MS Thinks OOo is 10 Years Behind 736
greengrass writes "In a recent interview with IT Wire, general manager of business strategy for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft, Alan Yates expressed the opinion that Open Office is at the same level that MS office was around 10 years ago. Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop, isolated user. After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
Perhaps it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates knows best (Score:0, Insightful)
Open source projects need to spend a little cash to get quality artwork that corporations have for all their products. This may seem a shallow analysis, but the truth is the initial appearence of the application does matter.
Perhaps it's ten years (Score:4, Insightful)
10 years behind? Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
Its all relative (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a word processor, then you wouldn't need care alot about the last 9 years of development (Office 97 had a pretty good WP).
If you do presentations, then Office is a few years behind Keynote, at least as far as slick graphics goes (and what is presentation software for if not to look slick?)
Its about getting the base function good enough
They're right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet.
Re:Perhaps it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, if I were to be brutally honest, I would say that this is one area where OO.o really isn't 10 years behind MS Office, it is jam-packed with seldom used functions, that however is the price of getting involved in a tick-box war with MS Office (which open office really has to).
Re:Gates knows best (Score:2, Insightful)
In general I do agree with this, opensource is in most cases not about the good look and feel as commercial products do. However spending the bucket loads of money on this as commercial products do is not a good option. I know there are open projects out there helping developers to get nice looking GUI's. I think that in general one of the aims of the opensource community should be to attacked more and more GUI designers to provide work in a GPL or Creative Commons license.
Regards,
Johan Louwers.
Re:Gates knows best (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure I understand them (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in the UK, MS has been running ads with people wearing dinosaur heads making comments like:
"I'm either here for the 11:00 meeting on the 12th or the 12:00 meeting on the 11th"
- Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?
The thing I don't understand is that all the "problems" the ads show haven't actually existed since around Office '97. A simple PDA with Outlook integration (which has existed for... oooh, some time now) would solve the problem above, for instance. The only reason I've heard anyone in business give for upgrading for years is "we're receiving a lot of email attachments in the new format".
I would argue that, this being the case, OpenOffice doesn't need to get "on a par with Office $NEXTVERSION". It just needs Office '97 equivalence and good import/export filters.
Snarky Response (Score:5, Insightful)
"Say, haven't you been having trouble convincing people to upgrade ever sicne Office 97? Does that mean OO is just one year away from being a software package everyone will feel comfortable with and have no need of new features, right about the time you totally change the interface for the newest Office and require offices to retrain workers?"
Re:Perhaps it's ten years (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ok. It's not as great as people say it is. Organizations that have the money for MS Office and want it, honestly, have a bit better product.
I do most of my writing in LaTeX if it requires any formatting, and coding in gedit. I use Kile, though it's buggy as it gets, just for the completion feature.
If I need a presentation, I use PowerPoint. I find the OOo presentation software to be a bit clunky. It'll open a PowerPoint presentation, but it doesn't look very good on the other side (this is stock Gentoo Linux... perhaps there are other bells and whistles).
OOo seems to run slow and with a lot of overhead. The interface is a little clunky too.
Now, I don't do much in MS office, but if I'm not using LaTeX, and have a Windows box with it installed handy, I'll usually use MS Office prior to using OOo. Usually, I'll use KWord if I need to open or write a doc. Honestly, the KDE presentation tool seems better than the OOo one, but PowerPoint still smokes those two.
ThunderBird smokes Outlook, honestly... if it's compatible with your installation (I'm thinking university Kerberos auth still doesn't work). The guy is right about the lack of email integration, but, honestly, all that ever did was irritate me. It facilitates group writing... lovely.
Most of my writing with multiple authors is handled via CVS, in LaTeX.
For spreadsheets I use gnumeric.
Plots and charts, gnuplot, which I think everyone on the planet uses.
Did I miss some crucial thing that OOo does? It's a nice product and all, but, the truth is, it doesn't match the hype. Firefox probably made a big ripple for open source apps under windows, but Firefox is an awesome browser. Firefox offers a real improvement over IE.
My Linux solution barely involves OOo. I think that I uninstalled it it a while ago so I wouldn't have to wait for Gentoo to emerge the update. I don't really think that the hype is justified, and I used StarOffice back in the day and everything. There's just, simply put, better stuff available.
They are probably right... (Score:5, Insightful)
While MS Office is '10 years' ahead of OOo, why are you afraid to compete with it head on through Open Formats? I'm betting MS has the resources to still stay ahead for a long time in the future and pave new ways of thinking.
The real answer I guess is that they find this to big a risk for their likings...
After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:10 years behind? Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
Multi-lingual support is better, especially Chinese and such using Unicode fonts. That may well not be a critical feature for many readers here though.
Re:Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Price. There's no way I'm going to shelling out £100+ for something I use occasionally.
2. Open Document Support. I am very wary about storing things in proprietary formats.
3. It's not Microsoft. Well, I am a Slashdot reader, after all
For these, I'm prepared to stick with it; as others have said it's improving fast.
Which share... (Score:5, Insightful)
MS WORD is like MS Outlook, it might have very useful features, but 95 % of the users do not need them. They buy a PC and Word is included, whether they need it or not. And office solutions developed for huge enterprises are probably not the best choice for private desktops.
Access (Score:5, Insightful)
Access seems to be a real selling point for Office to a lot of people. To a certain amount I understand why; it's incredibly easy to set up a "database-application" within hours.
From a practical, DBA perspective Access is the devil though. It's absolutely horrid as a database engine and I'd bet you that umpteen companies curse Access on a daily basis, since that "clever hack" somebody implemented 10 years ago is unreliable, crashes, is virtually impossible to maintain, corrupts the data and for some unfortunate reason it's "business critical" nowadays.
Another horror is the Access front end when it's abused by end users to connect to a real database. The queries submitted are just dreadful and I've seen numerous times ghost locks on pages, or even tables by such applications, which only could be released by rebooting the database server and that's pretty bad news in a production environment.
While MS SQL Server is a pretty fine product, Access really, really sucks shit from a database perspective.
Re:Not sure I understand them (Score:5, Insightful)
"I'm either here for the 11:00 meeting on the 12th or the 12:00 meeting on the 11th"
- Microsoft Office has evolved. Have you?
The thing I don't understand is that all the "problems" the ads show haven't actually existed since around Office '97.
Exactly, because it's Office '97 that new Office (what's it even called now?) is competing against. If you look at some of those adverts, it even has a dinosaur saying "We've got Office 97, is that good enough?" and the other replies "not nearly!". People have been saying for a while that MS's biggest competitor are their own old products, well now we see MS 'fessing up to that. Googling around you find bloggers and commentators annoyed and insulted by the ads. I don't think they're a great idea.
Re:Not sure I understand them (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be rich if I received a penny every time I notice someone trying to align text by just typing enough spaces to get the text where they want it to go instead of using properly aligned tabs, or selecting text over and over to change a font while they should be using formatted styles, the list goes on to infinity.
It's not that everyone only uses 10% of the feature set because that's all they need, it's because 10% of the feature set gets the job done decently enough to not want to bother learning about the other 90%.
It's only when someone thinks "a word processor should be able to do X or Y" and they go looking how to accomplish it that they stumble across a new feature and then use it consistently whenever it's appropriate.
Most of the comments I've seen so far indicate that all office application are just becoming too bloated and they stopped looking into them at version so and so but at the same time they show their ignorance about future versions. There has indeed been very little innovation for a long time, but if a new version can accomplish something in half the time it used to take you than that's a significant improvement by itself; the fact that people are set in their ways and will continue to use the wrong tools (eg features) for the job is a problem of education.
Re:Oh, get be back 10 years. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, it was perfectly possible to do seriously good typesetting with WP5.1. In fact, it was quite common.
In any case, you wouldn't necessarily have to run DOS; IIRC, WordPerfect was originally written for Data General platforms. I don't remember, though, whether it was for their Aviion unix clone, or whether it was AOS/VS only...
Re:Perhaps it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
That way, you could build a minimalist version and add the features you want, while leaving off what you don't.. It would be very usefull for secure environments too, where support for such things as macros will need to be removed.
10 years ahead. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the progress goes in wrong direction, time to change the baseline of the "progress" and move on to alternatives.
Maybe you should try Lyx... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No flight simulator either (Score:5, Insightful)
If some programmers at Microsoft with too much free time can slip an entire fucking _flight simulator_ into a business product and get it shipped past management, how safe does that make you feel about Microsoft products in general?
OpenOffice.org (Score:5, Insightful)
MS Office is a great lumbering beast. It has too many features that ordinary users -- the ones who do document layout using rows of spaces, type out tables of contents by hand and use spreadsheets as a substitute for databases -- are almost never going to use. It needs these features, because it is closed-source software sold for profit and every new version must have something that was absent from previous versions. {Software doesn't naturally wear out like cars or VCRs or steam irons, so alternative and possibly underhand methods are required to force users to replace old software with new versions.} The proliferation of "wizards" should already be sounding an alarm bell: if a task needs a "wizard" at all, then maybe, just maybe, some part of the user interface was badly designed in the first place. But the MS Office user interface is sacrosanct: if MS change it even slightly, then the alternatives will automatically become less unattractive {learning a new UI, vs learning a new UI and paying for the experience to boot}.
If OOo is ever to do anything other than play second fiddle, then it needs to innovate -- do something Microsoft Office cannot do. If the devs are canny, they will introduce a really useful new feature which would be very difficult to implement in Microsoft Office. {Note, I am not above a little "exercise of reasonable force" in the course of achieving this}.
I also think that my abovementioned pet peeves such as spaces-based layout are holding people back in ways they will never realise -- precisely because one of the things they are holding themselves back from, is understanding what they could be achieving. There needs to be a way to tell users "there is a better way to do this" -- and to figure out what they were trying to do, and do it properly. Preferably not by Clippit saying "It looks like you are trying to
It should also be borne in mind that OOo is no longer the only alternative to MS Office. KOffice is maturing rapidly, and has the advantage of having been Free Software from Day One -- there is no legacy closed-source codebase lurking in there to spoil things. As a part of the popular KDE desktop environment, it can easily find its way into many distributions. I have high hopes and great expectations for KOffice. Gnumeric and Abiword should not be discounted either -- they really fly on modern hardware, and Abiword can still hold its own on a Pentium 133.
Re:Perhaps it is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, more and more apps are leaping into the same style of user interface, and they're driving me nuts.
Re:Here is a chance for Evolution or Thunderbird (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps it is... (Score:2, Insightful)
The 1980s called... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, really, modern operating systems know how to launch programs when you click contextually, via icon or URL or filename extension. The whole point is to let people create the best solutions to individual types of tasks, not one hulking thing that tries to do everything.
Sounds attractive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps it's ten years (Score:3, Insightful)
Now all you're missing is calendaring, the task list, and a whole host of other features I can't remember. The only one I care about is the calendaring, though.
I'm currently using Debian Testing on my development machine at work [slashdot.org], but I still have to have a second Windows machine for Outlook's calendar functions. (Yes, I know that Evolution has an Exchange connector, but it appears to be broken in Debian Testing. There's a bug report filed against it - hopefully it'll get fixed soonish and I can start checking email on my primary machine.)
If all I wanted was an email client, I wouldn't be using Outlook. I also happen to need the calendaring feature to keep track of what meetings I have scheduled. (Oh, and there's all those other various features that I don't use but someone might.)
Advantages and Disadvantages (Score:4, Insightful)
As a former educator, OpenOffice org was (and still is) a valuable learning tool. Because of its licensing, I have been able to distribute copies of the software to students who can't afford to buy a copy of Microsoft Office, even at Microsoft's educational pricing. This especially made a big difference to those who needed to complete assignments at home, but lived too far from school to return to the computer lab or whose jobs required them to work irregular hours. Because I was teaching the concepts of creating documents rather than learning a specific application by rote memory, the students were able to take what I taught them with OpenOffice.org and apply it to Microsoft Office or any other application they choose to use at home or at work.
Those interested in reviewing the lessons I developed for use with OpenOffice.org 2.0 in an educational environment can download a free evaluation copy of my new book "A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 2.0" at http://www.conciseconceptsinc.com/ [conciseconceptsinc.com]
Re:Latex and CVS (Score:4, Insightful)
Trying to edit a technical Word document (even in Office2003) is an exercise in frustration. You have to fight the system inserting stupid new sections (2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.22 things), fucking up the formatting on every other line. And then randomly inserting page breaks whenever I though I was done.
And if you try to copy-n-paste a diagram made in PowerPoint into your Word document? That's when Clippy points and laughs derisevely at you and proceeds to completely mess up your previous work by inserting 15 new random pagebreaks and making the diagram float over your previous text (so you can't see it).
Now try to do the work with multiple people with their own section/subsection notation and their own diagrams. Try to put these together into one Word file and watch hell break out.
Seriously, Word is the only editing tool which I have seen which has no problems inserting automatically generated figure numbers IN INCORRECT ORDER. (Ie figure 2 before figure 1.) Naturally all references in the text are messed up at the same time, how convinient.
And compare that to LaTeX. LaTeX may be a bitch to get running. But once you have a working it can be quite nice for handling technical documents.
Re:Well, where's the alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
The proper way of doing things is to submit a technology project request to IT, wait a couple weeks for a project manager to be assigned, spend a few days putting together a requirements document, wait a few weeks for the requirements document to be reviewed, spend a couple more days rewriting the requirments document, wait a few more weeks for the project to be prioritized, and then wait another 3-5 years for the project to actually be completed, if it doesn't get delayed even further because of projects with a higher priority.
As a database guy in a large corporation, I think it's great that employees can create small things in Access. It frees up my time for projects that are important and challenging. And when the Access databases actually become buisness critical, I migrate them to SQL Server or Oracle. Since you'd clearly prefer to be the bottleneck preventing people from helping themselves, I'm glad you don't set policy where I work.
Re:Perhaps it is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10 years behind? Sounds about right (Score:4, Insightful)
Get a new version of Excel.
If you're going to flame Office, that's fine. But at least qualify that you are stuck on a 5 year old copy that's soon going to be three major versions behind the curve. People like you are the reason they use Dinosaurs in their adverts -- you aren't even aware how behind you are unless someone tells you.
Seems Legit..... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't of course see a problem with this though. OOo is free, and 10 years ago office had effectively implemented all the important editing features I was looking for. So to have OOo do that, while being a bit more stable, is good by me.
It is true OOo does not contain any of these new 'group-centric' features or frameworks. I must say though that i'm not convinced as of yet that this direction is one that will hold. And I'm very certain that it is not being used by the majority of Office users, and mostly only in large corporations. I do enjoy some of these features in the newer versions of Office, the xml/xsl capabilities and sharepoint integration, the web-service integration, etc... But they are not hugely important yet.
Re:Just you wait! (Score:3, Insightful)
At least it's not animated. Or it isn't in the version I used to run.
Some notes (Score:2, Insightful)
1. "Open Office doesn't ship with an email client...if you look at Office 2003 and use Outlook for your email, you can right click and set up a meeting; you right click and see if someone's on the phone or in a meeting; you can right click and see their presence information; you can right click and call a meeting of multiple people..."
Am I really the last person in the free world who uses an office suite to write letters and create spreadsheets?!
2. "One of the things we have done, for example, is that we have really expanded the tool tips where, if you hover over something, you'll get directions to how that feature is used. As well, if you hover over something, the entire text will change right in front of you so you'll see what happens immediately.
How innovative. (By "innovative," I mean "that really sounds like a pain in the ass.")
3. "...honestly the old paradigm of the tool bar user interface had outgrown its utility. Things had gotten too complicated there."
*sigh* See point 1. I can't think of too many other applications that are "too complicated" for a toolbar interface.
4. "There's a wonderful reason to move to the new file formats which is that it's open and it's XML..Other software products can use the XML information in the format that it was originated in."
The jury's still very much out on that one, buddy.
5. Also, we have automated conversion tools so that people can take existing documents and have them converted to the new file format relatively painlessly.
Again, how innovative. (This time, by "innovative," I mean...wait for it, you're gonna love it...Way to catch up with OOo, suckers! Yeah, I know that was a cheap shot, but I couldn't stop myself.)
6. The company has been told users that they are comfortable with Office and they don't want to see too much change. However, in order to differentiate itself from its open source rival, Microsoft has decided to take the bold step - some might say gamble - of telling its customers what's good for them.
Indeed, very bold. We've certainly never seen this attitude from Microsoft before.
We're all ten years behind (Score:2, Insightful)
Would you be able to be productive today with 20 year old versions of those programs? (The GUI version of PowerPoint came 1987, Word 1984 and Excel 1985.) Absolutely. The only problem would be that you would have to use a non-mainstream OS, as they all were released for Macintosh.