")
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
And, Ballmer has the right to be concerned about the 300 million pc market is eaten by both Apple and Linux:
and
And, OpenOffice runs on Android mobile phones: http://www.alwaysonpc.com/aboutOpenOffice.php. That is something for Microsoft to be sleepless about.
OpenOffice on Android mobile phones. Mmmmmm. Sweet.
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
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
By native code surely you didn't mean Java?
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?
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.
Why? The arrow is the standard pointing cursor, the cross adds nothing to the usability.
But... the future refused to change.
It's *NOT* about being a Microsoft "shill", it's a matter of being realistic and understanding that the Open Office product doesn't *YET* measure up in terms of professional standards and needs, what people that use such products in a serious business setting need.
For the one percent of people who actually _need_ them.
For the other 99%, Open Office is fine.
In most economies some 95% of companies and at least half of all employment is in SMEs. >90% of those companies will also never use any of the advanced features MS office has, and OOo is missing. Even sharing documents (as in: opening at the same time for editing - I once tried but failed in a recent version of OOo Calc; no idea on how MS Office is doing there) is often not done.
In large businesses I wouldn't be surprised if >90% of the users doesn't use those features. They probably don't even know it exists.
Actually I think 99% or more of the Office users wouldn't be able to name a feature that does not exist in the other suite, even if you would let them use both for a year for normal work, office and home.
We have to be realistic indeed (MS seems to be): how many people know what a macro is, and how to use it? What VB script is, or how to use it?
Have you tried using windows?
I've found windows the best platform to play WMV files and run Silverlight. There might be better software out there but windows 7 just runs this without any extra setup. Frankly it is the best for this task and you should seriously consider using it if you want to be in the *know* about these topics.
The bottom line is whatever Microsoft says or attempts as a fear tactic, it won't make any difference whatsoever to a very large number of those consumers. They simply cannot afford Office at any price Microsoft would offer it--other than free. When you have no money, free (or theft*) is the only alternative. Given that reality, Microsoft is jousting at windmills and trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.
* Might we next be seeing not-so-subtle threats in those emerging markets about using illegal copies of Office? Betcha we will.
/.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
The thing is, there are all sorts.
There -are- businesses which use Excel for the features. That is, they use features that are hard to use, or nonexistant in OpenOffice.
But there are -also- a lot of businesses that use Excel because, honestly, they've never honestly considered the fact that there even exists alternatives. Many of them never use formulas more advanced than basic arithmethic and perhaps SUM(..) - but nevertheless fork over the cash for Excel for their entire staff.
The former can't easily swap, but the latter could. And there's a lot of excel noobs, for every Excel guru, out there.
"I need something I can rely on. If an open source based system breaks, who's going to fix it?" -- Jeff Cimmerer, Director of Technology, Pittsford School Districts
The whole idea of Open Source is that it's open for anybody to fix it. If you've got the skills you can fix it yourself. If you're a business with a genuine interest in the FOSS you think is broken, but don't have the skills to fix it yourself, you can at least log a bug report if not hire someone to fix it for you if you consider it urgent.
Yes, you can also log bug reports with Microsoft for their software. But you're still at the mercy of Microsoft to actually get it fixed - trawl support forums about Microsoft's ClickOnce deployment system for .NET Framework 2.0 or later and you'll understand that Microsoft is quite willing to acknowledge the presence of bugs (and anti-features) and, strangely, also willing to publicly acknowledge that they have no intention of fixing them. Ever.
I've logged the same bug on Windows Find/Search since Windows NT 4.0 and yet it still isn't fixed in Windows Vista/7. (You can get search matches from unicode text files using the command line find tool, but Windows Find/Search cannot find those same matches - it only understands ASCII/ANSI test files.)
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
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.
Have you checked the comments on the right side here: http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/faaf9eb8-77c6-4bed-bc08-c069a7bfbb04 Let's tell MS what we think.
It's not written in Java. It requires Java for some optional features, but believe it or not, it's slow, buggy and heavyweight even without Java's help.
I was actually amazed recently when I discovered that Open Office _wasn't_ written in Java because I'd always assumed that was why it seemed so slow at many things.
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'
Many of the open source tools just aren't up to par. Open Office may be for many things. I am not a serious Office user, I just do basic word processing and the like so I'm not in a position to say. It has a good interface though, so that alone puts it ahead of many.
However for a lot of programs, particularly those in the media area, they just do not compete with commercial software. I've found this in video editing. I tried to do it on Linux and just couldn't. None of the open source tools would do the trick. Not only were there some extremely confusing, unintuitive, hard to use, interfaces but the software just didn't have the features I needed. Not even esoteric stuff, but simply shit like the ability to capture and open DV video.
Unfortunately I think some people who recommend OSS alternatives do so out of a loyalty to OSS, without any real knowledge of if the solution will work. They don't use the software, or if they do they use it only in an extremely cursory way. They've never used the commercial packages they are advocating it as an alternative to. As such it doesn't end up working.
You always have to remember that just because a product is the same rough idea, doesn't mean it is a replacement for another product.
I live in Eastern Europe, too. I process text for a living. That means I take in fairly massive numbers of documents from businesses every week. I've never seen a file arrive in native OpenOffice format. Not once. Of course, everybody could be using OpenOffice to export as .doc, but I don't think so.
The truth is simpler. As the post above notes, MS Word is still ungodly expensive here – in Microsoft's shortsightedness, during the 1990s and later, it did indeed cost several months' average salary. The result has been a well-entrenched tradition of using the "free" version of Word. Even at the Ministry level, in at least one prominent case. Getting around an absurd system is also a very old tradition, for obvious reasons.
So the problem OpenOffice faces in catching on here is very definitely one of taking on another free-of-cost competitor. And in a region where people want so badly to catch up with the West, Microsoft has the cachet that comes with being perceived as the Western standard.
With a zero cost differential, the choice will seem clear to a lot of people. It's a very difficult perception to beat.
And GIMP is every bit as good as Photoshop, if not better, right? Right?
For me? Yes, it is. For a professional graphics editor? No, absolutely not.
The difference between the comparisons is that very few people need all the features of the M$ Office suite. Very, very few people need the really advanced features in Word or Excel. Macros are one exception - and 90% of applications I've seen developed as macros should never have been developed as macros in the first place.
Right on.
Don't forget that MS owes its fortune to its 'educating' the western world to its products while it was an emerging computer market - but, different from today, users then had little choice - the 'first' (later, 'most popular') product out there is most likely to be learned first, a trend that led to the 'interoperability market lock' MS has over western users today. Emerging computer markets today, on the other hand, do have other choices: this is what scares MS, as if they can't use their initial 'educate, majority rules' marketing strategy that has worked so well until now, they will fail - and utterly. Today new users can and ~will~ compare products for their capabilities, and make the most economic choice. Throw into that MS' dear price and OpenOffice's 'free-ness' - and go figure. In short, for emerging markets, and perhaps for the first time in its history, MS can depend only on the performance of its product to justify its price.
Which also brings into question our way of determining the 'value' of software - On one hand we have MS and its 'old market' values ("here's the tool, this is the price"), and on the other we have the Open Source movement giving their products out 'for free'. I see fault in both - the first depends on a consumer's 'tech ignorance' to take as much money as they 'can' from him (the software's price is not determined on how much work it took to create it), and the second... well, I see the value of the system as a whole (development, de-bugging, feature requests & updates), but I don't see how they can make money enough to keep it going, especially as it grows. So here as well, an emerging market user's choice is a confusing extreme: overpriced or free.
So, if MS is trying to sell into a market where it doesn't already have inter-operability dominance, and there exists a similar product for free, I can see reason for their fear - especially before shareholders expecting continuously increasing profits: the western world is saturated with MS products already.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
Scared is the word. From the TFA, apropos Microsoft's video ad (Silverlight or WMV if you please): "However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion."
That is completely wrong.
There is nothing subtle about it. Unless you consider being bludgeoned by someone screaming "Give Me All Your Money Or I'll Go Broke" subtle, that is. Pretty much every statement made in it is at best a half-truth, and more commonly an outright lie. This kind of hysterical trolling is the kind of thing we expect from the losing side in a political campaign, and it's an ugly look.
The difference between Calc and Excel isn't so much in the number of features, but stability, plain and simple.
Oh dear. Heads up, guys - We've woken up Microsoft's PR department, and the shills are having to earn their keep again.
I've been using OpenOffice since, well, since it was StarOffice, and stability has NEVER been its problem. Startup time used to be slow, but now it's pretty much equal to (or maybe a bit quicker than) MSOffice.
I'd be shocked if an other product better supported MS' proprietry format than MS' products. Yes, MS Office is better in supporting MS Office macros. But OpenOffice is better in supporting OpenOffice macros.
The reverse argument is that if 95% of Word customers just want quick common tasks done then it comes down which is easier.
If you don't use Word or Open Office enough to really dig into it and discover the features then the program with the more accessible UI will seem more useful.
I find Office 2007+'s hand holding and templates extremely helpful in this regard. I don't have to think about fonts or formatting I can just use the defaults which actually produce really well designed products. And since I don't spend any time in office I don't know where anything is but with the Ribbon I'm using significantly more of the application. That's been worth the $60 I spent.
In contrast when I load OO I'm always hunting and reading help files trying to find the tool or menu I'm looking for. And the templates aren't nearly as well designed or sexy.
I also like the minimized ribbon. Since I don't use much of Office most of the time I can just have it minimized and it literally takes up less screen real-estate than notepad. If I could get it to launch as fast as Notepad I would use it in its stead.
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.
If your IT department is supporting user-created macros then your company has a lot bigger problems than what brand of office software you use.
If you look at any larger company that uses MS Office their IT department usually has to support these types of solutions one way or another (ie. officially/unofficially).
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
In the context of the article where it is about new businesses without any existing excel spreadsheets?
Switching from an existing solution has nothing to do with it. Any new business could use anything and have the same problems. If they start out with open source solutions then they can scale that up much better then starting with Microsoft then making the switch.
The advertising video the Microsoft released isn't about new business though (which the article refers to). Almost every quote given in that video is from companies switching to open source solutions or specifically open office. So I don't believe the article when they say that Microsoft is targeting New Businesses.
Well, I've used both. I don't consider Excel to be superior because that would suggest that it's actually any good at all. However, it loooks like the OO guys decided to clone every single annoyane and limitation of Excel (e.g. arbitrary table size limits, rubbish sort dialog). I seem to recall the Calc equivalents of Pivot tables being a bit rubbish too but perhaps they've fixed that.
If anyone thinks they're equivalent, they only want to do trivial things with their spreadsheets. This is actually okay. Most people do. For most people Calc is perfetly adequate.
And that's a strength. However, selling something to people on the grounds that they can pick who fixes it when it breaks may be shooting yourself in the foot.
I like the idea that an MS campaign against FOSS can be used to show FOSS has become a serious competitor. I don't think it will play out that way. If your client watches an ad by MS pointing out flaws (real or otherwise) with FOSS the most likely impact is they will now be worried about the flaws the ad highlights. They aren't going to simply ignore the content and think "wow FOSS is mainstream, let me in on this".
Macros are one exception - and 90% of applications I've seen developed as macros should never have been developed as macros in the first place.
Be that as it may, you won't get people to migrate off Office by saying "Your processes built around huge numbers of macros (which, for all its sins, broadly works) was developed in the wrong way in the first place, you must rip the whole lot out and start again".
That is because, even where we use OO to produce documents, unless we have prior consent from the recipients, we export to MS format before sending. The majority still believe that Computer==MS.
If anyone can accept ODT, they will generally say so when requesting documents. I hope you do!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Two things to bear in mind:
1. Who's going to go through every spreadsheet and make sure there's nothing too taxing in there?
2. For most businesses, the cost of an Office license is really not that great. They'll spend more in man-hours learning something else and for what gain? Businesses tend to be run fairly pragmatically - they want something that works, not a religion. All your "you are being held hostage by the file format!11oneone" stuff is something most business owners will take one look at and say to themselves "Let's look at this in context. A: it's never been a huge problem before - sure we've had to upgrade occasionally, but BFD and B: why on Earth would Microsoft make the next version completely incompatible with the old one, not even able to open the old file format? It makes no sense at all."
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.
The real question to ask of any software is does it do what you need it to do in a relatively efficient manner.
Pick the tools that meet your requirements and your budget, it really is that simple.
You can probably find many cases where the Gimp does what you need it to and some where Photoshop is the only tool for the job. We make choices like this all the time in every area of our lives.
Is OpenOffice a viable alternative to Microsoft Office - sometimes it depends what you want to do with it.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
This idea that MS will come around to fix your broken Word install is so ludicrous, so totally beside the daily reality you have to wonder how it ever got started.
When you buy from MS, you are NOT buying from IBM. Yes, when you buy from IBM you buy a large amount of support (how large? just see how many of your accounts drop dead when the bill arrives). When you buy from MS... oh wait. You DON'T. You buy from Dell and your support comes from India and is "re-boot and re-install". MS barely acknowledges security threats that affect ALL its customers. The idea that they will an issue that only affects you on demand is insane. They won't. Never have, never will.
Open Source, you got the code and developing software is NOT all that expensive. Not for companies that develop aircraft or build oil rigs. And you can coast on their efforts. And that SCARES MS. They live not just on the myth that they will fix your problems, but that software is hard and only a billion dollar company can do it.
I have had a couple of discussions with open source developers about issues in beta code. NEVER EVER had a talk with a MS employee about the countless issues with MS software.
Where is this mythical MS support? Is it the great manual that comes with Windows or Office? Is it the direct line to MS development or at least bug testing? Nah... it is through Dell or countless forums. Sure, most Linux support is through forums as well, but at least forums run by the Linux distro and I don't pay through the nose for my Linux software.
And you know the strange thing. OpenOffice has become accepted, the days when you HAD to run MS office are gone at least in my field. Now the un-official company policy is that all documents must be readible by everyone and this includes people running Linux and OSX without jumping through hoops.
This means using older formats and not all the bells and whistles and lockin of MS products... and that scares MS. A non-upgrading Word user is almost as bad as a FOSS user. MS gains the majority of its income from the endless upgrade cycle. It NEEDS this money to fund its numerous loss making programs. If that revenue stream dries up, it will loose the status of must have stock and have to actually economize on its spendings. That would very quickly end MS as it is. No more Vista's or ME. These failures would then wrack the company like they would a real company.
MS fears Opensource. Not because it is better or even equal in its own eyes, but because it is good enough and an awful lot cheaper. And once enough switch, then its lockin breaks down for everyone else. No more "Needs Office 2050" if companies run into "resend that file, can't read it" to often.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm an average user. My office-related activities consist of writing letters, short papers, and making the occasional presentation. OO.O does all of this just fine, and I hence have no need to shell out $100 for an Office suite.
You are not alone. You are in fact a long, long way from being alone.
Depending on the geographic location, OpenOffice has been measured as being installed on between 10% and 20% of machines.
Unless you call this "tiny", the OP has it wrong.
This measured 10% to 20% share correlates quite well with the number of copies of openOffice that have been downloaded.
But how many of those OOo installs are alongside MS Office installs, rather than instead of?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Problem: Excel doesn't ask for a delimiter.
Solution: Excel won't even ask for a delimiter.
And that's not even the first time I hear Microsoft fanboys rephrase the problem as the solution.
I've had the same problem. Excel expects that a CSV file is always separated with a comma. If you use the US version. En the European version, Excel expects that a CSV file is always separated with a semicolon.
If you have a file that's not separated with the separator Excel expects, everything ends up in column A. Even if you try to import a euro-style semicolon separated file into a US version of Excel.
> Open Office had better support MS Office documents to a perfect degree, and offer the same toolset that MS Office provides.
Quite frankly, this is exactly, why OSS is always trailing and having a hard time to catch up: It needs to always do twice as much as the entrenched programs...once their own way of doing things and then, in addition, the Microsoft way of doing things. Most complaints I hear are not so much about how an Open-Source program in itself has limitations, but how it has limitations (perceived or real) in dealing with MS-issued software or larger MS-environment.
"If it doesn't do exactly what MS-Office does I won't use it!"
"If it doesn't perfectly/100% read MS' proprietary file formats, it's not ready for business!".
"If it doesn't look exactly like MS-Office my people won't be able to/won't want to use it!"
"If it doesn't integrate with AD...."
etc.pp..
While Open-Source software is certainly not the right thing for every place (incl. some Office settings), I hear the distinct whining of people and businesses, who have more or less willingly painted themselves into the corner of a specific vendor. That getting out of that corner or even entertaining the thought of it is almost an insurmountable obstacle is only a logical conclusion.
As far as I am concerned I feel, that it's got to be one of the most ridiculous things on earth in 2010, that people are forced to use a specific Office program to edit documents. It shouldn't matter, damnit, what you use, as long as the resulting file makes sense and can be shared. OpenDocument is a great thing, but came a decade too late. Today DOC(x) is 'the standard' and everybody else's gotta cater to it. MS wins by default: DOC(x) = MS-Office, MS-Office = Windows, Windows = site license, site license = AD, Exchange, Sharepoint etc. until we are in schools, where 'todays business standards' are being 'taught' to students. It sucks and the Mafia couldn't have done better in setting up their business (remember WordPerfect, which most people were highly unwilling to leave but got forced to by MS). I still regard the DOC format as one of the top three things that held back innovation in the entire IT infrastructure and business landscape. It's be so great, if the choices were manifold with a certainty, that resulting documents and spreadsheets could be seamlessly used by any other choice (of a user). Technically we have that (OOo, MSO, WP, KO etc.)...in reality we don't!
I was working on a site that had a Sharepoint problem and there was a bug which was reported to Microsoft and open for like 6-9 months.
This "corporate support" thing is nonsense. Some of the best support I've ever had has been on Wordpress, because you hit the forum and find someone who has had the problem before, delved into the code and worked out a fix. If I got stuck with something from Microsoft, I'd post soemthing on superuser.com or stackoverflow.com before I started talking to Microsoft.
You have to install the grammar checkers for OOo as extensions. Which grammar checkers to install depends upon which languages you want to do grammar checking in.
Amber
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
Which is a good point. For some reason our company has 10's of photoshop licenses, mainly for people who just resize pictures occasionally. It would be very easy to do with gimp "but it's always been done with photoshop". Probably the main reason Adobe does so little to fight against piratism - if people where accustomed to using gimp at home (due to not being able to buy photoshop) most would find it adequate. Sure there will be some who are actually requiring the features in photoshop, but not very many.
Not true. For a large percentage of Microsoft's customers, MS Office 97 did everything that they needed. The only reason that these people upgraded was that people kept sending them files from newer versions of Office that they couldn't open. I worked with one company that ended up upgrading over a hundred thousand users from Office 97 about five years ago for exactly this reason - they didn't need any new features other than the ability to open files that they had been sent.
If OpenOffice becomes more popular then ODF becomes more popular and this makes it much harder to force people to move to Office 2015 to support its new file format. Sure, a few people will need the new features, but a lot of people use Word as a glorified typewriter - they don't need even a fraction of the features that the current version has. OpenOffice can quite easily skim these users away from Microsoft's market share. It doesn't have to be as good as the latest MS Office to do so, just as good as the last version that added a feature that they use.
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if people where accustomed to using gimp at home (due to not being able to buy photoshop) most would find it adequate. Sure there will be some who are actually requiring the features in photoshop, but not very many.
That's precisely what has Microsoft shitting itself.
They try OpenOffice, see that its more than enough for what they need. Sooner or later people who have to budget for companies IT support needs realise that large chunks of their workforce could use a free alternative that they've got experience with and there goes Microsoft's bread and butter.
OpenOffice, Gimp etc have been good enough for non professional use for a long time now. The only real change is that people are now becoming aware of these free and legal applications.
regards, the_leander
Wow, if clicking on the image -> scale menu is "extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken", then I wonder how Photoshop does it? A telepathic interface, maybe? Photoshop knows instinctively what size I want the picture to be and reshapes it without any command from me?
Your argument seems pretty desperate, like you are grasping at straws to find some shortcoming in Gimp. If you need to do it, then it seems like Gimp has improved to the point of being a serious contender to Photoshop by now. Good to know that.
The full truth is openoffice sucks and is hardly usable for real world use.
Have you actually used OpenOffice.org in the real world? Five or six years ago, I was in the mortgage industry and I used Calc to create some pretty complicated spreadsheets such as amortization tables (including adjustable rates loans). In fact, I used such spreadsheets as a sales tool because I could show a client how much he or she could save by refinancing or the potential impact of rate changes on an ARM.
"Hardly usable for real world use"? Bah. Hyperbole not based on real world use. Is it right for every situation? No, it's not but it is sufficient for about 95% of real world users.
Life is short; think quickly.
Actually, OOo already can easily replace M$O for most users. Performance and stability are already there. Features .. OOo has everything most users need. Only a very small percent need scripting capability that only M$O can provide.
I use both. OOo interface has been consistent for years. M$O changes theirs with each update. The most recent M$O is not intuitive at all and quite inconvenient to use, for me when I need to get something done. "Now where the fuck did "print" go?" or "Now where the fuck did 'save page as' go?"
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Actually, I'd say that's true of any office suite. In a large enough company, you always wind up with someone in some department somewhere deciding they can avoid going through all the bureaucracy to get a proper system in by solving their problems with a spreadsheet, some VBA and a few formulas. Possibly some Access thrown in as well.
Six months later it's become critical to the business and the first you hear about it is when the person who threw it together's left the company and your helpdesk starts to get calls about it. I don't think you'd see a drastically different outcome if you were to substitute OO Calc for Excel.
Take away every iota of similar functionality and you'll wind up with an office suite that a lot of people simply will not touch with a bargepole. The people who will be making the noise are the people who have serious traction within the business, generally because they're either directly generating money (sales) or they count money and try to reduce the money going out (finance).
IT is seen as a sort of necessary evil within many companies, and trying to tell sales and finance that they can't put together their own little apps in a spreadsheet - particularly if you're not in an industry where you can point to a big scary regulator who explicitly bans such things - is a hiding to nothing.
Thanks for pointing this out. I was wondering how so many people were bitching about this "missing" Excel feature. You can open any arbitrary text file in Excel, and yeah, it won't ask for delimiters--because it has the "Text to Columns" menu that lets you specify delimiters, fixed length fields, etc.
OpenOffice can do the same, for that matter. The two programs are pretty much equivalent in terms of that little feature.
(I say that as someone who prefers OO in general, though.)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I've written a pretty awesome Star Fleet Battles software (sound effects, full rules) for Calc.
It won't run on Microsoft Excel without changes. I can't count on all my SFB buds having Excel but I can count on having Calc on my memory stick. (it won't run well from the memory stick so I have to copy it to their hard drive-- too slow).
If the writer of the D&D utility wanted it to work, it would work. The macro languages are very similar- just not identical.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Word perfect had better WYSIWYG functionality that MS office at half the price. MS did the same thing to them they are doing to LO. They are intentionally programming incompatibilities within their software and using the monopoly power to lock other vendors out.
You seem ok with this?
Keep in mind that when you talk about "Overpricing" in emerging markets, it's way much more than you can imagine. Down here in Argentina a Dell computer is about 3x the price of a generic machine (already assembled by your local computer tech), yet in developed countries the price is similar. An XBOX 360 or PS3 goes for almost USD 800 for the basic version (while it's not over $200 in the USA). And NO, I don't accept the "taxes" excuse. Taxes aren't really that high.
So the point is: companies have been trying to squeeze money out of emerging markets for years, and now they're basically whining because they never sold anything (except maybe to corrupt governments).
It's not that difficult to do: just sell your product at a price that the market can pay (no, this isn't impossible. McDonald's has been doing this for years. A Big Mac doesn't cost the same in every country). But the problem is: companies don't want to go through all the "hassle" needed to sell a product. Look: Microsoft doesn't have "offices" here in Argentina. They have a whole , like IBM, and I'm not sure why, but there is a 30+ story building with a Sun Microsystems logo near these. So if they can invest that much money in a developing country such as mine, why can't they put a little, just a LITTLE effort in selling their products as well?
Why do I have to pay almost 2 months salary for a game machine that any European or American can get for 1/5 of their weekly salary (and even less)? Why does a Windows license cost MORE here than what it costs in the USA? Are you really, absolutely, positively sure that they can't sell a product here for what the market can really pay for? No? Really? Then why does 3D cinema on a saturday night cost $20 (USD 5) here? I know it costs way more than USD 5 in USA. Oh, I know, because people would buy the overseas version of Windows to pay less? Really? Really? Joe Sixpack will order Windows from Argentina (in Spanish for Christ's sake!) to pay less than the american version? Really? Oh so we make a castrated version of Windows, call it Windows Starter and sell it to all the poor bastards that don't deserve to open more than THREE apps at a time.
Really? Really, FUCK Microsoft, Sony, and every other company that doesn't give a fuck about the third world and then comes whining when they are "losing" a "potential" market share. Potential my ass: you won't sell your crap for what you want to charge.
Thank God we have piracy (because open source just doesn't do it sometimes).
Meh, I used OO.org for some graphs for my master's thesis and for work. Had lots of instability with graph formatting and consistent crashes with drop-down menus a few years back. Had to struggle to manually install the latest bleeding edge OO.org (3.2 at the time) that finally addressed some of these issues... the versions packaged for my distros were a tad too old. So I understand when people knock at OO.org .
I can see where M$ is threatened by OO.org becoming the de-facto office suite, though. There's a lot of extra features (that are actually useful, like collaborative "track changes") in MS Office and some nice mail merge wizards that I still haven't seen in OO.org. But most people who do office style work have no idea how to use those features, and think I'm some kind of genius when I point out how they can simply autofilter a spreadsheet to generate different reports from one set of data.
For my part, I do little office-style work and still prefer LyX / LaTeX + gnuplot/octave + make for the occasional serious report generation I do. WYSIWYG is fine for quick and dirty, but gets very cumbersome and unmaintainable after a few chapters.
To be fair, OpenOffice does this as well. Two weeks ago I was creating a spreadsheet of contact information. Every time I entered an email address, Calc would turn the email address into a link, change the background color to grey, and then would not let me edit the address in the formula field. Don't believe me? Open Calc and enter "address@example.com" in a field, then hit return. The "lightbulb" helper (OO's Clippy) appears in the bottom right to tell me that "An URL has been detected and a hyperlink attribute has been set".
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
You run into the paradox of choice.
Microsoft ran into it and added the Ribbon which basically hid most of your choice. The feature is there but in some cases it took me months to find it again.
It may have a feature you need, but if you don't know the feature exists or where it is or what their name for it is, you may have a hard time finding it.
But otherwise- of course, you are absolutely correct. If your job runs around putting drop shadows and soft oval masking of images, then Word >>> OO (for now).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.