
Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat - monkeygrinder
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2010/10/microsoft-gives-its-blessing-to-openofficeorg/index.htm?cmpid=sbycombinatorschapman
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jacquesm
Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when
compared with Microsofts suit.

In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so
there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do
this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect).

Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking.

The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet,
it's not even close.

In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more. The amount of
features that I use in these packages is small enough that I can get by with a
lesser program and not being locked in is an advantage as well, what sealed
the deal is that microsoft does not sell a version for linux ;)

Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from
things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

~~~
drinian
How many people use the features in Excel that are missing from OO? Surely
it's a small percentage of the total number of Office licenses out there.

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eli
For home users, maybe true. Though I'd imagine many home users of Excel would
be better served by Google Docs.

But it's a massive number of business users. Everyone at my company relies on
at least one spreadsheet that has macros or complex pivot tables. It's a bit
scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business.
My understanding is that Wall Street relies pretty much runs on Excel.

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btilly
_It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the
typical business._

It is a lot scary that an average of 1 formula in 10 in Excel spreadsheets is
wrong.

~~~
AndyKelley
Care to explain?

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nhebb
The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how
long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that
impressive.

Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened
to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked
it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it ( _I mean, she really
hated it._ ). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is
that the school district is back to using MS Office.

[1]
[http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...](http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments)

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dhimes
That's too bad. Schools are the one place that definitely _should_ switch. The
basic skills of writing, revising, presentation, and spreadsheet usage can all
be taught just fine with OO. I switched to it (nearly) full time about a year
ago and haven't had any problem. The idea that teachers make students pay for
MS Office, simply because they can't be bothered to change, angers me.

I don't know too many teachers who can actually use the finer functionality of
MS office. A reluctance to switch must have another origin.

The one place where I've had trouble with OO occurs when I sometimes teach
using prepared presentations. I can modify them in OO, but if they have a
bunch of A/V goodies baked in I'll use ppt player to present so that
everything works easily. I usually run a show like that out of Windows, too.

~~~
phr
Typical grade school teachers spend their days on their feet, rushing from one
crisis to another, trying to help mainstreamed kids with serious disabilities,
kids with chaotic home-lives and resulting learning and behavior problems,
political mandates to teach to a standardized test regardless of what they
think the kids really need, and so on. They don't feel they have time to
figure out simple user interface problems like where did all these IE windows
and tabs come from, let alone learn a new software suite.

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dhimes
I understand, but what they need to "relearn" isn't that hard. The skills are
quite easily transferred, especially the skills that they would use an office
suite for in grade school. And especially the skills that the grade school
_students_ would use an office suite for.

Like any population, some of the teachers are actually quite tech-savvy, and
some will whine about anything. This is an area, however, where if I was
superintendent I would make the switch and take a day or two of their
"planning time" for training. It would be a good place for a "peer teaching"
lesson plan.

When we first got computers, we had to teach the teachers what it meant to
"save," how to insert and eject the disk, and so on. Transferring to OO would
be _much_ easier than that initial training.

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rodh257
The video is pretty cringeworthy, but everything in it is true from my
experience. Open Office as it is just isn't viable in a corporate environment.
Staff members will despise it, poorly formatted documents from others won't
display properly, training costs go up, it's a mess.

Sure, most of it may be Microsofts fault for their .doc format or whatever,
but fact remains, Microsoft Office is king in the corporate world. Not sure
that this video was really necessary, but I guess it could be good for I.T.
guys to show to their boss when he decides they should swap to Open Office.

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arethuza
I think that should be _Excel_ is king - I suspect you could probably replace
Word and PowerPoint for most users and they wouldn't notice that much.

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matwood
I'm going to agree with you 100%. Word and PPT do not matter if the format
changes a bit or whatnot (this already happens between different versions of
Office). If you need to create a document that keeps perfect formatting, then
you need to output in something like PDF.

Excel is a completely different beast that has so many features it's very hard
to cover them all for all users. A big one we use is using Excel as the front
end to MSAS. Normally we would have had to design some user/reporting
interface, but instead we were able to use Excel pivot tables to access the
data directly on the server. Since all of the analysts are already familiar
with Excel and its pivot table interface I just had to show them how to to
point it to our MSAS instance.

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ErrantX
Hmmm. I don't think the comparison with GNU/Linux is 100% clear cut.

At that time Linux was making huge inroads into the server market and anyone
not recognising that was going to be laughed at. Microsoft doing so was
probably not the biggest driving force in subsequent growth.

The modern equivalent would be not recognising how much of a "threat" Google
Chrome is to the other browsers with its brand and growth.

Now, Open Office. I am not convinced that it is a viable threat to Microsofts
corporate sales. I know personally of very few (big) corps who could reliably
switch to OO - for all manner of reasons.

It is a competitor, sure, and certainly making inroads into the home market.
But a serious corporate threat? Not yet.

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Maro
OpenOffice is a horrible piece of software.

When I switched to Mac, I tried MS Office 2008, and it was buggy as hell, so
I've been using OpenOffice, which sucked too, but slightly less (on Macs). Now
MS Office 2011 is coming out, bugs fixed, looks great, UI/UX is great, so I
started converting all docs back to MS format and will ditch OpenOffice in a
couple of weeks.

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mattparcher
I agree that Office for Mac 2011 is a large improvement, but it still doesn’t
feel quite right to me. Have you seen Apple’s iWork suite?

<http://www.apple.com/iwork/>

It provides the most commonly used functionality from Word, Excel, and
Powerpoint in a simpler interface that I find much easier and pleasant to use
(certainly much more Mac-like), at half the price of Microsoft’s Home/Student
edition (a 30 day trial is available).

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Maro
I like Keynote a lot and use it all the time for presentations, I think it's
better than Powerpoint. Also, compatibility isn't that much of an issue here
because I just present from my Macbook all the time.

But I prefer Word & Excel over the Apple/OpenOffice counterparts. Here
compatibility also matters, as I routinely send Word & Excel files to lawyes,
investors, etc. You don't want your files looking like crap with those guys =)

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jlgosse
As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I
remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with
Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.

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drinian
To be fair, my understanding is that different versions of Word will display
the same .doc file differently.

Also, you should really do that sort of thing as PDF. Quite easy, considering
that OO has PDF export built in.

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Splines
There are back-compat features in Word to render files using old rules, so
work has been done to help preserve your visual layout across versions.

That said, there's a ton of churn between different versions of Word, so
there's no guarantee a bug-fix (or sadly, a regression) won't cause your
document to display differently anyway.

FWIW, Word has PDF/XPS export built in as well. (I believe Word 2010 has it in
the box, and Word 2007 has some silly downloadable component to enable this).

~~~
drinian
And, of course, with the free PDFCreator virtual printer on Windows, or the
PDF generation builtins on Linux and OS X, there's no reason you can't use PDF
from any app...

Not to mention that PDF generation was probably added to word as a response to
OO's capability.

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mwilcox
I went to a Microsoft Roadshow recently where they were demoing Office Web
Apps - he specifically said it was being targetted towards home users, because
"people don't buy Microsoft Office for home use. They use Open Office or they
pirate Microsoft Office."

If they're saying that in a promotional event, then it really shows the threat
MS see from OO. They own the corporate market, but they have trouble capturing
the home market, especially with Google Docs

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arethuza
Microsoft Enterprise Agreements often give users the right to have a copy of
Office at home.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Often only for "business" use. Everyone of course ignores this since it's
ridiculous and unenforceable, but that'll probably be what it says.

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braveheart
Welcome to India. Most of the Government offices here are using openoffice
(Indian railways,Electricity boards,Government schools,Post offices, etc).
OpenOffice is a real threat to Microsoft here in developing nations.

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forgottenpaswrd
OO is a committee designed bloatware mammoth.

Office was created in low level coding, with the minimum possible dependencies
(e.g excel reinvents the wheel so it does not include so many external libs).
OO is a sluggish and high level clone with minimum attention for detail.
Consumes too much memory and too much processor, like Netscape Navigator
became, but hopefully(thanks to the license) it could be transformed into
firefox.

It will be very expensive to replicate the hard work that went into Office,
only starting from scratch you could do it like Koffice, abiword or gnumeric
did.

You can't outperform Office in their strengths, but you can outperform it on
things Microsoft is not an specialist, like multiplatform coding, cloud
writing, and new interfaces(multitouch and voice).

I don't use windows, and honestly I don't care about Office any more. There
are very good alternatives, but not OO.

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xentronium
I don't think OpenOffice is a threat, especially considering what Oracle does
(virtually everything to kill it).

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AndyKelley
I've noticed exactly 3 things since Ubuntu's Open Office updated to Oracle's
version:

* It's about half as fast as it used to be.

* "Oracle" logo on the splash screen (which remains on the screen for twice as long)

* A message box that says "General error" any time I open a document. I kid you not: <http://www.superjoesoftware.com/temp/general-error.png>. Note that after I hit OK the document opens fine.

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eitally
I almost completely disagree with rodh257. A large percentage of corporate
workers don't create complex content and rarely interact with complex files
created by their colleagues. It is completely reasonable for a CIO to engage
his staff on a research study to determine how feasible it would be to migrate
a significant swath from MS Office to OpenOffice.org (or LibreOffice). I have
personal experience with this.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
There's a reply button below each comment so you can disagree in context.

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stretchwithme
I've used OO.o and worked with its code and when it came time to choose
between it and Office, I had to choose Office.

I needed the ability to manage sections of a document, move them around, open
and close them. Only Office has that feature. I spoke to someone from Sun
about that feature at their booth at a convention and they had no plans to
implement it.

Its bloatware, but it has everything. And it works.

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bld
I wonder if the the biggest aid to OO adoption will be the new interface in
Office 2007? OO basically clones the old Office menu-driven interface for
everything, which I find easier to navigate by drilling down in context to
find things. Switching to OO avoids the need to relearn how to use an office
suite.

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zokier
I think that's a double edged sword thing. OOo while similar, is still
somewhat different than 'old' Offices. You might think you know it well
because it feels similar, but the little differences makes your work
inefficient, as you try to use it like old Office. On the other hand, new
Offices forces you to relearn some things, and because of the visual
dissimilarity you (hopefully) don't try to apply your old knowledge to it.

Note: I don't have anything to back this theory of mine up, so take it with a
grain of salt.

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tocomment
You know what I hate about google spreadsheets. When you open a long
spreadsheet it won't open at the last row. You have to scroll all the way
down. Excel seems to handle this issue fine.

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bpodgursky
Open office is a threat only to those who use it.

