Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice Perhaps Microsoft's failure to meaningfully penetrate new markets like search has it scrambling to defend old turf like Office, but something is awry in the company's latest salvo against OpenOffice. Microsoft, with a gargantuan 94-per-cent share of the office productivity market, has seen fit to release a video beating up on …
When OpenOffice get that right (make sure that Excel Macros run flawlessly), then OpenOffice will have a chance on getting market share from MsOffice.
I, for one, don't use MsOffice from many years now, but I don't need to run Macros on my xls docs. For people that do need it, it's a deal breaker.
Actually, that's all they should be working on! Then they can start improving on other areas...
>Actually, that's all they should be working on! Then they can start improving on other areas...
Trouble is they is ever-shrinking in a Sunless world - best you can hope for are bug and stability fixes.
Can understand MS's angle in that there's much trumpet blowing when councils, school districts and big corporations announce their move to OOO, but very little noise when they go back to MSO the following year with tails between their legs.
MS compatibility between it's own versions is atrocious.
A little while back, SWMBO was filling in a job app - Word .DOC, basically a table with multiple protected boxes.
It was about 75+ pages of complete horror on Word 2k7 on her Vista laptop.
It was 99% bob-on-perfect on OOo on my Ubuntu laptop...
Never written one. But never use Windows either. Someone sends me a DOCX I send them an ODT.
I don't see that Open Office needs to compensate I see it that people need to use Open Office.
Up hill struggle, of course, but to all those at home with stolen, dodgy, old, incompatible with any other version of M$ Office I say Open Office is a no brainer.
I send all external documents in PDF as generally I don't want the receiver to be editing them, but on the rare occasion that when I send them an editable file it is in ODF. They complain they can't read it, I send them to the plugin page. They complain it costs them $$, I tell 'em that MS Office would cost me more than the plugin will cost them. Deal with it.
Now MS is supporting ODF, perhaps this will change, but somehow I have a feeling that it will not.
I think the macros angle is a red herring. People with that much time and effort embedded will not switch - it's hard enough for them to move versions.
I think Barmy Ballmer probably sees that cash-strapped Governments may well be considering the move. Especially given the talk on open standards and contracts broken down into segments to allow all and sundry to bid etc. Once Central Government moves away then Regional and Local Government will doubtless follow. This could make a big dent in revenues - more so given Governments undoubtedly get tooled on their license fees compared to corporates. They may, for once, have MS by the balls - "we have no money so strike a great license deal or we'll get open source on the go".
... one of the great write-only development environments.
How many professional developers know the sinking feeling when somebody says, "We've got this Excel spreadsheet that does lots of clever stuff in macros. Trouble is, the accounts person who wrote it has left the company. Can you fix/enhance/explain it for us?"
A Junior Engineer at an ex employer was once directed to move the entire Fortran industrial production package over to (only) one Lotus123 spreadsheet complete with a maze of reference cells and macros. This was a temporary fix to get it off the obsolete Data General Mini.There was no documentation in the file at all. It was a hideous and terrifying thing to behold. Happily, later that production package was rerouted to a Sun workstation running Fortran.
Spreadsheet macros rock!
One thing I spotted during my years with a major pharma was that some people would write a lot of macros, and often got quite good at it but in the vast majority of cases they could have done the same jobs more transparently by just using the spreadsheet functions. Also many people just blindly copied the macros (warts and all) and were oblivious to quite ludicrous results.
>> When OpenOffice get that right (make sure that Excel Macros run flawlessly)
Macros are a feature that include vendor lock-in by design. Microsoft most definitely does not want others to dabble in their costly, proprietary products. They change and add code and specs all the time not only to add features (sometimes known as bloat) but also to complicate compatibility issues. Reverse engineering a moving target is far from easy. Blame Microsoft before blaming OpenOffice.org.
Given that only a small proportion of Spreadsheet users need Macros if Macros is the reason people use Excell Microsoft would be in real trouble.
Same holds true for word processing. For most of what people use Word for WORDPAD would be sufficient.
At the end of the day its just document format, the herd mentality, and security fixes and support why most people upgrade their MS Office or use it any at all.
I personally use OpenOffice and Google DOCS for most every day needs. Also have Office 95 running in CrossOver Office for the but never use it. I have not used an EXCELL macro since early 1998.
"Given that only a small proportion of Spreadsheet users need Macros if Macros is the reason people use Excell Microsoft would be in real trouble."
Funny. I recall a report that Excell macros is the most used programming language in the *world* (DDJ. Special edition on small languages) , partly because people don't feel as if they are *are* programming.
Unless OO can offer that level of comfort to those people (the sort of people who use spreadsheets to do tricky stuff tend to be the sort of people who can sign cheques in companies but think programming is for nerdy propeller heads) it will *not* have mass market acceptance and remain <10% of market (although there was a time when it was <5%)
I am neither OO-phile or OO-phobe. I use OO and have written some fairly extensive macros in Excell. BTW the looping paradigm Excel tends to encourage seems to be *exactly* the way some parallel functional programming languages seem to operate.
"OpenOffice [is] little more than a rerun of the best and worst of Microsoft Office."
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. People use Office because they HAVE to, not because anyone actually likes its interface or horrible format-over-content paradigm. OO is just as horrible, but at least it works on more platforms, is more-or-less compatible with MS Office, and doesn't come with a price tag that adds insult to injury.
In the past I've chucked away MS offerings with new machines, preferring what I bought and OO. Today things step up a gear with my first fully Linux based machine.
I've used MS since at least Windows 2 x, watched the whole thing develop and have had some very good moments. However and with regret change is sweeping through this little office, not least because I regard the MS Office package as filled with security threats and ill deserving of the market % it has (a % that attracts people who write exploits, incidentally).
I don't want MS to die. I don't want Apple to supplant them. I want a more vibrant market, with recognised document standards with which a healthy variety of packages - open source and commercial - are capable of complying.
The among the things that I dread most of all are large, ponderous, over powerful corporations and a lack of alternatives. MS has too much power for my comfort.
"I don't want MS to die. I don't want Apple to supplant them. I want a more vibrant market, with recognised document standards with which a healthy variety of packages - open source and commercial - are capable of complying."
A beautiful idea which shows the Rev Smith's "Invisible Hand" at work , marred only by one *small* blemish.
Microsoft might *loose*.
What did you think MS's efforts with their bogus international office documents standard was all about?
The prime benefit of having an effective monopoly is to charge people through the nose and the prime decisions companies in such a position make is to work out what will extend their monopoly further or cripple *any* challenges to it.
MS idea of "competition" is any word/excel/powerpoint format you like.
You will pry an increase in *any* one else's share of the office software market from the cold dead hand of Steve Ballmer himself.
But it's still a nice illusion.
> I don't deign to speak for Sir Spork, but for me, I mean "work on"
OK - bearing in mind this is _way_ beyond my normal area of usage but what I understand you...
- can import the diagrams into OO as SVG/CGM or similar (which Visio can export easily enough)
- can create UML-like diagrams within OO, but it's (or was) missing proper UML labels/symbols etc and has somewhat limited functionality.
- probably wouldn't want to use the diagramming tool in OO for any serious UML work/code generation anyway, in much the same way that you can't really/wouldn't want to do any serious work with VSDs in MS Office.
There was a proposal for a Visio import filter (via ODF) for OO Draw - but i've not heard anything about it subsequently.
If you want to do similar work, but without Visio, you could always try using a combination of OO and Umbrello (Dia seems to have some UML stuff, but IIRC is not as feature rich as Umbrello). From a limited play with Umbrello it seems decent enough (and has importing from C++ sources, which is of particular interest to me) but I know next to nothing about Visio to be able to compare them... i'd be interested to hear from anyone who has used both in comparable situations (e.g. ground up diagram creation, code import/export - not importing from each other)
MS problem with OO isn't so much "OO the product", but rather that OO's supporting community is the driving force behind ODF. A truly open format is a huge threat to MSO, because it makes it apparent that the vast majority of users have no need for such a complex package. Using ODF people can get by using custom webapps, goffice, koffice, abiword, gnumeric or whatever tool they find appropriate while only the very few who really need the advanced features have to bother with something as complex as OO or MSO.
The whole argument in favour of MS Office appears to be:
It's easier for new users... because they've used it elsewhere.
It's easier if you're sending out documents... because the other guy probably uses it.
It's easier if you're receiving documents... because the other guy probably uses it.
It's easier if you used to use MS Office... because your files were written in MS Office.
In summary:
Use Microsoft Office: it's not open or compatible with other products, so you've got no choice! Bend over, assume the position and prepare to receive 6 inches of pure monopoly.
It's all well and good saying that OpenOffice and its like are dead because trendier alternatives exist, but that in turn means sod all in a corporate environment. We all know that there are large sections of large companies still managing their data via macros in Excel 2003 (if they're lucky) and surfing the net in IE6. These people will be using Office for a looooong time to come, so why shouldn't OpenOffice try and pilfer them? And why shouldn't Microsoft worry about said pilfering?
Especially if you're the sort of cynical git who thinks that people might eventually swing back toward keeping hold of their own data.
Anyone else catch the lady saying, more or less, I fail my students if they don't use MS Office?
There were other comments in there too, but that one stuck out to me.
My kid uses MS Office at school and is expected to have it for homework assignments too. Not that use by kids is really important to their bottom line, but I'd bet a big part of the Microsoft dominance of the "office" world is due to indoctrination in the educational system. I had an IT VP (at a very large company - you know their name but that's all I'll say) tell me one time that they were catching crap from new hires about not using MS Outlook for their mail. This same company is now in the process of dropping eight-figures on a migration over to Exchange and the rest of the Microsoft M&C stack. Of course, the relatively popular use of Macs in college (i.e. secondary system indoctrination) is also a source of penetration into the corporate world - I've seen a number of companies successfully adopt a "you can use it but don't expect us to support it" approach with Macs.
I seriously doubt they would have spent any time talking about educational use (which has been extremely solidly Microsoft from what I've seen - probably over the 96% quoted in the article) without having entertained that train of thought. If kids grew up using OOo or Google Docs instead of MS Office, or Linux/Mac instead of Windows... they could have some serious trouble on their hands.
Only with PowerPoint. Teacher would not even allow the presentation to be shown, even though the presentation style they had been taught was so simple (background and basic titles and bullet points only), it could have been done using ANYTHING!
This makes Office Student and Home edition the only piece of Microsoft software that I have purchased that did not come bundled with a computer for around 10 years! (I do not copy licensed software).
>Anyone else catch the lady saying, more or less, I fail my students if they don't use MS Office?
I caught that, and what she said was that she failed them due to the bad formatting and presentation in OO edited documents.
If this individual really is incapable of reading mere text then she has a problem; if she is incapable of advising a student on how to produce a no frills document using OO, then she has a problem.
The formatting of a document has nothing to do with the truths it contains, and the way in which they are expressed. Using MS Office vs OO to make things more mark worthy? This is a new form of cultural relativism and I oppose it as much as the other forms, including multiculturalism, poly legal systems, and shrieking politicians who concentrate more on style than substance, and point to well formatted presentations as being more valid and true, for the benefit of gullible, evidence incompetent electors.
The article is not bad, and I like the general tenure (why does Microsoft think such horribly unspecific scraremonger is effective? It indeed makes them look petty).
However there is one big problem. Market share is not equal to (regular) revenue.
The biggest competitors of Office are not Google Docs and/or Open Office, but Office in the previous version and to a lesser extend, piracy. I think the article could have stressed that more.
MS shot itself in the foot with the awful Ribbon thingy. Most of us have kept our old Office 2003 versions because of that, and those who got 2007 are usually the ones using the pirated versions, because someone gave them the pirated one.
If piracy were to go away overnight, a lot of MSO installs would probably revert to 2003 ... or simply switch over to OpenOffice. Ditto with the Windows installbase.
If there is zero competition to Office, MS can sell it for what ever they like.
If there is an alternative to MS Office then purchasing managers have a stick to beat the MS salesman with and demand a discount.
Salesman, "Your new license will be $10zillion"
Purchasing manager to ITO "So hows the OO evaluation project going?"
ITO (crosses fingers behind back or not - who cares), "Oh fine, we've now got 3 field offices over to OO and are seeing very few problems"
PO turns back to MS Salesman, "Nope, I don't think so, for a $1zillion we can cope with our problems in OO, you're going to have to do better than that".
Ask BOFH he knows how these things work :-)
>> Nothing seemed to translate right.
If that was indeed the case then it's pretty clear implementation was a problem, and more than likely intentional. I can see occasional problems with problematic documents but if the IT staff couldn't get past 'nothing seemed to translate right' than there's a much bigger problem that school district needs to deal with. I've seen a lot of problems working with various versions of MS Office that are more complicated than MS Office <<>> OpenOffice.org issues.
At work we use MS Office. At home I use OOo. When working from home I take the .xls/xlsx, doc/docx files that have been put together by myself or co-workers and load them up on my PC at home in OOo ... and I've yet to hit a single real problem with it.
I wish I could say the same about the different versions of MS Office we've got installed at work (I think there's still a couple of machines with Office '97 on).
"Because OpenOffice just upset me whenever I had to use it. Awful software."
Well, it *is* an Office clone after all.
But seriously, it should worry Microsoft. Sure, if people have these loads of custom macros or other custom rigging, well, honestly they probably can't even go from Office 2003 to 2007 or 2007 to 2010 or whatever without some of it breaking. Otherwise, OpenOffice really does duplicate Office pretty well for most uses, well enough to really make people think twice about paying $100s for Office. Plus OO doesn't have that horrible ribbon.
What problems does OO have? Essentially the biggest problem is ALSO that it's an Office clone -- it's bloated, just like Office (with as many features as OO and Office have crammed in I think this is relatively unavoidable, although OO is quite a bit smaller.). It's interface is clunky, just like Office (and to those who want to mention the ribbon, sorry, strips of unlabelled icons are worse that the menu-based interface). It has people trying to use spreadsheets as "databases" (even though Office *has* a bad database included) and do page layout with a word processor, just like Office.
What the world needs is an MS-Works replacement (unless Im missing something...). I spent an evening trying to convert a friends Works document into something the rest of the world could read, without much joy (not having MS Office).
I use AbiWord and Gnumerics when I dont need the grunt of OO, but TBH they're both flakey and not software that I would trust or roll out to someone who I am defacto support for.
Worse.
I want to format a word, and it changes the sentence. I want to change a sentence and it changes a whole paragraph. Not to be taken exactly literally, but I certainly found it one of those do-what-I-want-not-what-you-want programs. Dreadful. More microsoftian than microsoft.
Still, I am using linux now, not Windows, so I guess I'll have to get used to it. Either that, or it'll be writing letters in vi again, like when I went from a manual typewriter to Unix.
I only use Linux and so Open Office is a given. My use is mostly spreadsheets but my wife uses the word processor a lot and really had no trouble adapting, both to Linux and Open Office. She's a mostly-retired teacher who still acts as a consultant to her old school so was moving from Windows/Office. Remote access from the Linux machines to her school's Windows system is notably more robust and quicker BTW
Here's the situation: A company sees a product produced by a rival that is similar to something they themselves produce
Company type A reacts by upping their game to improve on it and win the market by innovation and/or quality and just being better in general. (Hey, it's a bit like how evolution works)
Company type B reacts by going completely paranoid and launching a massive slagging campaign to discredit their rival, regardless of the fact that what they produce isn't actually particularly good. Furthermore, the campaign itself is often full of misinformation or even outright lies, and the product they produce remains pretty much the same for years on end.
Why is it that I feel like Microsoft seems to fall into category B every single time?
At least 95% of big corp is Type B all over, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle; they all fiercely guard their OK-ish products and stifle any attempt by any Type A to produce anything that might be better than the recycled dross they're making.
Microsoft is looking more and more like the record industry, trying the cling to it's fiefdoms while the ground beneath them is eroded away. They couldn't answer the iPhone (or clue-phone for that matter) or indeed any fruity throwdown, Phone 7 won't conquer Andriod and now Office is under threat.
The moment anyone designs a real SQL Server alternative and get big corp using it Microsoft will find it under attack on all fronts.
Which oddly enough is STILL more expensive than FREE...
New game or meal out + OOo
vs
MS Office OEM/Home
Hmmmm - I've never yet had to do anything at home that's required my use of MS Office over OOo - to be fair, I've never yet had to do anything that's required the full "complexity" of MS Office anywhere, ever.
MS Office... riddled with bugs, that have been in place since the '97 versions and earlier. Never fixed, just crappy new interfaces slapped on top of the same old code. Of course, there's the half baked "integration" with sharepoint and other junk to try to leverage more lock-in, but these features are barely used ever - partly because very few want them but also because they're invariably unstable and unusable as hell.
Not that OO is perfect, but it's come to the rescue on many occasions to recover a document that office has mangled beyond all recognition and is a less trying recovery tool for documents that wordpad (for .doc files)
"Not that OO is perfect, but it's come to the rescue on many occasions to recover a document that office has mangled beyond all recognition and is a less trying recovery tool for documents that [sic] wordpad (for .doc files)"
Funny you should mention that. A local business has sent me Excel files that they are unable to open using, um, Excel. OO.o Calc (on a Debian box) opens them just fine, so I save-as a renamed .xls file and send them back. They can then open them, at least, and fix any corruptions. Usually, OO.o has opened and saved the spreadsheets perfectly.
Oddly, I can't talk them into simply installing OO.o for themselves. :shrug:
After YEARS of suffering incomprehensible insanity, demoralisation, frustration, and an acute vertical learning curve - at the hands of Microsoft and their "really shit is good enough" operating systems and software..... (or let the consumers sort it out - and then charge them again for another upgrade in 2 or 3 years time)
Since MS have been a real barrel of monkeys, I have also been looking for solutions to the MS shitfest of corporate crapware sourced problems, I have been looking to solutions to them and for escape routes from them.....
Linux - in the variant called Ubuntu - and Open Office; along with a HUGE swathe of generally really excellent software has grown and developed - meaning that the folks at Microsoft can stick their products up their arses....
I reckon it's sooooooo good to see all the MS Anti-Fans sticking the knives in......
And I ask myself why are the so well informed, so adversarial towards Microsoft?
Why has Microsoft made so many visciferal enemies?
Let me see...
Killing off backward compatibility with their own products.
Killing off interoperability with other software.
Selling buggy - as in really buggy software.
Making so incredibly hackable operating systems - with NO firewall, no anti-malware, and the most fragmented (in 10 different areas) security settings...
Ripping off customers... by charging people in the USA one price and everyone else double - and then bullshitting their way out of that with excuses like "Oh we charge double to account for currency fluctuations".
Rigging the ISO certification process to make xhml (or docx or whatever) a formal standard.... MS's own formal standard.
The fucking cancer that this company is with it's cash grabbing vertical integration and forced repeat buying cycles.....
Oh damn... I migrated gradually over to Linux.... NEVER going back.
Microsofts shifty secretive shitware is neither worth the cost nor the hassles.
Microsoft is far from alone in that nice little earner, sorry, I mean con trick.
Same with operating systems. Went through a long sales demonstration for a reporting package that we knew we would be quite keen on, and were. We didn't mind that our enthusiasm was showing. In the final negotiations, somebody noticed that our servers were AIX, not NT, and the price got multiplied by ten. Excuse us, but there's the door.
We did it too: we got the Unix system at the Windows price --- just shows what bullshit the price structure actually was.
And... charging by processor power. Look: I have twenty users, I want a twenty user licence, WTF is it to you what Mhz those twenty users' tasks are running at? It's the same software, doing the same work, only just a bit faster.
Con men, the lot of 'em!
Errr... I think I may have gone just a *little* bit off topic. It's late. Coat please!
with the iPad getting tons of hype and everyone knowing Microsoft tried this for over a decade they know they have to get back into the market. But there's one problem and that is that Apple changed the game because they could, and did, go without x86. So now all Microsoft has is Windows CE to run on ARM and Microsoft Office does not go there. It is a big deal because without some way to hook into their market position, they have to compete on the OS level and Windows CE does nothing to help. Windows 7 might but it's huge, bloated, heavy on resources and to top it off requires x86 so that device would have to be a few pounds heavier or a few hours less battery life.
Bashing OpenOffice is their way of saying, 'so your netbook or tablet runs OOo, it's not Microsoft Office so you really don't want it'. That's all I can come up with since this does seem to be coming out of the blue. We also know that Microsoft is deeply involved with many vendors and what they are doing with tablets and netbooks and there's lots of Android talk these days. Microsoft just does not fear something enough to make it public without something triggering it.
First of all, I could not see the video (Sileverlight required?) on my XP with Firefox. Almost 100% CPU until closed down manually. Duh! Found some other Microsoft produced videos against OOo on YouTube instead.
Secondly, Microsoft seems to talk about the difficulty of changing from MS Office to OpenOffice.org -- how about changing from one version of MS Office to the next? I have had quite a few calls from my less IT-savvy friends after they upgraded to a newer version of MS Office. Calls like "How do I do this now? It used to be in ..." I cannot help anymore as I stopped at MS Office 2003 and have not looked at any of the newer versions. I have, in fact, not even seen the Ribbon in real life!
Thirdly, apart from big organisations (or organisations with very IT-savvy people), macros seem to be rarely used. And, as other people have said in their posts, macros can be pure hell to maintain -- especially when the original creator has left the building.
Fourthly, relatively few people use more than the absolute basic functions of the program and using MS Office is mostly due to apparent lock-in and the "Lemming Effect".
Fifthly, the cost of maintenance, especially in the bigger organisations that use more than just the most basic functions, is huge.
Sixthly, the cost of MS Office is too high (even the Student Home Edition or whatever it is called) -- especially when compared to the actual functionality used by most people.
Seventhly, MS Office interoperability with other products (even previous versions of the program) is, to put it mildly, seriously lacking.
I find it difficult to accept that so many organisations (especially public bodies) that seriously lack money keep paying over the top for MS Office despite having a number of perfectly good alternative choices. I also find it difficult to understand that governments accept that some solutions that most (if not all) departments have to report into or use, demand the use of MS Office. Some organisations cannot archive their documents unless they are in MS Word format!
I keep MS Office 2003 as I often have to deliver proposals and reports in MS Office format (by customer demand) and I need to be fairly sure that what I write is what they see -- properly formatted. This is currently not guaranteed when using other products to make MS Word files.
So, all in all, I do use MS Word, but only because it is the only program that "interoperates" with MS Word -- i.e. vendor lock-in. Sigh!
My employer has Office 2003. Then when customers started to send in those dreaded "xlsx" and "dpcx" documents, without a patch to be able to open them, we stuck OOo on to be able to do something. So they introduced an add-on? Well it was too late.
We may end up with a new version of Office when we get machine upgrades, but chances are we'll all be using OOo (or whatever it's called by then).
I most like my seemless experience between home and work. Not that we'll ever seem M$ Office for Linux that is.
When I compared Office 2007 with OO 3.1 I found that as we had used MSOffice for years we had a considerable amount of documents in this format.
When I tried to open the documents in OO, the formatting was way, way off. 50 page documents would turn into 60 pages, etc. extensive re-editing would be required if we were to use OO.
If we were to give OO documents to our customers then they would face the same problem. Our documents would look messy and unprofessional on their MSOffice package.
We simply can't afford the time to re-editing our documents or face complaints from our customers due to bad looking documents.
Until OO faces this problem and fixes at least this one basic problem it'll never be competition for MSOffice. As much as I like the principles behind open source software OO needs to get its act together!
P.S.
IIRC early versions of Firefox had exactly this problem when compared with Internet Explorer. The layout of a web HTML document looked very very different between the two Browsers. Only when Firefox page layout started looking like IEs did it take off.
Until the design becomes less flawed, there is no chance.
Create a simple document. Add some bullets. Save. Reopen and try print. Whoa, drunk document. Worse when coming from any other format. MS Word? Works first time every time. Even fixes the bullet breakages that OOO causes on it's own format. Word might be a dog - but a working dog.
Create a simple spreadsheet. Add some formulas. Save content as values-only. Open again. Whoa. Now try opening in Excel, as-is. Hey presto. Excel might be a donkey, but it's a donkey on speed.
I don't see the problem with office, and I agree with Microsoft's video.
£100 for a piece of software is literally nothing. It's a false economy when morons start saying "Well we have 60,000 staff who use Office, we can save millions by switching to OpenOffice."
Sure you can. But a million between our 60,000 staff is still only £100 each. And £100 each is nothing compared to the cost/productivity each member of staff can lose by using software which isn't as well supported. A few hours of my work has more impact to the company than £100, it's just not worth a false saving.
It's exactly the same as it used to be with office managers who are tight with biro pens. A box of pens costs next to nothing, and the time wasted pleading for a pen is better spend.
The cost of support and the cost when things go wrong are the real costs and the price ticket difference makes no odds.
...but in my company, and most of my clients AFAIK, we don't even buy pens, pads, and post-its for our employees anymore. Microsoft has been the sacred cow for years, why I can't really explain, but how long is that really going to last?
At the end of the day, if you're really comparing like-for-like (which we're not, not completely... yet) saying it *only* costs me $100/employee to stay on what I'm comfortable with is not going to hold water. Furthermore, when it comes down to management by homegrown spreadsheets (which we do where I work) vs. keeping our crap in a form on a web server somewhere... the desktop management costs add up quick.
In the future, I see a lot of pressure to continue reducing costs and at some point, it's going to start hitting Microsoft's gravy train. For 60k employees $100/per is $6M - layoff 60+ employees or tell Microsoft (and your users) to piss up a rope because you're moving to OOo? Maybe not now, but at some point I can see companies starting to bite.
Just my $0.02...
MS is worried that Oracle may once again take up the battle axe, this time pouring resources into OO. If Oracle can re-engineer OO into something that will lay OO-haters to rest, then MS has a fight in its hands...and mind you, Oracle can be one mean competitor...would be fun to watch the sharks battle it out
I've never found any reasons why a home user in need of an office suite would need to throw away good money to purchase Microsoft's costly - and buggy - product. Working now as he does for Canonical, Matt should be acutely aware of the fact that market share in a given field does not necessarily reflect performance and/or reliability differentials between the products available there. I agree his general point that Microsoft under the ineffable Mr Ballmer has looks more backwards than forwards, but badmouthing OOo in order to make it strikes me as gratuitous....
Henri
OpenOffice is just... icky.
Nothing they can't fix. And probably will fix. But at the moment if you need to create a document to meet a deadline and you choose OpenOffice, you'll be running into little niggles everywhere in short order. Not that the later iterations of MS Office are much better of course. And I suspect that is precisely MS's problem.
If there's something you can't do in Office 2003 then you're trying to do something outside the scope of an Office productivity suite. If you're a drooling simpleton maybe you'll find Office 2007 or 2010 genuinely more intuitive. But chances are, if that's your idea of intuitive, you don't get a lot of work done during your day job and should probably never have been employed to use Office in the first place.
1. Trying to watch the video: a typical experience to remind me what life was like when I used to use MS software. The video is in Sılverlight. I am redirected to download the Moonlight plug in from Novell. I have to restart Firefox. (ahh restarting to get things done, a friend of mine installed windows 7 on a Toshiba laptop last week - the install that comes bundled with the computer - and had to restart *54* times during the process). Then the moonlight plug in refuses to play the video. No error message, nothing, it just sits and stares at me.
Then I notice that there is a WMV download option. Click that and Totem (Linux movie player) picks it up and plays it without problems.
2. Excel macros. Designed to be incompatible. Not surprising OO has difficulty. But OO should try to fix it.
3. Office use. My own experience, in a University, where almost all computer using employees are graduates, is that totals in spreadsheets are *routinely* added up using a calculator, then entered in. Yesterday I got a budget spreadsheet in local currency, dollar and euro from our highly intelligent admin assistant. All the currency conversions had been done by hand. In MS Word, *nobody* outside the Computer Science department uses styles. We use OO and convert, if we need to send editable documents to MS addicts.
Yes normal MS Windows users should all use Wordpad. It does far more than they need.
4. Compatibility. True, Open Office cannot read my archived Word1.0 documents. Neither can any version of MS Word after 2.0. My Word 2.0 install diskettes have corrupted, so I now have to mine the text out of these documents and reformat if I need to read them. True Story follows.
Two naive computer user friends. A: "I cannot open that .docx you sent me". B: "Oh you have an old copy of Office, but that's easy. Just download OpenOffice, then you can read the document and convert it to .doc". As most home copies of Office (with MS implicit approval) are illegal copies - updateing to the latest version is hard.
5. Finally, yes, OO is a bloated beast, too. The time has come for different ways of doing these jobs. The average user is only using 1% of the features in these Office suites. Excel is often used simply as a *layout* tool (amazing but true).
Macros? Yuk. Macros are an ugly kludge from a time before even Microsoft Access, when user departments needed a little database but couldn't get the people in the IT department to approve it. Today you could set up a little browser app with a load of free LAMP tools.
Funnily enough, Microsoft are killing macros because they've moved developers onto .net. Developers really don't want to go back to fixing VBA now.
With Ellison now owning OpenOffice, and given his long-standing regard for the 'Softies, I expect the Vole is worried about actual *COMPETITION* (horrors!) in the office-suite market.
The Monopolist doesn't make much off all those OEM copies of 'Doze to the box-builders, but Office doesn't get discounted much, and drags the businesses into the whole Exchange/Sharepoint/etc infrastructure, where they can rake in the real money. Impact that and you truly start to cut into the bottom line.
It says something when a program is free and it still has almost no market share. And of course in the wonderful culture of open source, you can never discuss the problems or show the benchmarks. One of the main websites that talks about open office carefully segregates its benchmark results so you never see a straight-up comparison -- because open office is three or four times bigger and slower than MS Office. The open office spread sheet program frequently just crashes after a few minutes of manipulating a big excel file. If they want open office to gain market share, there has to be more than just a disinformation campaign...it has to actually not suck.
For what I use my office suite for, I'm not fussed. I have one version of office at work, a different one on my main PC and OOO on my netbook. I have to say though, that the worst interoperability issues I've faced have been from one office type to another. OO seems to just work more reliably than MS but its trade-off is that it can be pig ugly. Having said that, it's a tool. Yep, it's nice to have a pretty tool, but a shiney fancy hammer with a coloured grip still bangs nails into the wall doesn't it?
It is nightmare. At the place I work (large org), we stick with "ancient" MSO because:
"upgrade" from older version had created enough trouble for our template, macro, and not forget each version of Access is incompatible with each other.
Our file recording keeping software, only supports MSO, and only supports old version.
Budget isn't exactly good for hugely costly "upgrade" that will only break more things.
Matter of fact, if MSO can support earlier version better (like OOo does), it will be a huge improvement.
To those who argue "sending client word document", why exactly you want to do that for? Majority of things you send out from a normal business will be in PDF format. So you don't want client to change anything. For client editable form, I think most business would do it in online form of some sort.
that is the most surreal thing I heard coming from MS. Did anybody out there ever reported a problem and got it fixed beyond the "let's restart your computer" stage ?
man that is the reason why I tell people to go OO. If you get frustrated enough about some thing at least you have the possibility to fix it yourself. Granted you have to be a pretty good / amazing programmer but in MS software you can't even think about finding a solution yourself.
I'd venture to guess that 90+% of MS Office support is performed by non-Microsoft employees. Hell, I have a team of people who do nothing but manage Microsoft-stack M&C servers and it takes an act of God and Congress, and occasionally a credit card, to get Microsoft support on the line.
Maybe the rest of the world is different, but we use fully licensed products and I have very, very rarely seen anything of Microsoft support... and as a home user, I thought when a company OEM's Windows they are responsible for support. I've never contacted them for anything other than hardware warranty support.
"But the odd and sad thing is that, if true, it's Microsoft acknowledging competition in a market that five years from now no one will care about"
No-one will care about, at all, really?? Granted Microsoft's stranglehold on "fat-client" Office products will almost certainly become less significant, largely due to Google Docs and even Microsoft's hosted Office offering. If OpenOffice can hone in it's interoperability then as many commenters have said, it'll become a contender.
But we're still a way off in terms of mass uptake of the alternatives, cloud offerings still need to be proven robust enough for mission ciritcal work and I suspect that in five years the fight for the lion's share of a hitherto unbreakable market could just be hotting up.
I use MS office 2003 myself- I like it over 2000 for the little comments bubbles.
My academic institution keeps upgrading their software, they're on Windows 7 now with Office 2007. Next year they'll be on Office 2010, I'm sure.
But why? What will it do that Office 2003 does not? Every time they upgrade, they've moved another step away from compatibility with the cheaper competition, locking themselves in still further, so that they'll keep paying $$$ and effectively locking students and staff into academic version licenses at home- MS could still make a profit by providing the institution with free software and making money from their home computers.
OOo should stop worrying about catching up proprietary Office features post 2003 and turn its sights to streamlining the codebase instead. Fact is, it's very heavy on memory and takes a long time to open.
MS has 2 things going for it - their OS and Office.
Their OS is vulnerable to Linux and Apple. Office is vulnerable to OpenOffice and GoogleDocs.
All the rest of the MS stuff is predicated on maintaining the majority market share of either or both of the above.
That's why Bulliboy is crapping himself.
Not much surprising here. OO is far behind MS Office in terms of fit & finish, polish, etc. If your job is to sit at a desk all day and create documents and spreadsheets, the MS Office would be well worth the investment.
But for the rest of us --- who just write an office document now and then --- OO is more than adequate. And it's easier to install, no license keys to keep track of, no CDs to lose, no need to go down to the store or call MS for license verification. And it runs native on Linux.
That's why OO is a threat to MS. Not because it's better --- but because it's good enough for "the rest of us", which entails a pretty large market segment.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
