The poster's summary is extremely misleading. The article is not about which OS is best, it's about whether OSS can grab most of Microsoft's marketshare. If you're basing decisions about "best" software on marketshare, then congratulations, you will doubtless be regularly promoted up the toady pole until your company goes out of business. Soon.
I'm not bringing in a strawman, I'm making an analogy. Sigh, I guess I need to stop doing that, since there's always someone who doesn't get it and calls me a troll. Let me make it perfectly clear for you: someone who has more important things to do than respond to an unrelated person's challenge, will not respond to said challenge. Follow me so far?
Yes, Gruber is calling them out on it. Which is a clever publicity move for Gruber, but does not have any bearing on whether their exploit is real. Unless you think these guys are more concerned over Gruber's readership's opinion than any of the other things they have on their plate right now. Maybe that's so.
So, if I put on my blog that I challenge George Bush to provide some proof of [pick anything that's ever come out of his mouth], at a mall of his choosing, and I'll give him a free laptop if he does it, and he never shows up, that proves... what exactly?
I'm sure John Gruber's blog is extremely important to John Gruber, but if some guys who are clearly dealing with a mountain of legal issues right now choose not to meet him at the mall, you can't take that as evidence of anything -- except that Gruber's pretty clever at diverting attention to himself.
Write me a ticket if you catch me speeding, but don't put a governor on my car that won't allow me to speed. Lock me up if I bash someone with a club, but don't handcuff me at birth. That's the way it has to work.
Torture me in Gitmo if I nuke Manhatten, but don't prevent me from enriching uranium.
In my experience, the vast majority of spreadsheet users do not use charts or even formulae. They just use them as very simple databases. In my company, every single person uses Excel at least once in a while, because that's how the company phone list is distributed. Spreadsheets are also used as shared to-do lists, bug trackers, requirements lists, and test matrices (despite the fact that we have specific software for all these tasks). Any time you have a little bit of tabular information to throw around, people reach for Excel.
In my eight years in office jobs, I have seen hundreds of spreadsheets -- I have only seen one person generate a chart from them. I'm sure it's different at other places.
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The poster's summary is extremely misleading. The article is not about which OS is best, it's about whether OSS can grab most of Microsoft's marketshare. If you're basing decisions about "best" software on marketshare, then congratulations, you will doubtless be regularly promoted up the toady pole until your company goes out of business. Soon.
I'm not bringing in a strawman, I'm making an analogy. Sigh, I guess I need to stop doing that, since there's always someone who doesn't get it and calls me a troll. Let me make it perfectly clear for you: someone who has more important things to do than respond to an unrelated person's challenge, will not respond to said challenge. Follow me so far?
Yes, Gruber is calling them out on it. Which is a clever publicity move for Gruber, but does not have any bearing on whether their exploit is real. Unless you think these guys are more concerned over Gruber's readership's opinion than any of the other things they have on their plate right now. Maybe that's so.
So, if I put on my blog that I challenge George Bush to provide some proof of [pick anything that's ever come out of his mouth], at a mall of his choosing, and I'll give him a free laptop if he does it, and he never shows up, that proves ... what exactly?
I'm sure John Gruber's blog is extremely important to John Gruber, but if some guys who are clearly dealing with a mountain of legal issues right now choose not to meet him at the mall, you can't take that as evidence of anything -- except that Gruber's pretty clever at diverting attention to himself.
In my experience, the vast majority of spreadsheet users do not use charts or even formulae. They just use them as very simple databases. In my company, every single person uses Excel at least once in a while, because that's how the company phone list is distributed. Spreadsheets are also used as shared to-do lists, bug trackers, requirements lists, and test matrices (despite the fact that we have specific software for all these tasks). Any time you have a little bit of tabular information to throw around, people reach for Excel. In my eight years in office jobs, I have seen hundreds of spreadsheets -- I have only seen one person generate a chart from them. I'm sure it's different at other places.