Very few other companies can revolutionize something as vast and as powerful as the internet while continuing to offer innovative new services.
I think you're giving them rather too much credit. They have a lot of business sense, and to give credit where it's due, obviously a lot of people find their services useful and their funding through advertising less intrusive than most. However, much of their stuff is hardly the innovation that keeps the Internet going.
There is little Gmail can do that any number of MUAs can't; sure, it's web-based, but for a lot of people that's no great advantage. Google Groups wasn't invented by Google, it was bought in, and even now it's nowhere close to a good news agent for Usenet stuff. The Fish has been translating web pages since before Google was a twinkle in its daddy's eye. The list goes on.
Since we're discussing Google breaking rules, I'm also going to give just a passing reference to the dubious legality of several of their more recent endeavours, many of which are close to violating copyright law when viewed favourably, and, viewed unfavourably, outright flouting of it: Google Cache, PDF->HTML rendering, permanent storage on Google Groups, etc. Some of Google's "innovations" are potentially quite damaging to people whose work they are using. (I'm not going to go into details in this post because we've done this one before. Search the Slashdot archives if you're interested in concrete examples.)
Give it a try, and see how much meaningful dialogue you get.
I hate to break this to you, but every report I've ever taken the trouble to file on a major OSS project has been marked WONTFIX or as a dupe of something that wasn't quite the same and wasn't being looked at anyway, with not so much as an automated e-mail to tell me of the change in status. Compare the comments and feedback on the MS site with say Bugzilla and they're both as helpful (or otherwise) as each other.
Do independent work on a contract basis building one-off utilities or small websites. Then you're self-employed, which even removes the complication of somebody dumber than you telling you what to do.
I hate to break this to you, but if you're going to go self-employed and work as a contractor/consultant type, then soft skills are going to be more important to your work than they would be working in a team for an employer, not less.
Re-read the EULA. By accepting it and installing the software you have agreed that they can.
That's funny. I just searched the EULA for my copy of Windows, and the word "audit" doesn't appear anywhere in it. I don't have Office installed here at home; are you telling me if I check my copy at work tomorrow I'll find a clause saying Microsoft can audit us? (If so, do you think it's legally enforceable anyway?)
FWIW, when I need automated documents, I use LaTeX-2e. It works really really well. If you want a nice front-end, I suggest LyX. Mailmerging can be painless if you know anything about TeX, and the results look very professional.
Word is used for automated documents in Windows simply because TeX has a foreign feel on Windows. TeX is infinitely more powerful.
Unfortunately, since LaTeX is a typesetting tool and not a WYSIWYG WP/DTP package, it's rather unsuitable for the job. Hell, just getting it to use more than the standard fonts is a chore. LaTeX is a great tool for some jobs, but the sort of things I'm talking about are not among them.
To illustrate the difference, suppose I'm a person with some ideas for and complaints about a Microsoft (or nearly any other company) product. How do I go about submitting my ideas and getting engaged in a dialogue?
I'm just pointing out that it is simply impossible for Microsoft to pay the kind of attention to all of their customers that they paid to you--they just don't have enough people or time.
Of course not; if all their customers had the interest in that particular area that I did and were as willing to discuss it at length, then we couldn't all have had the same luck. Fortunately for me, that's not the case.
What I don't understand is why some of you seem to think this must be some exceptional fluke. Something that came across loud and clear from the guy I spoke to was that the dev teams really wanted better contact with end users, without all the channels in the way. If you go over to the MSDN web site now, you can find links to newgroups, blogs and more where Microsoft guys get that chance. They didn't really exist in the same quantities when I had that conversation, so things have definitely been improving in this area in recent years.
Now compare and contrast with a major OSS project, like Linux, Firefox, or OpenOffice. They have far fewer "regular staff" than the Microsoft equivalents, and if anything their customers tend to be more vocal about their needs IME. How is their situation any better than Microsoft's? Putting a Bugzilla page up and letting anyone post to it is not the same as giving everyone a genuine say in how things are done, and the level of feedback you get from making such a request varies dramatically in both its depth and its courtesy depending on which area of which project you're dealing with.
I think your comments on "support policy" are drifting off the topic here. We were talking specifically about the ability of Joe Public to influence new features, and how this compares between OSS and (in this particular discussion) Microsoft products.
Generally speaking when bugs get marked WONTFIX or NOTABUG there is a good reason for doing so. [...] I am curious if you have a WONTFIX story to go along with your mystical Microsoft encounter. My guess is that if you do there is another side to the story that is compelling. What's more, chances are good that the entire episode will be easy to verify.
The one that bugs me the most right now is the new-mail notification in Thunderbird. A zillion people have asked for an option to switch off notifications for certain types of message (those identified as junk, for example). At present, there are something like 50 votes for that enhancement, and numerous dups in Bugzilla. The first request was filed more than five years ago. It hasn't officially been marked WONTFIX, but it's been idle for literally years and has no-one currently assigned to deal with it. Even Microsoft moves faster than that with so much interest in a feature!
You can verify this in Bugzilla for yourself, of course. They don't accept links from Slashdot, but here's the URL:
Equally, you're welcome to go back through my Slashdot posting history and search for the conversations I had with the Microsoft guy; they'd be around three years ago I think.
Does MS Excel have it built in? No. And the fact that you and your buddy are such Excel jockeys that you can hack this up in 15 minutes shows pretty clearly where your allegiances are.
I don't have any "allegiance". I'm at least somewhat experienced with most of the major office apps that have been around over say the past decade, and I use what looks like the most suitable tool for the job.
In this case, I really don't see your point. In the OSS app, someone wrote a specialised bit of code to achieve something unusual, and it worked. In the commercial one, someone wrote a macro to do the same thing, and it worked. That's great, everybody's happy. I don't understand your objection to having the feature as a "plug-in" rather than built-in; most OSS apps seem to regard this approach as an advantage. I also don't see what advantage you feel the built-in approach conveys.
Fair point about your friend's results. I should probably have added a YMMV disclaimer on my anecdote. (As an aside, do you know what was causing him problems? Word's frames and anchoring support is actually pretty good in recent versions, IME not far short of a serious DTP package for many things.)
about the problems you encountered - have you tried 2.0 beta ? are they solved ?
I hope several of them are; the features list does mention improvements to things like the word count and styles UI. Unfortunately we don't have a spare machine to try out the beta on, but I'm optimistic.
The kicker is that even the improvements (as described on the OOo 2.0 beta web pages) would only really bring OOo Writer up to a similar standard to the established commercial packages. That's great progress and the dev team should be congratulated for it, but I still wouldn't agree with the GGPP that OOo was actually better than Word, which is the claim I was disputing.
LaTeX is a very good typesetting system, and I realise you may be talking about something like Lyx, but that isn't really what I'm talking about here. I'm just looking for a simple-yet-powerful UI on the same kind of user-friendly WP app we have today, but with the emphasis shifted dramatically from as-you-go formatting to a template- & style-based approach.
The best way to get your interests serviced is to either spend considerable funds (relative to the organization you're paying to) or donate the expertise yourself. And even then there's no guarentee.
Yes. My point was simply that this can be just as true for OSS as for CSS, and the posts further up the thread that mocked the response you get from commercial vendors weren't entirely fair, as the anecdote I related demonstrates.
The difference between the two processes is that the Free Software process is out in the open. You can see the entire deliberation process, and if you are willing to get your hands dirty you can even participate.
Sure, but the fact that it's an open process doesn't give you any more guarantee that the response you get will be positive than the closed processes operated by commercial software vendors. Being able to see someone mark your bug as "WONTFIX" or "NOTABUG" doesn't mean you're any more likely to get the code changed.
I'll skip the rest of your first paragraph, since it's really nothing but a string of unsupported claims about how Microsoft works. If you care, most of them are readily disproven with a quick visit to their web site, where you can see first-hand the various ways they're trying to improve interaction between their dev teams and users.
The funny thing about Free Software is that for every truly useful requested feature that goes unnoticed and unfulfilled there are two or three esoteric features that would never be included in most commercial packages. For example, the other day I had a spreadsheet that I wanted to include in a document I was writing written in LaTeX. [...] You can't do that with Excel, even if you wanted to.
Sure you can, and in fact one of my peers did exactly that while typesetting his masters thesis years ago. The macros required must have taken him at least 15 minutes to write, though.
So, for some random reason, a Microsoft developer talked to you personally and actually listened.
It wasn't random at all; we started the discussion right here on Slashdot, and you can go ahead and search the archives for the posts if you like. After a couple of messages, he gave me his e-mail address, we went from there, and I have an archive of several fairly long e-mails over the next weeks to show for it.
The fact that you choose to believe that Microsoft staff never listen does not make it so. The fact that you haven't gotten involved in any of their more direct attempts to deal with their customer base doesn't mean they don't exist.
And by the way, you can check out the various blogs, Usenet forums, etc. Microsoft host, many of which are linked directly from the home page for Visual Studio on MSDN, if you want to see people interacting directly with Microsoft reps as a matter of routine.
I mean how good does it have to get to be considered suitable for the average office bod?
Business studies 101: For a new product to succeed against a dominant player with high penetration in an established market, the consumer needs to perceive roughly a 10x benefit: other things being equal, it must cost 1/10 as much, let you do the job 10x faster, have some subjective benefit of a similar magnitude, etc.
Since about office 2000, people have been realising that the approach of formatting-as-you go is stupid - like they already knew in HTML (CSS, anyone).
The sad thing is, it's been a well-known and well-used concept for serious typesetting for decades, but just as everyone's a published author in the Internet age, I guess everyone knows about graphic design and typesetting now we have word processors on our desk.;-)
As an aside, if I were designing a modern word processor/DTP system from scratch, one of the first big changes I'd make from most of today's software is to get rid of the prominent formatting-on-demand options. Instead, I'd create a robust, flexible, and most importantly easy-to-use framework for templates and styling, and put this at the heart of all formatting. The "Format Font" dialog box with five hundred settings that you can apply independently to individual characters in the document should be the thing that's hidden away where only power users can even find it, and the styling and template features should be on the top-level menu and toolbars, not the other way around.
Unfamiliarity would probably make this approach unpopular for the first five minutes, but experience says that an objectively better solution with clear advantages will catch on with a first wave, and then start to spread. In the long run, you'd do the world a favour by getting rid of most of the horrible formatting that so many people think is clever, even though it's actually harming the readability of their work...
The thing is, for the sort of complaint we're talking about, you probably didn't have to file the report on the commercial application in the first place, because most likely the feature was there and working years ago.
Whoever modded that a troll, I'm sure we'd all be most interested to hear what features Microsoft added to Office for you.
I've never requested a feature in Office, but I had an extensive discussion with a Microsoft developer on the Visual Studio team (after he posted here on Slashdot, curiously enough) a couple of years back. He was very keen to hear the views of an end-user, and ultimately I sent him several suggestions, mostly quite trivial and a couple pretty deep. I'm pleased to see that in the beta of the new version, almost everything I mentioned (both the minor tweaks and the "big ideas") has been added in some form or another. I don't know exactly how many people it takes asking for such features to get them in -- I'm sure I won't have been the only one asking for most of them -- but in they are, and the product is better for them.
Now, let's talk about bugs in major OSS applications with dozens of votes and/or dozens of duplicate reports that haven't been addressed more than a year after first being filed, shall we? "It's free, you get what you pay for" is a perfectly valid response from the dev team to such bugs, but then again, "Thanks, but I'll go use [CSS alternative] instead then" is a perfectly valid conclusion from the user.
However, saying that MS Office is always better than OOo even on Windows displays a great deal of ignorance regarding the different set of capabilities between the products.
He didn't say that. You said OOo was better than Word, and he called you on it.
I'm going to challenge your specific points. As background, I have been involved in producing publicity materials for a large club for some time, and we've been using OpenOffice because we can't afford Word and we don't break the law. These materials include multi-page booklets, flashy flyers, membership cards, event tickets and programmes, and more. I've also produced numerous articles, papers, letters, technical reports, and other document types in the past, and have experience with almost every major word processor that's been released in the last decade. In other words, I produce documents, of varying types, a lot.
Now, to your specific points... The number of limitations we have found in OOo Writer when it comes to things like complex layout and mail merge is enormous. The club's publicity officer, a very experienced computer user, gave up in disgust at one point and announced that the printed materials wouldn't be produced for a particular event, because she couldn't make OOo Writer do some simple layout that would be trivial in any other WP she'd ever used, even after looking in the help (which didn't). Next time around, she used a machine with Word installed at her office instead, and produced some excellent results in about five minutes.
This is not exceptional for our design work; in fact, it's the norm, and we're considering spending the money to buy a proper DTP package for use in future (no small thing for a not-for-profit organisation whose members mostly have very little money) because as promising as OOo looks, most of us find that it just isn't up to the job. As an experiment, I tried to produce the same results myself using OOo writer (as someone who's been using OOo for quite a while now), and eventually managed it after about half an hour fighting the terrible frames UI.
Your freedom of deployment argument is irrelevant; if OOo Writer doesn't do the job, it doesn't matter how free it is in any sense of the word. Your freedom from licensing audits argument is just straight-up FUD; Microsoft has no right to "audit" anyone here.
OOo's printing abilities are terrible. The printing dialogs are cumbersome, and related things like mail merging into a single document so you can tweak some of the merged pages before printing just aren't possible.
I could go on at length, but my purpose here wasn't to criticise the details of OOo, it was to criticise people who unrealistically claim that it is feature-comparable with Word. To most users, that is simply nonsense, and all you're doing by claiming it now is damaging any credibility OOo's advocates will have in the future when it really is true.
Throw in the words "professional" or "enterprise" and claim that "fill_blank" does not meet the needs of "enterprise users".
If you don't know the difference between the requirements of a kid writing a school essay and the requirements of a professional author when it comes to things like word count, then I'm afraid you are woefully unqualified to be in this conversation.
Comments about the limitations of the features I mentioned for non-trivial tasks in OpenOffice writer can be found in various on-line discussion groups/web sites. For example, a search for 'openoffice writer "word count" criticism' in Google turned up this plea as the first link. See also previous Slashdot discussions of OOo, the feature requests on the OOo web site, etc.
These features are all present for tick box feature list comparison, but the simple fact is that Writer's just aren't up to the job for anything beyond the trivial, while those in the established professional products (of which Word is the dominant one) are superior in numerous subtle but useful ways. This is not a criticism of the OpenOffice developers -- they're trying to catch up years of head start, after all, and doing a pretty good job of it so far -- it's simply an objective statement about the power of features in OpenOffice compared to the current market leader.
Besides this, more and more "enterprise" customers and professional users, see how silly those words sound!, are beginning to be concern about owning their data and having it encode it in a format that is perenially open and documented.
Perhaps, but not nearly as many as care about being able to read and write the format their customers use almost universally without risking accidental data loss. Playing the file format card is not an advantage to OpenOffice, and including the word "open" in your ads is no more an advantage than including the word "enterprise" (which I didn't).
At this point, I've decided never to pay again for an Office suite as long as Openoffice.org is around. There's no point.
That kind of complacency is why OpenOffice.org is still nowhere near MS Office for many serious applications. It just doesn't (at version 1) have the polish. For example, simple usability issue #1: how do you define keyboard shortcuts to, say, insert a symbol, or apply/remove a style? It's a word processor; I shouldn't have to reach for the mouse and click half a dozen times to do these things!
The same goes for things like word count or mail merge. These are basic features for a WP package, yet in OOo they have (at least in the current version) pretty basic limitations that seriously reduce their usefulness for professional applications. As long as this sort of shortcoming remains, OOo Writer will never seriously challenge MS Word in the "best WP package" stakes. Similar comments apply to Calc vs. Excel. Notice that these are straightforward quality issues, with nothing to do with which product has the current market share or compatibility with the incumbent standard.
Right now, the OpenOffice.org apps get at least 11/10 for effort, but while I'd give them 9/10 as packages for simple hobbyist use, they're only pulling 5/10 as professional tools where minor oversights are unacceptable. That's why professionals spend hundreds on MS Office, and will continue to do so for a while yet. The question is how well OpenOffice 2.0 can improve all the "little things" that make all the difference to professional users.
The law says, however, that a blogger/journalist CANNOT be held in contempt of court for saying "No, I will not comply with your order to reveal my confidential source."
You've given away your bias there by writing "blogger/journalist". If you claim that this law truly extends to anyone writing on any web page, then you're effectively arguing that anyone who doesn't want to reveal who told them anything can simply write on a web page that someone did, and then use the shield law as an excuse not to tell the court. The scope for damage in giving legal weight to that argument is far greater than anything we're discussing here.
Is £10 a month too much? Hell, I'd be willing to pay that just for the BBC News channel and BBC News Online.
Me too. It's lunch time here, and as I sit in the open plan office where I work and look around, I can see a page from the BBC News web site up on about half the screens in the room. There is a reason for that.
I have a mild dislike of some of the current arrangements to finance the Beeb, but ultimately, I'd rather have the good points about the service with the current somewhat flawed system for paying for them than risk losing the service in an attempt to save a tiny amount of money.
I take it that you've not tried Java? The OO framework is much more highly developed than C++'s and it is almost like a proper OO system; it bears no comparison with C++'s half-arsed system.
That's a fascinating description, since Java's OO system is basically C++'s with the addition of the top type, the removal of multiple inheritance, non-virtual methods and deterministic destruction semantics, and minor changes such as the extra access level.
You can start talking about the type system as a whole and arguing that late binding for everything and reflection are advantages, but then you also wind up with native types that don't derive from the "top" type and have to be wrapped/boxed/etc. to fit in with everything else. I'm not sure you can accurately describe Java's type system as "materially better" than C++'s when it exhibits this sort of inconsistency in everyday use...
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I think you're giving them rather too much credit. They have a lot of business sense, and to give credit where it's due, obviously a lot of people find their services useful and their funding through advertising less intrusive than most. However, much of their stuff is hardly the innovation that keeps the Internet going.
There is little Gmail can do that any number of MUAs can't; sure, it's web-based, but for a lot of people that's no great advantage. Google Groups wasn't invented by Google, it was bought in, and even now it's nowhere close to a good news agent for Usenet stuff. The Fish has been translating web pages since before Google was a twinkle in its daddy's eye. The list goes on.
Since we're discussing Google breaking rules, I'm also going to give just a passing reference to the dubious legality of several of their more recent endeavours, many of which are close to violating copyright law when viewed favourably, and, viewed unfavourably, outright flouting of it: Google Cache, PDF->HTML rendering, permanent storage on Google Groups, etc. Some of Google's "innovations" are potentially quite damaging to people whose work they are using. (I'm not going to go into details in this post because we've done this one before. Search the Slashdot archives if you're interested in concrete examples.)
I hate to break this to you, but every report I've ever taken the trouble to file on a major OSS project has been marked WONTFIX or as a dupe of something that wasn't quite the same and wasn't being looked at anyway, with not so much as an automated e-mail to tell me of the change in status. Compare the comments and feedback on the MS site with say Bugzilla and they're both as helpful (or otherwise) as each other.
I hate to break this to you, but if you're going to go self-employed and work as a contractor/consultant type, then soft skills are going to be more important to your work than they would be working in a team for an employer, not less.
That's funny. I just searched the EULA for my copy of Windows, and the word "audit" doesn't appear anywhere in it. I don't have Office installed here at home; are you telling me if I check my copy at work tomorrow I'll find a clause saying Microsoft can audit us? (If so, do you think it's legally enforceable anyway?)
Unfortunately, since LaTeX is a typesetting tool and not a WYSIWYG WP/DTP package, it's rather unsuitable for the job. Hell, just getting it to use more than the standard fonts is a chore. LaTeX is a great tool for some jobs, but the sort of things I'm talking about are not among them.
You might try starting here.
Of course not; if all their customers had the interest in that particular area that I did and were as willing to discuss it at length, then we couldn't all have had the same luck. Fortunately for me, that's not the case.
What I don't understand is why some of you seem to think this must be some exceptional fluke. Something that came across loud and clear from the guy I spoke to was that the dev teams really wanted better contact with end users, without all the channels in the way. If you go over to the MSDN web site now, you can find links to newgroups, blogs and more where Microsoft guys get that chance. They didn't really exist in the same quantities when I had that conversation, so things have definitely been improving in this area in recent years.
Now compare and contrast with a major OSS project, like Linux, Firefox, or OpenOffice. They have far fewer "regular staff" than the Microsoft equivalents, and if anything their customers tend to be more vocal about their needs IME. How is their situation any better than Microsoft's? Putting a Bugzilla page up and letting anyone post to it is not the same as giving everyone a genuine say in how things are done, and the level of feedback you get from making such a request varies dramatically in both its depth and its courtesy depending on which area of which project you're dealing with.
I think your comments on "support policy" are drifting off the topic here. We were talking specifically about the ability of Joe Public to influence new features, and how this compares between OSS and (in this particular discussion) Microsoft products.
The one that bugs me the most right now is the new-mail notification in Thunderbird. A zillion people have asked for an option to switch off notifications for certain types of message (those identified as junk, for example). At present, there are something like 50 votes for that enhancement, and numerous dups in Bugzilla. The first request was filed more than five years ago. It hasn't officially been marked WONTFIX, but it's been idle for literally years and has no-one currently assigned to deal with it. Even Microsoft moves faster than that with so much interest in a feature!
You can verify this in Bugzilla for yourself, of course. They don't accept links from Slashdot, but here's the URL:
Equally, you're welcome to go back through my Slashdot posting history and search for the conversations I had with the Microsoft guy; they'd be around three years ago I think.
I don't have any "allegiance". I'm at least somewhat experienced with most of the major office apps that have been around over say the past decade, and I use what looks like the most suitable tool for the job.
In this case, I really don't see your point. In the OSS app, someone wrote a specialised bit of code to achieve something unusual, and it worked. In the commercial one, someone wrote a macro to do the same thing, and it worked. That's great, everybody's happy. I don't understand your objection to having the feature as a "plug-in" rather than built-in; most OSS apps seem to regard this approach as an advantage. I also don't see what advantage you feel the built-in approach conveys.
No, but you do need the User of Supreme Incompetence +5 to damage it.
Fair point about your friend's results. I should probably have added a YMMV disclaimer on my anecdote. (As an aside, do you know what was causing him problems? Word's frames and anchoring support is actually pretty good in recent versions, IME not far short of a serious DTP package for many things.)
I hope several of them are; the features list does mention improvements to things like the word count and styles UI. Unfortunately we don't have a spare machine to try out the beta on, but I'm optimistic.
The kicker is that even the improvements (as described on the OOo 2.0 beta web pages) would only really bring OOo Writer up to a similar standard to the established commercial packages. That's great progress and the dev team should be congratulated for it, but I still wouldn't agree with the GGPP that OOo was actually better than Word, which is the claim I was disputing.
LaTeX is a very good typesetting system, and I realise you may be talking about something like Lyx, but that isn't really what I'm talking about here. I'm just looking for a simple-yet-powerful UI on the same kind of user-friendly WP app we have today, but with the emphasis shifted dramatically from as-you-go formatting to a template- & style-based approach.
Yes. My point was simply that this can be just as true for OSS as for CSS, and the posts further up the thread that mocked the response you get from commercial vendors weren't entirely fair, as the anecdote I related demonstrates.
Sure, but the fact that it's an open process doesn't give you any more guarantee that the response you get will be positive than the closed processes operated by commercial software vendors. Being able to see someone mark your bug as "WONTFIX" or "NOTABUG" doesn't mean you're any more likely to get the code changed.
I'll skip the rest of your first paragraph, since it's really nothing but a string of unsupported claims about how Microsoft works. If you care, most of them are readily disproven with a quick visit to their web site, where you can see first-hand the various ways they're trying to improve interaction between their dev teams and users.
Sure you can, and in fact one of my peers did exactly that while typesetting his masters thesis years ago. The macros required must have taken him at least 15 minutes to write, though.
It wasn't random at all; we started the discussion right here on Slashdot, and you can go ahead and search the archives for the posts if you like. After a couple of messages, he gave me his e-mail address, we went from there, and I have an archive of several fairly long e-mails over the next weeks to show for it.
The fact that you choose to believe that Microsoft staff never listen does not make it so. The fact that you haven't gotten involved in any of their more direct attempts to deal with their customer base doesn't mean they don't exist.
And by the way, you can check out the various blogs, Usenet forums, etc. Microsoft host, many of which are linked directly from the home page for Visual Studio on MSDN, if you want to see people interacting directly with Microsoft reps as a matter of routine.
Business studies 101: For a new product to succeed against a dominant player with high penetration in an established market, the consumer needs to perceive roughly a 10x benefit: other things being equal, it must cost 1/10 as much, let you do the job 10x faster, have some subjective benefit of a similar magnitude, etc.
The sad thing is, it's been a well-known and well-used concept for serious typesetting for decades, but just as everyone's a published author in the Internet age, I guess everyone knows about graphic design and typesetting now we have word processors on our desk. ;-)
As an aside, if I were designing a modern word processor/DTP system from scratch, one of the first big changes I'd make from most of today's software is to get rid of the prominent formatting-on-demand options. Instead, I'd create a robust, flexible, and most importantly easy-to-use framework for templates and styling, and put this at the heart of all formatting. The "Format Font" dialog box with five hundred settings that you can apply independently to individual characters in the document should be the thing that's hidden away where only power users can even find it, and the styling and template features should be on the top-level menu and toolbars, not the other way around.
Unfamiliarity would probably make this approach unpopular for the first five minutes, but experience says that an objectively better solution with clear advantages will catch on with a first wave, and then start to spread. In the long run, you'd do the world a favour by getting rid of most of the horrible formatting that so many people think is clever, even though it's actually harming the readability of their work...
The thing is, for the sort of complaint we're talking about, you probably didn't have to file the report on the commercial application in the first place, because most likely the feature was there and working years ago.
I've never requested a feature in Office, but I had an extensive discussion with a Microsoft developer on the Visual Studio team (after he posted here on Slashdot, curiously enough) a couple of years back. He was very keen to hear the views of an end-user, and ultimately I sent him several suggestions, mostly quite trivial and a couple pretty deep. I'm pleased to see that in the beta of the new version, almost everything I mentioned (both the minor tweaks and the "big ideas") has been added in some form or another. I don't know exactly how many people it takes asking for such features to get them in -- I'm sure I won't have been the only one asking for most of them -- but in they are, and the product is better for them.
Now, let's talk about bugs in major OSS applications with dozens of votes and/or dozens of duplicate reports that haven't been addressed more than a year after first being filed, shall we? "It's free, you get what you pay for" is a perfectly valid response from the dev team to such bugs, but then again, "Thanks, but I'll go use [CSS alternative] instead then" is a perfectly valid conclusion from the user.
He didn't say that. You said OOo was better than Word, and he called you on it.
I'm going to challenge your specific points. As background, I have been involved in producing publicity materials for a large club for some time, and we've been using OpenOffice because we can't afford Word and we don't break the law. These materials include multi-page booklets, flashy flyers, membership cards, event tickets and programmes, and more. I've also produced numerous articles, papers, letters, technical reports, and other document types in the past, and have experience with almost every major word processor that's been released in the last decade. In other words, I produce documents, of varying types, a lot.
Now, to your specific points... The number of limitations we have found in OOo Writer when it comes to things like complex layout and mail merge is enormous. The club's publicity officer, a very experienced computer user, gave up in disgust at one point and announced that the printed materials wouldn't be produced for a particular event, because she couldn't make OOo Writer do some simple layout that would be trivial in any other WP she'd ever used, even after looking in the help (which didn't). Next time around, she used a machine with Word installed at her office instead, and produced some excellent results in about five minutes.
This is not exceptional for our design work; in fact, it's the norm, and we're considering spending the money to buy a proper DTP package for use in future (no small thing for a not-for-profit organisation whose members mostly have very little money) because as promising as OOo looks, most of us find that it just isn't up to the job. As an experiment, I tried to produce the same results myself using OOo writer (as someone who's been using OOo for quite a while now), and eventually managed it after about half an hour fighting the terrible frames UI.
Your freedom of deployment argument is irrelevant; if OOo Writer doesn't do the job, it doesn't matter how free it is in any sense of the word. Your freedom from licensing audits argument is just straight-up FUD; Microsoft has no right to "audit" anyone here.
OOo's printing abilities are terrible. The printing dialogs are cumbersome, and related things like mail merging into a single document so you can tweak some of the merged pages before printing just aren't possible.
I could go on at length, but my purpose here wasn't to criticise the details of OOo, it was to criticise people who unrealistically claim that it is feature-comparable with Word. To most users, that is simply nonsense, and all you're doing by claiming it now is damaging any credibility OOo's advocates will have in the future when it really is true.
If you don't know the difference between the requirements of a kid writing a school essay and the requirements of a professional author when it comes to things like word count, then I'm afraid you are woefully unqualified to be in this conversation.
Comments about the limitations of the features I mentioned for non-trivial tasks in OpenOffice writer can be found in various on-line discussion groups/web sites. For example, a search for 'openoffice writer "word count" criticism' in Google turned up this plea as the first link. See also previous Slashdot discussions of OOo, the feature requests on the OOo web site, etc.
These features are all present for tick box feature list comparison, but the simple fact is that Writer's just aren't up to the job for anything beyond the trivial, while those in the established professional products (of which Word is the dominant one) are superior in numerous subtle but useful ways. This is not a criticism of the OpenOffice developers -- they're trying to catch up years of head start, after all, and doing a pretty good job of it so far -- it's simply an objective statement about the power of features in OpenOffice compared to the current market leader.
Perhaps, but not nearly as many as care about being able to read and write the format their customers use almost universally without risking accidental data loss. Playing the file format card is not an advantage to OpenOffice, and including the word "open" in your ads is no more an advantage than including the word "enterprise" (which I didn't).
That kind of complacency is why OpenOffice.org is still nowhere near MS Office for many serious applications. It just doesn't (at version 1) have the polish. For example, simple usability issue #1: how do you define keyboard shortcuts to, say, insert a symbol, or apply/remove a style? It's a word processor; I shouldn't have to reach for the mouse and click half a dozen times to do these things!
The same goes for things like word count or mail merge. These are basic features for a WP package, yet in OOo they have (at least in the current version) pretty basic limitations that seriously reduce their usefulness for professional applications. As long as this sort of shortcoming remains, OOo Writer will never seriously challenge MS Word in the "best WP package" stakes. Similar comments apply to Calc vs. Excel. Notice that these are straightforward quality issues, with nothing to do with which product has the current market share or compatibility with the incumbent standard.
Right now, the OpenOffice.org apps get at least 11/10 for effort, but while I'd give them 9/10 as packages for simple hobbyist use, they're only pulling 5/10 as professional tools where minor oversights are unacceptable. That's why professionals spend hundreds on MS Office, and will continue to do so for a while yet. The question is how well OpenOffice 2.0 can improve all the "little things" that make all the difference to professional users.
You've given away your bias there by writing "blogger/journalist". If you claim that this law truly extends to anyone writing on any web page, then you're effectively arguing that anyone who doesn't want to reveal who told them anything can simply write on a web page that someone did, and then use the shield law as an excuse not to tell the court. The scope for damage in giving legal weight to that argument is far greater than anything we're discussing here.
And indeed, employees who are under legally binding NDAs. I argued in an earlier Slashdot thread that the source should be disclosed in this case because Apple is on the right side of the law here and it would be inconsistent for the legal system not to support them, and that the "free press" defence doesn't work here.
Me too. It's lunch time here, and as I sit in the open plan office where I work and look around, I can see a page from the BBC News web site up on about half the screens in the room. There is a reason for that.
I have a mild dislike of some of the current arrangements to finance the Beeb, but ultimately, I'd rather have the good points about the service with the current somewhat flawed system for paying for them than risk losing the service in an attempt to save a tiny amount of money.
That's a fascinating description, since Java's OO system is basically C++'s with the addition of the top type, the removal of multiple inheritance, non-virtual methods and deterministic destruction semantics, and minor changes such as the extra access level.
You can start talking about the type system as a whole and arguing that late binding for everything and reflection are advantages, but then you also wind up with native types that don't derive from the "top" type and have to be wrapped/boxed/etc. to fit in with everything else. I'm not sure you can accurately describe Java's type system as "materially better" than C++'s when it exhibits this sort of inconsistency in everyday use...