First: Yes, VBA is a big deal in the corporate world. VBA incompatability is a dealbreaker for openoffice in many situations. Anyone who doesn't know this is simply out of touch with corporate computing. You don't have to like it, that's how it is.
Second: Yes, of course VBA and Excel aren't the "ideal" solutions for many of the tasks for which they're used. But they're very convenient and quite powerful. It's like a mechanic using a screwdriver as a crowbar, hammer, etc. It's handy, and most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't work and it can end up costing more time and money than simply having used the right tool at the outset, but convenience is the overwhelming consideration.
Seems to me there's no point in having a discussion where both realities are not acknowledged at the outset.
My memory is that what really killed Borland was Phillipe Kahn's megalomania. Things really started going downhill after two things happened: 1) they bought Ashton-tate (dBase) for a *lot* of money (Microsoft countered by buying Foxpro) and 2) they were sued by Lotus for having a 123-compatability mode in Quattro. In the end Lotus lost, but by then both Borland and Lotus had lost time fighting.
My memory, possibly faulty, is that the compiler strategy you describe was partly a response to the losses in the office suite and database business.
See also Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman. It's a fascinating account of Glenn Curtiss, who in many ways did more to create the modern airplane than the Wright Brothers. For example, Curtiss invented ailerons; the Wrights by contrast had a difficult to control system that physically twisted the wings. But the Wright patents prevented Curtiss from selling his planes, and it was only military intervention that got the market moving.
This book will reinforce any ill feelings you may have toward the patent system.
I understand that many folks are pleased with the ribbon. I'm happy for you. However I am not pleased with the ribbon. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't have kept the traditional menu as an alternative.
When Microsoft experiments with a new interface, it also has a huge effect on the installed base. If 20% of users don't like the ribbon that's probably 100-200 million folks who've had their productivity shot to hell. Bring on the ribbon as an alternative.
I find that Office 2003/2007 has a "fit and finish" that is light years ahead of OO. There are little things like the visual indicator when you have copied a region in Excel, that I find I miss in OO. However, when 2007 came out I switched to using OO whenever possible because I just cannot stand the toolbar. (And I also think it unbelievably presumptuous to require all users to switch en masse between hugely different interfaces. It's either lazy engineering --- Borland's office tools let you pick your menu system 20 years ago --- or a deliberate ploy for lock in.)
I was being sarcastic, sorry if that didn't come through! As much as I love Linux, I have complete sympathy for Joe User. I thought your post was hilarious.
Open a terminal and type "apropos windows|cat -n". On my machine, Wine is right there. There are only 76 hits, and even a moron will immediately pick out number 39:
38 window (3ncurses) - create curses windows
39 wine (1) - run Windows programs on Unix
40 winemaker (1) - generate a build infrastructure for compiling Windows...
This is just one anecdote, but my institution just screwed up big time trying to implement a set of web services including a CMS. I'm a peripherally involved user. The implementation was such a disaster that the boss has put everything on hold. Best guess is that we will rip everything out and start over. It's that bad.
What's interesting is that the IT folks required, from the outset, the use of commercial products running on Microsoft server; open source was ruled out, and an expensive consulting firm was engaged to assist with the implementation. The folks pushing Microsoft have taken a big reputational hit, and the perception is that a Linux-based OSS solution (which some pushed for at the outset) would have been more successful.
So this is both to agree with you (the IT admins were terrified of anything not Microsoft) and to disagree (the result has been that OSS solutions now have a *lot* more standing and credibility, even though they haven't been used). We'll see what happens. If I didn't have to live with the results, it would be a lot of fun to watch this play out!
I use OpenOffice under Ubuntu (and MS Office only when I absolutely must). I agree that OO is slower and less polished. But I have found that it gets the job done, and the MS Office interface has its own issues (I'm among the hard-core ribbon-haters).
The great thing about IBM adopting symphony is that this should lead to improvements in the software. Nothing like eating your own dog food to make it taste better.
If Wine 1.1.9 permitted Office 2007 to completely work, IMO it would be newsworthy. But I am willing to bet that significant features in Office don't work. TFB doesn't discuss this.
As numerous other posters have mentioned, it depends on your field. The use of LaTeX in economics has been growing in recent years, and it is common if not standard in math and other technical fields. I published a textbook using LaTeX (the actual compositing was done using LaTeX and it's a beautiful book.) I've had other authors who used Word tell me they regret not having done the same thing.
I could become boring by reciting my complaints about Word, but I'll just focus on what happened when Office 2007 was introduced. Word 2007 uses a different equation editor than Word 2003, and the two are incompatible. So folks that upgrade found they had two versions of equations in their papers, and that no one piece of software could edit equations that had been touched by both versions of Word. It created a huge uproar where I work. Everyone I know detests Word; most use LaTeX via Scientific Word (in Windows). A few (like me) use Emacs.
I never used the old player but I have to agree that the quality of the new player (under Windows) is more than acceptable. I was surprised how good it looked (not DVD quality, but reasonable). I looked at the complaints in TFA and I've had a different experience.
I don't think parent was talking about DRM. Parent was talking about "windows genuine advantage" and the hoops you have to jump through to convince windows that you're a legitimate user. I have no opinion about the DRM stuff, but as someone who has always taken pains to make sure my licenses were legit, I find WGA and the licensing issues to be a total PITA. I agree with parent.
In part for this reason I switched 4 months ago from XP to Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier.
Let me elaborate on some of the replies you've received. I think there's a social component that needs to be understood. For background: I was an editor for a few years, have been an associate editor (responsibilities of this position can be significant or minimal, depending on the journal), and referee a reasonable number of papers.
The best academics view themselves as part of a community to which they can contribute and which in turn makes it possible for them to do the work they want to do (by funding their research, for example). One measure of the value of an academic is the number of others who cite their work. Everyone thinks about citation counts. Authors want to publish in journals that are heavily cited and journals want to publish papers that will be heavily cited. It's not just that top journals publish the best papers, it's also that the best academics send their papers first to the top journals. This creates tremendous inertia in the pecking order of journals with the result that it's *very* hard to raise the perception of a journal's quality. Journal quality is a consideration when publications are evaluated by tenure committees, because journal quality is a rough screen for the quality of the paper. It is not a perfect screen, but it is informative.
In many cases editors and referees are paid nothing or minimally, and they view themselves as contributing to this community. The best editors are generally highly-regarded academics who think that it is important to publish high-quality papers that others will find useful, i.e. papers that will contribute to the community. In deciding what to publish they use their judgment and they also rely heavily on reviewers. The reviewers in turn try to do a good job because the editors recognize the higher-quality reviewers --- they may ask them to serve on editorial boards, they will write them positive letters at a tenure review, they may take treat their papers more carefully when deciding what to publish.
There are lots of ways this process can fail: entrenched editors play favorites, referees suck up to editors and authors whose papers they review (even if the process is anonymous, reviewers sometimes reveal themselves informally), there is a "good old boy" network with favoritism, and sometimes outright mistakes get made. But by and large the process works astonishingly well, with the majority of players trying to do the "right" thing. It shouldn't work as well as it does, but OSS shouldn't work as well as it does either.
The publishers provide continuity in this process. You want to make sure, for example, that a paper published today will be available in 20 years; that if the editor gets hit by a bus, there is institutional backing to keep things going; that the journal has a quality web presence, etc.
Some publishers are leeches and I am appalled that the NIH access policy might be changed. But I think it will be a while before academia moves to a more open model. There will continue to be a need for a process to certify quality, and there will be a need for long-term access. Commercial journals, with all their flaws, do fill those needs.
Except that if you're running MC in gnome-terminal, F10 doesn't work (it brings up the window menu. Now you might say why am I running MC in GT, but we all know that linux users can't stay away from the command line...
I find the ribbon controversy very interesting. I completely detest the ribbon, and in fact I have used OpenOffice increasingly because of my frustration with Office 2007. At the same time, lots of folks I know agree with you.
I would love to know what user characteristics determine feelings about the ribbon.
The fact that it's a better editor doesn't help the people who are trying to collaborate with users of Office 2003 (who can't touch the equations produced by the new editor).
If this had been clearly documented, with suggested workarounds, I wouldn't be nearly as unhappy. But I have several colleagues who got trapped between the two equation editors.
Office 2007 (without the fix) strips out the VBA code from an old spreadsheet. It's gone. You can't see it. You can't retrieve it. You can't edit it to fix it. It's gone. I fully expect that with some future release a fix will no longer be available. If this were a matter of the syntax changing, that would be one thing. But if you save the opened file you've potentially lost a lot of work.
Can you point me to a comparable Linux compatibility issue? One where old documents are irretrievably lost due to an upgrade? (I'm not talking about the need to edit configuration files.)
1. Why did Microsoft make the equation editor in Word 2007 incompatible with that in Word 2003? (And yes, I know that they shipped the old equation as part of powerpoint 2007 and you could discover this with enough effort. But in my setting a few people upgraded and everyone else had to upgrade to be able to edit the new documents. No, the docx update for 2003 did not permit editing of the new equation format.)
2. Why did Microsoft ship Excel 2007 in such a form that it couldn't read old macros (circa Excel 95). In fact they have a simple fix for this, but it's not available unless you contact MS tech support.
I can see two reasons for these omission: 1) stunning incompetence or 2) a deliberate attempt to drive upgrades. I have a hard time believing it's not #2, but I have no evidence.
Just because it's FUD doesn't mean the F, U, and D are not justified.
The thing that always shocked me about Microsoft's UIs is that they do such a terrible job of implementing the things they're purporting to implement. Clippy's an obvious example. But think about right-click menus, which I always thought were a terrific idea but never particularly well-implemented. There are many times I repeat the exact same many-step procedure in Office. Why doesn't Office notice and offer to make a macro or menu item out of what I'm doing? Why can't I drag menu items to the quick-start toolbar (a feature available in many applications for well over a decade)?
There's so much low-hanging fruit in the Microsoft UI. For all the incredible brainpower in Redmond, it never seems like the people in charge have good judgment.
If you're creating camera-ready copy, I agree with you that LaTeX is a great solution. Just to be clear, however, in my case I did not do it myself and I did not create camera-ready copy. The books were heavily reformatted by the publisher (the compositor created a custom class and did a great job), but the equations and cross-references were left alone.
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I find these discussions bizarre.
First: Yes, VBA is a big deal in the corporate world. VBA incompatability is a dealbreaker for openoffice in many situations. Anyone who doesn't know this is simply out of touch with corporate computing. You don't have to like it, that's how it is.
Second: Yes, of course VBA and Excel aren't the "ideal" solutions for many of the tasks for which they're used. But they're very convenient and quite powerful. It's like a mechanic using a screwdriver as a crowbar, hammer, etc. It's handy, and most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't work and it can end up costing more time and money than simply having used the right tool at the outset, but convenience is the overwhelming consideration.
Seems to me there's no point in having a discussion where both realities are not acknowledged at the outset.
My memory is that what really killed Borland was Phillipe Kahn's megalomania. Things really started going downhill after two things happened: 1) they bought Ashton-tate (dBase) for a *lot* of money (Microsoft countered by buying Foxpro) and 2) they were sued by Lotus for having a 123-compatability mode in Quattro. In the end Lotus lost, but by then both Borland and Lotus had lost time fighting.
My memory, possibly faulty, is that the compiler strategy you describe was partly a response to the losses in the office suite and database business.
See also Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman. It's a fascinating account of Glenn Curtiss, who in many ways did more to create the modern airplane than the Wright Brothers. For example, Curtiss invented ailerons; the Wrights by contrast had a difficult to control system that physically twisted the wings. But the Wright patents prevented Curtiss from selling his planes, and it was only military intervention that got the market moving.
This book will reinforce any ill feelings you may have toward the patent system.
I understand that many folks are pleased with the ribbon. I'm happy for you. However I am not pleased with the ribbon. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't have kept the traditional menu as an alternative.
When Microsoft experiments with a new interface, it also has a huge effect on the installed base. If 20% of users don't like the ribbon that's probably 100-200 million folks who've had their productivity shot to hell. Bring on the ribbon as an alternative.
I find that Office 2003/2007 has a "fit and finish" that is light years ahead of OO. There are little things like the visual indicator when you have copied a region in Excel, that I find I miss in OO. However, when 2007 came out I switched to using OO whenever possible because I just cannot stand the toolbar. (And I also think it unbelievably presumptuous to require all users to switch en masse between hugely different interfaces. It's either lazy engineering --- Borland's office tools let you pick your menu system 20 years ago --- or a deliberate ploy for lock in.)
I was being sarcastic, sorry if that didn't come through! As much as I love Linux, I have complete sympathy for Joe User. I thought your post was hilarious.
LF sounds like a noob luser.
Open a terminal and type "apropos windows|cat -n". On my machine, Wine is right there. There are only 76 hits, and even a moron will immediately pick out number 39:
38 window (3ncurses) - create curses windows ...
39 wine (1) - run Windows programs on Unix
40 winemaker (1) - generate a build infrastructure for compiling Windows
What could be more obvious?
This is just one anecdote, but my institution just screwed up big time trying to implement a set of web services including a CMS. I'm a peripherally involved user. The implementation was such a disaster that the boss has put everything on hold. Best guess is that we will rip everything out and start over. It's that bad.
What's interesting is that the IT folks required, from the outset, the use of commercial products running on Microsoft server; open source was ruled out, and an expensive consulting firm was engaged to assist with the implementation. The folks pushing Microsoft have taken a big reputational hit, and the perception is that a Linux-based OSS solution (which some pushed for at the outset) would have been more successful.
So this is both to agree with you (the IT admins were terrified of anything not Microsoft) and to disagree (the result has been that OSS solutions now have a *lot* more standing and credibility, even though they haven't been used). We'll see what happens. If I didn't have to live with the results, it would be a lot of fun to watch this play out!
I use OpenOffice under Ubuntu (and MS Office only when I absolutely must). I agree that OO is slower and less polished. But I have found that it gets the job done, and the MS Office interface has its own issues (I'm among the hard-core ribbon-haters).
The great thing about IBM adopting symphony is that this should lead to improvements in the software. Nothing like eating your own dog food to make it taste better.
If Wine 1.1.9 permitted Office 2007 to completely work, IMO it would be newsworthy. But I am willing to bet that significant features in Office don't work. TFB doesn't discuss this.
As numerous other posters have mentioned, it depends on your field. The use of LaTeX in economics has been growing in recent years, and it is common if not standard in math and other technical fields. I published a textbook using LaTeX (the actual compositing was done using LaTeX and it's a beautiful book.) I've had other authors who used Word tell me they regret not having done the same thing.
I could become boring by reciting my complaints about Word, but I'll just focus on what happened when Office 2007 was introduced. Word 2007 uses a different equation editor than Word 2003, and the two are incompatible. So folks that upgrade found they had two versions of equations in their papers, and that no one piece of software could edit equations that had been touched by both versions of Word. It created a huge uproar where I work. Everyone I know detests Word; most use LaTeX via Scientific Word (in Windows). A few (like me) use Emacs.
This gives a new meaning to digital storage.
And when he's running linux and he "fingers" someone, he really means it!
I never used the old player but I have to agree that the quality of the new player (under Windows) is more than acceptable. I was surprised how good it looked (not DVD quality, but reasonable). I looked at the complaints in TFA and I've had a different experience.
I just wish they supported linux...
I don't think parent was talking about DRM. Parent was talking about "windows genuine advantage" and the hoops you have to jump through to convince windows that you're a legitimate user. I have no opinion about the DRM stuff, but as someone who has always taken pains to make sure my licenses were legit, I find WGA and the licensing issues to be a total PITA. I agree with parent.
In part for this reason I switched 4 months ago from XP to Ubuntu and I couldn't be happier.
Let me elaborate on some of the replies you've received. I think there's a social component that needs to be understood. For background: I was an editor for a few years, have been an associate editor (responsibilities of this position can be significant or minimal, depending on the journal), and referee a reasonable number of papers.
The best academics view themselves as part of a community to which they can contribute and which in turn makes it possible for them to do the work they want to do (by funding their research, for example). One measure of the value of an academic is the number of others who cite their work. Everyone thinks about citation counts. Authors want to publish in journals that are heavily cited and journals want to publish papers that will be heavily cited. It's not just that top journals publish the best papers, it's also that the best academics send their papers first to the top journals. This creates tremendous inertia in the pecking order of journals with the result that it's *very* hard to raise the perception of a journal's quality. Journal quality is a consideration when publications are evaluated by tenure committees, because journal quality is a rough screen for the quality of the paper. It is not a perfect screen, but it is informative.
In many cases editors and referees are paid nothing or minimally, and they view themselves as contributing to this community. The best editors are generally highly-regarded academics who think that it is important to publish high-quality papers that others will find useful, i.e. papers that will contribute to the community. In deciding what to publish they use their judgment and they also rely heavily on reviewers. The reviewers in turn try to do a good job because the editors recognize the higher-quality reviewers --- they may ask them to serve on editorial boards, they will write them positive letters at a tenure review, they may take treat their papers more carefully when deciding what to publish.
There are lots of ways this process can fail: entrenched editors play favorites, referees suck up to editors and authors whose papers they review (even if the process is anonymous, reviewers sometimes reveal themselves informally), there is a "good old boy" network with favoritism, and sometimes outright mistakes get made. But by and large the process works astonishingly well, with the majority of players trying to do the "right" thing. It shouldn't work as well as it does, but OSS shouldn't work as well as it does either.
The publishers provide continuity in this process. You want to make sure, for example, that a paper published today will be available in 20 years; that if the editor gets hit by a bus, there is institutional backing to keep things going; that the journal has a quality web presence, etc.
Some publishers are leeches and I am appalled that the NIH access policy might be changed. But I think it will be a while before academia moves to a more open model. There will continue to be a need for a process to certify quality, and there will be a need for long-term access. Commercial journals, with all their flaws, do fill those needs.
Thanks!
Except that if you're running MC in gnome-terminal, F10 doesn't work (it brings up the window menu. Now you might say why am I running MC in GT, but we all know that linux users can't stay away from the command line...
Guess I provided a pretty good setup for that remark.
Thanks for the laugh!
I wondered why that shell scripter was hanging around my office ...
I find the ribbon controversy very interesting. I completely detest the ribbon, and in fact I have used OpenOffice increasingly because of my frustration with Office 2007. At the same time, lots of folks I know agree with you.
I would love to know what user characteristics determine feelings about the ribbon.
The fact that it's a better editor doesn't help the people who are trying to collaborate with users of Office 2003 (who can't touch the equations produced by the new editor).
If this had been clearly documented, with suggested workarounds, I wouldn't be nearly as unhappy. But I have several colleagues who got trapped between the two equation editors.
Absolutely.
Office 2007 (without the fix) strips out the VBA code from an old spreadsheet. It's gone. You can't see it. You can't retrieve it. You can't edit it to fix it. It's gone. I fully expect that with some future release a fix will no longer be available. If this were a matter of the syntax changing, that would be one thing. But if you save the opened file you've potentially lost a lot of work.
Can you point me to a comparable Linux compatibility issue? One where old documents are irretrievably lost due to an upgrade? (I'm not talking about the need to edit configuration files.)
Thanks :-) I had heard the expression but didn't know the name.
Here are two honest questions:
1. Why did Microsoft make the equation editor in Word 2007 incompatible with that in Word 2003? (And yes, I know that they shipped the old equation as part of powerpoint 2007 and you could discover this with enough effort. But in my setting a few people upgraded and everyone else had to upgrade to be able to edit the new documents. No, the docx update for 2003 did not permit editing of the new equation format.)
2. Why did Microsoft ship Excel 2007 in such a form that it couldn't read old macros (circa Excel 95). In fact they have a simple fix for this, but it's not available unless you contact MS tech support.
I can see two reasons for these omission: 1) stunning incompetence or 2) a deliberate attempt to drive upgrades. I have a hard time believing it's not #2, but I have no evidence.
Just because it's FUD doesn't mean the F, U, and D are not justified.
Great post.
The thing that always shocked me about Microsoft's UIs is that they do such a terrible job of implementing the things they're purporting to implement. Clippy's an obvious example. But think about right-click menus, which I always thought were a terrific idea but never particularly well-implemented. There are many times I repeat the exact same many-step procedure in Office. Why doesn't Office notice and offer to make a macro or menu item out of what I'm doing? Why can't I drag menu items to the quick-start toolbar (a feature available in many applications for well over a decade)?
There's so much low-hanging fruit in the Microsoft UI. For all the incredible brainpower in Redmond, it never seems like the people in charge have good judgment.
If you're creating camera-ready copy, I agree with you that LaTeX is a great solution. Just to be clear, however, in my case I did not do it myself and I did not create camera-ready copy. The books were heavily reformatted by the publisher (the compositor created a custom class and did a great job), but the equations and cross-references were left alone.