German City Says OpenOffice Shortcomings Are Forcing It Back To Microsoft

The city of Freiburg, Germany adopted OpenOffice back in 2007, mostly replacing the Microsoft Office software it had been using previously. Now, an anonymous reader tips news that the city council is preparing to abandon OpenOffice and switch back. "'In the specific case of the use of OpenOffice, the hopes and expectations of the year 2007 are not fulfilled,' the council wrote, adding that continuing use OpenOffice will lead to performance impairments and aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties. 'Therefore, a new Microsoft Office license is essential for effective operations,' they wrote. ... 'The divergence of the development community (LibreOffice on one hand Apache Office on the other) is crippling for the development for OpenOffice,' the council wrote, adding that the development of Microsoft Office is far more stable. Looking at the options, a one-product strategy with Microsoft Office 2010 is the only viable one, according to the council." The council was also disappointed that more municipalities haven't adopted OpenOffice in the meantime. Open source groups and developers criticized the move and encouraged the council to consider at least moving to a more up-to-date version of the office software suite.

Comments

Re:Legitimate complaints.

[jellomizer]

Legitimate reasons don't count here.
Open Source is Superior, Commercial is inferior.
Anyone who says otherwise must have been bribed or just a shill.

Re:Too late

[LordLimecat]

More likely, the Microsoft-indoctrinated employees don't want to learn a new interface, and have spent the last few years whining about it.

Lets be clear here, the OOo interface sucks compared to MS Office, even if you ignore the lacking functionality.

Its a little unreal that people are unable to accept that some people find OOo lacking, and instead insist that "they must be doing it wrong". No, theyre not, and statements like this are why so many FOSS projects are hobbled by awful interfaces. Admit theres a problem, and fix it, dont tell the customer that theyre too stupid to use your wonderful product.

Cut the Fanboy BS

[sjwt]

As a new user of Open Office on Windows I am left wondering what's wrong with it, So far i've only needed to use Write and Calc but they have random crashes anywhere from 2 minutes into the program to 20 minutes, the Auto recover only saved information once in all that good thing I staged saving every few minutes. The spell checker just stops at times and nothing will happen so you have to restart and the copy past is very hit and miss as in at times you can not past, not from with in or from outside of OO.. For any application where you are paying ppl to do a job, that costs you $.

I can run MW3 with out issues, and Kerbal Space Program (very CPU intensive physics based, that can bring my system down to 3 seconds per frame) with out issues and KSP is in Alpha, sure I can "Get the job done" in Open Office, but I would not use it in any form of Business. Also the chosen Macro langue is painful at best, it may make sense to ppl with a lot of programming experience, but your general office staff or average Joe? no way..