OpenOffice.org Newspaper Ad Mockup Released 413
Benjamin Horst writes "The volunteer effort raising $10,000 to place at least two backpage ads in New York City's free daily paper Metro is now entering its second full week. We've collected over 10% of our goal already and continue to find new pledge donors at a healthy pace. Our project's purpose is to help 'cross the chasm' and bring awareness of OpenOffice.org 2.0 to the large number of computer users who stand to benefit from its broad feature set and range of useful capabilities. This is not the first time an open source project has sought a high-profile newspaper ad buy. In fact, our effort was directly inspired by the Firefox New York Times ad. Firefox's famous effort announcing its arrival on the world stage helped push it from about 10 million downloads to its current tally of over 185 million!"
Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
My 0.02$.
The only way (Score:1, Interesting)
Other than that, the software is worth a download if abiword doesn't float your boat. Until they actively work on the slowness and non-free portions of their code, I'll stick with abiword and gnumeric.
Ugh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Old Chinese wisdom (Score:2, Interesting)
The comparison of Open Office to Firefox is apples/oranges. Firefox is at least as accessible to the end user as IE, and is a better choice for many users. Open Office might not be as favorably compared to MS Office as Firefox is compared to IE.
Despite its flaws, code blot, and so forth - when I reach for my own money, I choose Open Office every time. I imagine that many NY Times readers will reach the same conclusion. Will NY Times do for Open Office what they did for Firefox? Only time will tell.
misleading ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
The Ad (Score:3, Interesting)
They're not ready yet. (Score:5, Interesting)
I do use OpenOffice on a daily basis, and I love it. However, it's still dog-slow and clunky in some parts, unfinished or unpolished in others, and buggy here and there. You have to get to know its individual quirks. I tried getting my Microsoft Office-loyal boss to use it for a while, and he gave it up pretty fast. He found a number of things that he was used to doing in Excel that he couldn't do in OOo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the project or the efforts of its contributors, nor can I stand up and say that I've contributed code or money to it. What I am saying is, they haven't reached the level of completeness that Firefox had reached before the Firefox ad came out. Couple that with a typically glacial development and release process, and you'll get hordes of new users checking it out
And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.
NeoOffice is the preferred OO.o on OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
suggestion (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ad is missing important points... (Score:3, Interesting)
- I would expect 99% of Linux users are already well aware of OO, and including the word "Linux" might scare a few people off.
You miss the point. Of course Linux users know about OOo, the point is to tell people that it runs on all sorts of platforms. This incrases the value of the package as a software platform. I hardly think Linux would scare anybody away. Especially not in combination with Solaris, Windows, MacOS-X, FreeBSD.
BTW, Why are there no seagulls, and why is it yellow instead of blue and white. If you do an add you should use your logo and company colors. That way you strenghten your brand. Whenever sombody sees some one else open OOo they should be able recognize the logos in splash screen from the add.
Why not mention that ODF is the new iso standard for Office documents, why not mention that you easy can share documents with other popular office suits
Besides, I think promoting it on MacOS-X is a bit premature. Most Mac users don't have X11 installed. and will not think of it as a real Mac program as things like menus and fonts will look weird to them.
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the free throwaway 10 pager they pass out by the subways. The articles are sub-par, even for a free fishwrap. This won't have an impact on a literate, decision making crowd.
If they want to foster adoption, take out a quarter pager in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. People who have the clout to have their companies adopt a new and better office platform read those.
Re:Design (Score:4, Interesting)
Ya know, Doc Searls of the Linux Journal once said that "open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself." That's quite true, IMHO.
This is a total grassroots effort. Neither Sun Microsystems nor IBM nor Novell or anyone else has "officially" given a dime so far to this OOo ad campaign. YOU own this ad campaign, just like YOU own OOo and every other Free Open Source Software project.
I'm sure you've heard this joke. Microsoft says, "Where do you want to go today?" Apple says, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FOSS says, "Are you coming, or what?"
So, what are you going to do? Just sit back and complain? Or do something positive and help with this ad campaign?
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont have anything against openoffice.. but comparing openoffice with Microsoft-office.. it still has looong way to go (you are free to disagree).. where as firefox beats Internet-Explorer quite easily.
Indeed. I convinced my project to use OpenOffice. I did this purely to satisfy my anti-Microsoft ideology. I convinced the others via cost and demonstrating how well it handled Office files. Two months later, 2/3 of the people were complaining about how bad it was, and the rest were admitting that it wasn't so good. 1/3 of the people had installed Office, knowing that the rest of us would still be able to handle their files. The rest of us continue to use openoffice because of ideology, apathy, or laziness.
Basically, only the spreadsheet has worked to our satisfaction. Text documents are passable, but unpleasant. Presentations are completely inadequate. The migration to Office was mainly triggered by the need for PowerPoint.
I still tell people about OpenOffice, and that we (mostly) use it for our project. But I only recommend it to people who have to do simple things, like short reports or billable hours.
On the other hand, all of us independently decided to use Firefox. And nobody except me realized that there were all those extensions and themes---they chose it because it just worked better "out of the box".
Re:Is it (Score:3, Interesting)
First to go -- Yellow background and floating picture...
Re:Is it (Score:5, Interesting)
At least no one will download it (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you ever seen Metro? It's a cheap (quality-wise; we know it's free), informationless tabloid that's handed out (and usually refused) in the New York City subways. It does not represent a "young, affluent, and savvy demographic" -- it represents people slightly above those who read the supermarket tabloids, and who would like not know how to download and install OOo.
As for calling the proposed advertisement as bad as a "high school design project" -- that's a bit of insult to high school design projects. I was creating more professional stuff back in 9th grade.
Re:"Free" is bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Design (Score:3, Interesting)
When you see those ugly, poorly designed ads for used cars, home financing, rodent removal, and so on, the cheeze is purely intentional because the target market tends to avoid marketing that looks like its too classy for them. Just because the ad is ugly doesn't mean it will be ineffective.
My own mockup ads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's missing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Importing to OO fixed it, but messed up the colours slightly. It was still usable though.
I heard about it when they started cursing Microsoft... These aren't the people I would normally have expected to know what OO was and definately not the standard slashdot types.. but they all (well, a group of 5 of them) switched to it because Office let them down at a crucial moment.
Of course this is a place where backward compatibility doesn't really matter - documents are produced for the moment, so ODF is fine.
Re:Is it (Score:2, Interesting)
Then have some Ubuntu-esque happy smiling people handing each other CDs or some schmaltzy crap like that, and say "OpenOffice.org will never cost a penny, and is free to download and share with whoever you want"
Then "Have a copy on us". then a download URL or whatever.
Re:Is it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My own mockup ads (Score:3, Interesting)