
Intel heavy support to LibreOffice. Is Microsoft threatened? - scriptproof
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/23/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-for-windows-from-suse-is-now-available-in-intel-appupsm-center/
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dcminter
In the short term, until enhancements like 38262 Outline view (née 3959 under
OO) are taken seriously I very much doubt that office's core market of
document creators will be threatened by LibreOffice.

For casual/light _consumers_ of office documents, however, I think that
Libre/Open office has very much arrived. I'm starting to see it in the
default-install on my customers' machines.

In the longer term perhaps that will prove to be the thin end of the wedge.

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pwaring
I suspect by the time LibreOffice threatens Microsoft, everyone will have
moved to Google Docs, or a similar service provided by other companies. I
still don't know anyone who uses LibreOffice who isn't a geek.

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wladimir
The cloud "hipness" seems to be already fading in some circles, due to privacy
and concerns about who owns the data. Non-geeks creeped out about ads
following them around based on what they type in a document, or their data
being accessed by people that guess their password.

And remember that thin client/thick client has always been a cycle. A linear
prediction toward everyone using services such as Google Docs is probably
wrong.

Also, open source software for non-geeks seems to be on the rise as its
usability has improved surprisingly in the last 5 years. I wouldn't say it's a
direct threat for Microsoft though as their important customers are big
enterprises...

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nopinsight
It's not about being hip. For small businesses with a few branches, Google
Docs and other cloud-based services like Trello are god-send. Even though we
have Microsoft Office, cloud-based collaborative and real-time update features
are the most important criteria. We decided to use Google Docs instead of MS
Office for more and more documents over time as their feature set matures and
wireless infrastructure becomes widespread.

~~~
wladimir
"hip" was probably the wrong word. It's more like "having the temporary
advantage". I expect desktop office programs will also support real-time
collaboration in the near future. It's indeed an incredibly useful feature, so
there is no reason why it would remain limited to third-party hosted web
programs.

(and desktop programs could implement security features such as encryption,
and/or use peer-to-peer protocols, preventing third-party privacy issues)

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raphinou
After 10+ years of seeing such headlines, I'm growing tired of "Microsoft
threatened" kind of stuff. It's not Intel's AppUp store including LibreOffice
that will bring MS in the problems....

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ruediger
Microsoft is threatened. Selling Office (and Windows) licenses is the backbone
of Microsoft and that's what's financing all the other adventures. Large
companies have to buy Office licenses for every workstation. Even with large
customer discount they still pay millions on license fees. With LibreOffice
now being independent of a large company it becomes a viable alternative for
those large corporations. It's much cheaper to hire a LibreOffice developer or
get a company like SuSE for contract work on it to do all the required
customizations than buying MSOffice licenses.

People complain a lot about the GUI of LibreOffice. But in fact it can be an
advantage because it is much closer to Office 2003 than the new Office
versions. And it seems that Office 2003 is still the de-facto standard in a
lot of corporations. So moving to LibreOffice might in fact require less
training than new versions of Microsoft Office.

There are other alternatives like Google Docs etc.

Therefore it is a threat to Microsoft. Will LibreOffice/Google Docs etc. kill
MSOffice in the next Years/Month/Hours? Of course not. But it will have an
impact on Office sales and MS would be stupid not to consider it a threat.

And of course there are still some technical issues. E.g. a missing
alternative to MS Exchange. I know that there are some commercial open source
alternatives. But there is not the one true alternative on the horizon.
Another problem of course is backward compatibility, SharePoint, etc. But all
of that can be fixed in the long run and will be with more support from
companies like Intel.

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drzaiusapelord
Its not just things like the GUI, its interoperability between MS formats,
common "advanced" features like track changes, the lack of enterprise support,
and of course the political will for organizations to switch away from the de
facto standard to something a little hairier for the sake of saving $300 per
employee, which is peanuts in all the places I've worked at.

When people discuss Windows or Office, we often dismiss the natural monopoly
aspect of these products. There's a real level of momentum here because people
don't want to bothered with things rendering funny or not having the same
feature-set as their colleagues and clients. Every IT guy knows this because
half the helpdesk tickets are "How can I open this .pages thing?" "They sent
us the powerpoints but all the audio files are missing exentions!" etc thats
common with basic OSX to Windows office issues, let alone a entirely different
office suite. Sure hackers and computer nerds can do this stuff with ease, but
remember, offices are all about the lowest common denominator.

OO and LO are nice for basic tasks and when interoperability isn't very
important. Once you enter the realm of business, suddenly track changes needs
to work and images not being aligned properly is suddenly a big deal.

LO and OO are almost identical products. OO has been at the stage its at now
for 5 years. If it hasn't hurt Office by now it probably never will. I suspect
OO is yet another "year of the linux desktop" that always 2 or 3 years away.

/ITguy

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pnathan
> offices are all about the lowest common denominator.

This is so true. Office IT is driven around 96% case of their users... the
bottom 96% I believe. Power users are not the segment office IT cares about
(or likes caring about IME). I wrote to the hg mailing list recently about a
particular feature set, and I want to snip a certain statement I made, which
is generalizable out to other tools besides hg.

""" Do note that any time someone has to consciously do something, e.g., hg
push -B, pull -B, a large segment of users will _not_ do that, even though (1)
man pages say to, (2) their boss says to, (3), the program itself suggests it
- in red letters, (4) training materials say to. This means that hg bookmarks
will not work as a workflow for these users out of the box, because errors
will constantly come up. """

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bwarp
Yes they are. But only from new businesses looking to cut costs. In older
businesses, Office is entrenched and there's no getting away from it.

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bmj
This. It's not even older businesses--Office is THE standard in so many
offices around the U.S. Talk to the IT department in a company that has more
than 50 employees (and where processes can be document-heavy)--asking
employees to switch to a new platform would be a massive undertaking. Folks
that barely understand how to surf the web can compose documents in Word or
fiddle with numbers in Excel.

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zrgiu_
Nah, Microsoft shouldn't feel threatened. It's not like a hardware company
(like IBM) is building an IDE (like Eclipse). Oh wait...

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nailer
Is LibreOffice still desktop based?

Edit: looks like there's a web version coming out, based on the web version of
GTK: [http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-
the...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-the-web-
android-and-ios/)

~~~
hollerith
So is its competitor. Do you know of any _plans_ by the maintainers to do away
with the desktop version of either one?

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rimantas
As with almost all headlines with a question mark the answer is "No." I've
tried to get used to Open/LibreOffice but it was unbearable every time. I no
longer try. Luckily I don't need to deal with office documents much, so
iWorks/Google docs is enough for me.

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davidcollantes
The keyword (for some users and the enterprise) is Outlook (part of MS
Office). I don't think LibreOffice will be a threat to Microsoft, but sure is
nice to have alternatives.

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scriptproof
1) Add LibreOffice to its AppUp store. 2) Contributes to the code. 3)
Financial support to The Document Foundation.

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angelortega
As for all news title containing a question, the answer is "no".

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nknight
I'm a little confused as to the exact involvement of SUSE. Is SUSE just acting
as some sort of official steward for LibreOffice-in-AppUp? Is there any
particular reason TDF couldn't take on that role?

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scriptproof
SUSE has made optimizations in the compilation, it is why their version was
chosen for AppUp.

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nknight
That may sort-of answer my question, but it presents another obvious one: Why
haven't SUSE's optimizations been merged into mainline LibreOffice?

