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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS 611

Posted by timothy from the left-to-right dept.
CaptainT writes "According to this article in The Register Microsoft office was replaced by Open Office in the Israeli employment agency. MS scorns the defection... This follows current Israeli antitrust legislation and the recent release by IBM and Sun of Hebrew support in OpenOffice.org. Is the Israeli Defence Force going to follow?"
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Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS More

Israeli Ministry of Commerce Picks OO.org Over MS

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  • IMO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:00AM (#7555867) Homepage
    In my opinion, Open Office still has many issues which need to be fixed in future releases to compete with MS Office. I don't know whether that was taken into consideration in this move, but certainly a step in the right direction for open source.

    • Re:IMO (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rebeka thomas ( 673264 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:11AM (#7555921)
      Certainly. You can look at it from anywhere between two extremes. "Open Office still does not compete with MS Office feature for feature" and "Open Office is not as bloated as MS Office".

      Not everyone needs all of the features MS Office "Offers". It's just another product with a wide range of features available to users, and it would be insane to suggest every user needed all features.

      More than likely the Israeli decision went to OOo because it contained the right features, or enough of the right ones.
      • I think the parent's point was that OOo was designed to compare and compete with MS Office and is hence bloated by design and default.It's not ANOTHER Office product by that yardstick.

        Secondly, Open Office on Linux is not even half as good or useful as OOo on Windows. When considering a shift from MS Office, Israel could've evaluated better open-source word-processors and spreadsheets than OOo - I think that was the point he was making.

        -

        • Re:IMO (Score:3, Insightful)

          by buffer-overflowed ( 588867 )
          Wow, you sure can read a lot from a little.

          Personally, I think the parent was just doing a from the cuff posting at best, and karma whoring at worst.

          And as to your OO point. Huh? OO is just as good on Linux as it is on Windows. I'll boot into Windows to check. Ayup, performs about the same.

          Still nowhere close to MS Office, but who uses all those features? All I need is RTF + Spellcheck for documents, and basic spreadsheet functionality. Then again, I'm not a "power-office-user".

      • Re:IMO (Score:5, Insightful)

        by croddy ( 659025 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:32AM (#7555999)
        I'm fairly sure the decision was based on Microsoft's failure to support Hebrew in MS Office for MacOS, despite supporting other right-to-left languages. this was mentioned in another /. story [slashdot.org] noting that Israel had suspended all contracts with Microsoft.

        I guess MS can't get away with cutting too many corners anymore ...

      • OpenOffice can't do page numbers easily. (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You need to perform voodoo and raise the dead to be able to add page numbers to your documents in OpenOffice. In MS Office it's just one click away.

      • Re:IMO (Score:3, Interesting)

        by NanoGator ( 522640 )
        "More than likely the Israeli decision went to OOo because it contained the right features, or enough of the right ones."

        I should hope so. OO risks getting a black eye if they're missing that one big important feature. Let's say, for example, they don't synch well with PocketPC. (Disclaimer: I have NFI if OO syncs with PocketPC or not. Though I invite clarification on it, I am talking hypothetically here.) Let's then say that PocketPCs suddenly become real popular with the Gov't. Ouch. Is the Open

        • Re:IMO (Score:3, Insightful)

          by johnnyb ( 4816 )
          "I should hope so. OO risks getting a black eye if they're missing that one big important feature."

          No they aren't. If it's missing, they will tell Sun "Fix this", and they will. No big deal. That's why you have a vendor. People have been working with Microsoft so long that they forget that the vendor's job is to SERVE THE CUSTOMER'S NEEDS.

    • Re:IMO (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rf0 ( 159958 ) *
      While I agree that OO does have some problems its got 99% of the funtionality most people need i.e. spell checking, basic formatting. Of course if you are going to start trying to link to DB sources it might fall over. However with it starting to get some exposure it might help to get some extra development money to fix all those little bugs

      Rus

  • Who do you root for? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm a staunch anti-occupation, anti-IDF individual because of Israel's brutal regime in the West Bank. But then I'm also an OOo supporter.

    I'm torn.
    • Hi,

      Exactly the same feeling about this story. But Microsoft is not the US right ? Two different issues here, and I'm not going to debate the former one. Finkelstein already did the job.

      However, this is a good step for free software, indeed. And I sincerely think that OO is able to cope with the requirements of the employment agency. I won't say what OO would be able to cope with in my opinion, I don't want flamewars over MS.

      Jeez, is this auto-censorship ?
      I need a cigarette...

      Regards,
      jdif

  • Outrageous (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:02AM (#7555878)
    Us Americans don't send them billions of dollars in aid every year just so they can go squander it on anti-American, pro-terrorist software. How can they claim to be our "allies" in the war against terror when they start using software based on principles of theft that Osama himself would agree to? This must stop. If Israel decides to go down the path of "Old Europe" and Red China we need to make sure that they don't do it with American tax dollars, which should only be used for building illegal settlements and killing Arabs.

  • Windows Office 97 not good enough for MS? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:03AM (#7555884)
    The best line is where Microsoft criticizes OpenOffice as having "the features of Office 97 at best". What, Office 97 wasn't good enough? Now they admit it!
    • What about Appleworks? Version 5, heck even version 6, has more than enough 'features' to write letters, reports, all that normal word processing stuff but doesn't feel bloated beyond beleif.

    • Re:Windows Office 97 not good enough for MS? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cmallinson ( 538852 ) * <chris&mallinson,ca> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:56AM (#7556085) Homepage
      Having "the features of Office 97 at best" is also how I would describe office 2003.

      Do others think that MS Office has added many new core features since then (and I'm not talking about getting clipart from the web)? My mother has been using MS Word exclusively for 8 hours a day since version 3.0. She knows and uses all of the shortcuts (she does not even use a mouse), and all of the features. I recently upgraded her from 97 to 2002. She has read the manuals, and can't find anything new that she would use.

      • Re:Windows Office 97 not good enough for MS? (Score:5, Funny)

        by jesterzog ( 189797 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @05:07AM (#7556312) Journal

        I recently upgraded her from 97 to 2002. She has read the manuals, and can't find anything new that she would use.

        Well it has that new revolutionary file format. Surely that has to count for something!

      • O97 Debugged! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hughk ( 248126 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @07:08AM (#7556744) Journal
        My version of the comment would be "the features of Office 97 debugged".

        Actually Office 2K debugged most of the features of Office 97. By the same token, Office 2k3 should debug all of them and some of the new features introduced with Office 2K.

        I agree with your mother. I updated much earlier but that was because O97 wasn't stable with larger documents or embedded objects. However, I now stick with O2K on my remaining Windows system.

  • A small step forward... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:05AM (#7555886) Journal
    Some of the best thinkers and code writers come from Israel. Given this fact, it is no wonder they resent outside monopoly control over software, albeit from the friendly US of A.

    OTOH, Israel should be latching on to stuff like AbiWord, Gnumeric etc. rather than OOo. The latter neither provides full feature compatibility with MS Office, nor has any specific advantages to be adopted as a standard.

    -

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by burtonator ( 70115 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:05AM (#7555888)
    Palestinians also announced migration to both Open Office and KOffice.

    When asked for comment Mr Arafat said "the Israeli and Palestinian people can't agree on much but one thing we see eye to eye on is that Microsoft is an evil behemoth and needs to be stopped."

    Many are optimistic that the new Open Source philsophy in the Middle East could one day help bridge the gap between two peoples and lead to peace.

    • Great post. However, more than MS Office, I suspect a different initiative from Microsoft will foster global unity - and that is Palladium / TCPA / MSNGSCB / DRM engine / whatever other name or form it acquires. MS Office is too small to perform this miracle.

    • unless... (Score:5, Funny)

      by danro ( 544913 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:14AM (#7556551) Homepage
      Many are optimistic that the new Open Source philsophy in the Middle East could one day help bridge the gap between two peoples and lead to peace.

      Unless palestinian coders are using emacs, and israeli coders are using vi, that is.
      In that case there will never be peace...

  • People are stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rebeka thomas ( 673264 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:07AM (#7555903)
    I'm reminded of when a large australian company changed to an OSS desktop solution, and MS decried this as "a blow for choice in the market". No explanation of how this could be possible, but everything is sound bites, a mere snippet of text that cannot possibly convey any real meaning of a situation.

    "The ... agency has selected an immature and unproven software package" could well be applied to anyone looking towards Longhorn.

    Few will make that leap of judgment to understand the hypocrisy.
    • The statement can be read both ways.

      The day will come when people buy software for reasons other than utility: fashion, conspicuous consumption, political affiliation... but today it's simply a matter of price and functionality.

      Microsoft can say what they like, but very few people will try OOo and then MSOffice and then choose to pay for MSOffice with their own money simply because of a sound bite.

  • MS is helping me deploy OO.org (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kris_J ( 10111 ) * on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:10AM (#7555916) Homepage Journal
    Because Office XP was so awful, we've stuck with Office 2000. We've just started receiving .doc files that Office 2000 can't open, but the latest release of Open Office can. Now, if anyone receives one of these latest Office files from outside, I just install OO. Everyone gets to keep their preferred version of MS Office while being exposed to Open Office in small doses.

  • Iraqi defence minister (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pingular ( 670773 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:10AM (#7555920)
    "There is absolutley NO Open Source in Baghdad!"

  • Some "behind the scenes" (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sun ( 104778 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:21AM (#7555964) Homepage
    The specific office moving to OO do not maintain their own computers. They are on contract from IBM, and IBM preferred OO to Word.

    The contract is global, and the ministry does not pay more (or less) because of it. MS received quite some scorn over that, as their initial press release was claiming this is going to cost 50$/station. When the correction came in that OO was used rather than star office, their corrected response was seeked. They declined to comment.

    Another twist is that the Mac angle was not raised, not even once. I believe The Register put it in because they were the first to flag that.

  • I wonder how well they did? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tal_mud ( 303383 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:30AM (#7555993)
    Doing Bi-directional text well has lots of pitfalls. E.g. the software has to recognize when you start typing in a number and switch directions (The number five hundred thirty one still appears as 531 in hebrew, not 135).

    Mixing left-to-right with right-to-left is even worse. E.g. when you are on the boundary between the two texts and hit the backspace key, which piece of text gets erased?

    Lots of other subtle problems to getting it perfect. I hope they did a good job.
    • E.g. the software has to recognize when you start typing in a number and switch directions (The number five hundred thirty one still appears as 531 in hebrew, not 135).

      Excuse me for displaying my ignorance, but surely there must be hebrew right-to-left mechanical typewriters? I assume that you could type digits on those. I doubt they could switch direction, so the typist would enter the number as 135 so that it would appear as 531, right?

      So, for a hebrew touch-typist, would a word processor that changes
      • This scenario has to do with misunderstanding the Arabs. This time, it's the europeans.

        As you may know, the digits we use are called "Arab digits", because the Arabs invented the decimal system. Around the middle ages the european found out these numbers. However, they did not stop to fully gasp how to use them.

        In Arabic, 123 would be read as "three and twenty and one hundred". This means that it is written from right to left, just like the rest of the language. Europeans, eager to read things from left t

  • Legal guidelines? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by morganjharvey ( 638479 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:33AM (#7556000)
    From the announcement:
    According to the guidelines set by our legal department, we cannot release the full product, so we have built a set of diff source files and associated documentation.

    I'm kinda confused by this one... Why couldn't they release the full source code? Is there anything stopping somebody from distributing the source after applying the diffs?

    -mo

  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) *
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • As an Israeli (Score:4, Informative)

    by Circuit Breaker ( 114482 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @03:43AM (#7556039)
    I must say it warms my heart - but I'm a bit pessimistic, you see ... Israel has got some of the best politicians money can buy; And, judging from the enthusiastic appearance of two of our ministers in Microsoft's latest "microsoft in the government expo" in Italy, I think Microsoft Israel is well aware of the commodity status of Israeli politicians.
  • ... mighty oaks do grow.

    It's a big step forward for OS when large agencies (goverments , companies, even departments) collectively switch - it focuses the attention. Microsoft's attitude speaks volumes here as well - lets hope they continue their PR nightmare :-)

    Simon

    • Re:from such small acorns (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BigRedFish ( 676427 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @05:24AM (#7556356)

      Microsoft's attitude speaks volumes here as well

      Glad someone else saw that, too. Earth to Redmond: In addition to being obnoxious, the "tight fisted" comment can be read as an anti-Semitic slur.

      So MS has painted themselves into a corner, and now they're kernel-panicking. They can't support Linux or BSD for business reasons, the Mac is a *nix box now too so it's out of the picture for them, and they've already pre-announced that their next Windows version can potentially, via DRM and copyrighted file formats, usurp the document owners' rights to their data. Why would one of world's most security-conscious states go for a deal that locks them into the world's least security-conscious software company?

      "Buy it or we'll call you names" isn't going to cut it as a response. And for some reason, I don't think you need "advanced enterprise features" to crank out form letters that read: "Dear [applicant]: Thank you for your interest in..." even if it they do read from right to left.

      Gotta give MS the Darl McBride Brass Balls Award though. It takes a lot of nerve for a company that can't even suffer the possibility of a hypothetical competitor cutting into its revenues in the future, to call someone else "tight-fisted" for not reaching into his pocket for cold cash right now, just to buy the privilege of paying again and again any time MS decides to "increase shareholder value."

      And then there's the delicious irony of IBM and free software being the spoilers. [theatrical-trailer-voice] Twenty years ago, he stole their operating systems, (clip) and plunged the world into reboots (clip), incompatibilities (clip), and perpetual upgrades (pause). Now, they're back - with a vengeance! (30-sec. action clip sequence to dark screen. Cue titles) Desktop Wars II: IBM returns. Now playing in Israel and the West Bank. In theaters worldwide next Summer. This feature has not yet been understood by the Software Association of America.[/theatrical-trailer-voice]

  • Nice sentence (Score:2, Insightful)

    by tmk ( 712144 )
    "The employment agency has selected an immature and unproven software package and its functionality is at the best close to Office 97", said Microsoft representatives. What exactly does this mean for Office97? It had no feature like PDF-Export or XML-Support - but was far more immature than OO?
  • I've heard piracy is pretty darn rampant there. You can buy ANY software product on the street for 2-3 bucks. Sure enough no one wants to pay $250 for a version of Office they can't reliably "replicate" to all machines in the department (and to home PCs of employees as well). There's a lot more to Office than just word processing and spreadsheets. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side in this battle is yours) there's not enough education about all the stuff MS Office can do. MS has to reali
    • Most home users copy, and even that is starting to change lately, with awareness promoted by the BSA, mostly.

      Most businesses buy. And when you buy, it costs here the same as it does in the US (even though salaries are lower).

      MS Office support for hebrew is bearable (not perfect, but it gets the job done). Compatibility of office versions with respect to Hebrew is horrible - numbers and punctuation are reordered, randomly it seems, when you save in one version and open in another.

    • Re:Is this the country where Office XP costs $2? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dido ( 9125 ) <didoNO@SPAMimperium.ph> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @04:59AM (#7556278)

      True, but with the BSA breathing down your neck, that's not such an attractive option. And besides, if you bothered to read the article, it says that one of the Israeli government's main concerns had to do with editing documents in Hebrew text, which is difficult to do with MS Office and is not something particularly high on Microsoft's priorities. They couldn't give a rat's ass about all of the other "features" that new versions of Word and Office had. The key feature they were interested in is not there. If they can't easily write documents written in their own national language, then what good is it? The version of OpenOffice they'll be using has this type of support.

      As I recall, the same thing could have happened around 1996-7 with Iceland, had a viable alternative existed at the time. Microsoft was slow to add Icelandic to Windows and Office 95, despite repeated requests from the Icelandic government. The language eventually made it into Windows 98. Sadly, no viable alternatives to a Windows desktop existed at the time. (Before anyone shouts, I hope everyone remembers what Linux looked like at the time, and whether anyone would let barely computer-literate government workers use it in the state it was back in 1996.).

      Internationalization and localization is really something that Free Software does very quickly and effectively, and something that Microsoft is particularly weak at by comparison. Perhaps the use of Linux and Free Software will begin to grow more rapidly in places where i18n and l10n matter a lot.

  • OO vs MS Office 2003 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @04:11AM (#7556133) Journal
    OpenOfice works great with all my files, in fact if it had exchange/templates it would be on par with MS Office 2003. Exchange in 2003 is faster, and has much more features. Syncing email is smooth as silk now over dialup/dsl. Visio has a great selection of icons, thats almost worth the price for the whole suite.

    The other day, I recieved a PowerPoint that MSOffice couldnt open, OpenOffice opened it, exported back to .ppt and MS Office had no problem opening that. Very impressive.

    But thats for work, at home I save money and use OpenOffice/Mozilla.

  • During the install of OO.org (Score:5, Funny)

    by rock_climbing_guy ( 630276 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @04:28AM (#7556184) Journal
    During the install of OO.org at the Israeli government office, the beast Clippy pops up

    It looks like you're trying to migrate away from Microsoft Office. What would you like me to do?

    Hit the big red switch and give you a few minutes to reconsider?
    Remind you that Bill 0wnz j00?
    Send an MS FUD press release to The Register.
    Commit harikari?

    That last one is one I have been waiting a long time for Clippy to offer to do.

  • I hate being the bearer of bad news... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MikShapi ( 681808 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @05:00AM (#7556285) Journal
    I'm as much an Open Source lover as the next FreeBSD religious geek, but the way I see the train going right now, here's where it'll get:

    DMCA is already in action. TCPA and DRM are coming on us in the next couple of years, we already know Microsoft's Paladium will be present in longhorn. Fritz chips are already being sold, and sooner than we might like, DRM-enforcement will migrate from our motherboard into our CPU. Microsoft, Disney, the RIAA and MPAA etc. have been lobbying Intel and AMD over this for a while now.

    This actually gets on-topic when the DMCA is used to trash competition, as in cases of 3rd-party-made garage-door remotes, printer cartridges and .. yes. Office suites that attempt to open MS Office formats.

    Once Microsoft uses the DRM-enforcing Fritz chip (which, according to the DMCA legislation, must be present in your computer) to encode their .doc/.xls/.ppt/whatever files, it becomes _illegal_ [in the US] for OpenOffice to attempt to open them under the DMCA. Unless this can somehow be steered away, OO is going to be beheaded swiftly and cruelly, and nobody will use anything besides MS Office, because nothing else will open MS Office formats.

    Many questions are asked about how this will affect non-US countries without silly DMCA legislation, and the legal answer is "It won't". The economic one however says "If there is no US market for products like OO, quite a few them may simply cease to exist". Add to that the unwillingness of many OS developers to contribute their time to an open source project that is used in other countries but makes them criminals in the US where they live, and where they cannot use their own project where they work.
    OO may simply not bother breaking the DRM on Office files for non-US clients. And that would indeed hurt Israeli clients.

    This conclusion makes me question the wisdom of moving an entire government agency to OO. It actually hurt me to say that.

    Cheers.

    • Re:I hate being the bearer of bad news... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 ) <tmh@nodomain.org> on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @05:42AM (#7556407) Homepage
      If opening a document makes you a criminal, then I say the sooner the better, then the general populace might understand that having corporations like MS run your government isn't a good thing.

      It's just as likely people will ditch MSOffice than OO. In fact more so - who will want to work with a package that can't save files you can open anywhere else (even on a non-fritz PC which will be the vast majority for many years to come - there are *zero* fritz chips in circulation at the moment). No company is going to use Word if they deal with Europe, asia, in fact anywhere else but the US, because their documents would be unreadable.

      OTOH I can't see MS committing that kind of suicide. They're not *that* stupid.

    • Re:I hate being the bearer of bad news... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by johnos ( 109351 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @12:24PM (#7559446)
      Good points, but the game is changing fast. Five years ago, markets outside North America (except for Europe) were considered irrelevant in the industry. Not anymore. Check out this interesting story [linuxinsider.com]. Or let me summarize the important points:
      • The Thai Government's cheap Linux computer program is a smashing success.
      • A local (Linux only) PC vendor has just passed HP to become the largest vendor in the country.
      • Gartner says that only 40% of new computers sold in Thailand this year had Windows installed.
      All this bad news after MS dropped the price of Windows+Office to US$37. If that's still too much, you can buy a Windows CD on many streetcorners for US$4. Clearly, many people are choosing Linux. Why do they want Linux instead of Windows? Because of a brilliant localization effort by the country's Linux community. The Linux Thai language support is far better, apparently, than Microsoft's. This leads to the interesting proposition that localization can be done better and cheaper by local volonteers. Product managers sitting in Redmond don't have the incentive or resources to compete with hundreds of grassroots efforts.

      Thailand is not an exception, its just a few years ahead of other countries. Remember in Jurassic Park when the glass of water started shaking ominously? Thailand and Israel are the first two ripples.

  • Hebrew Mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tomer ( 313505 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @05:27AM (#7556369) Homepage Journal
    The next thing the Israeli govement thinking about is to adopt Mozilla instead of Internet Explorer for use with internal web applications and messaging. In the Hebrew press we got few messages about it in the past week, but I can't approve yet how much seriously they are.

    The problem is that the Hebrew localization project [mozilla.org.il] for Mozilla still missing few features, because of [mostly] UI bugs in the browser.

    Most of the major bugs in Mozilla for Hebrew users can be found in this list [mozilla.org] (Tsahi is the person who did most of the l10n progress). Any help would be welcome!

    Hopefully, one day, we will get our whole goverment to use Linux on each desktop...

  • In the other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @06:51AM (#7556680) Homepage Journal
    United States stopped military/financial support for Israel. They will continue providing moral support though.

  • Virus? (Score:3, Funny)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:17AM (#7557057) Journal
    OpenOffice is totally missing VB macro virus support. Microsoft really have been the pioneers in bringing the virus to places its never been before.

  • OO.o good, MSO = bad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 1eyedhive ( 664431 ) * on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:24AM (#7557108) Homepage Journal
    I've been using OO.o for a few months now and have yet to find any big issues with it when compared to O2k.
    Tables are easy to use, page numbering may take a bit to find, but until O2k it was a bitch to find there, too.
    I like the integrated PDF export, something that if you want to do in MSO, you gotta get acrobat for a few hundred $'s... haven't had a problem yet.
    I just sold my friend on OO.o a few months back and he's used it more than I, just made up somthing in calc and exported it to Excel 2k/XP without a hitch (his machine is Windows 2000).
    I've also lightly used Linux as a desktop OS (i don't largly due to lack of good 3D support for my geforce4), and find the cross platform compatibility an outright godsend. I used MSO 98 for that mac and found i had to save as an office 97 doc and then open it, converting up automagically to o2k, breaking the reverse compatibility until i resaved as o97. with OO.o, the headache isn't there (though OO.o doesn't do mac classic and an OSX port is still on the way, i rarely use macs anyhow.)
    MSO stinks, OO.o is better, any flaws in compatibility is due to the stupidity of the closed source format used by M$. at least with the oo.o files you can open them with your favorite zip utility and see what makes them tick. (Oo.o files are just zip archives containing xml files with the actual formatting and content therein, unlike .docs which are some bastardized... thing.)

  • Huh! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by K8Fan ( 37875 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @08:45AM (#7557249) Journal
    First out of the door is the Israeli employment agency, which will replace 550 out of 700 users with OpenOffice. The contract represents a hardware win for IBM. Some 150 staff will stay on Microsoft Office.

    150 staff to remain on MS Office? Can you say "manager"?

  • Way to reduce HR costs! (Score:3, Funny)

    by k12linux ( 627320 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2003 @11:39AM (#7558969)
    From Article:
    First out of the door is the Israeli employment agency, which will replace 550 out of 700 users with OpenOffice.

    Man, that's amazing. I can think of a a few employees where I work that I'd like to replace with OO as well. I'm sure a couple could even be replaced with a very small shell script. [thinkgeek.com]

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