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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."
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.
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
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.