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“I believe that OpenOffice is a cornerstone in the community’s fight against dangerous monopolies, and needs to be supported.” – Gernot clarifies his point from the ZDNet story about his comments on OpenOffice.org.
"What are we doing today Brain? Taking over the world like we always do."
I’m a fan, user, and sometime contributor to OOo, but I understand perfectly what Gernot is saying. For the most part, he’s right. I have introduced scores of people to OOo and just yesterday I heard from a very happy new user. He thanked me for pointing out the PDF export which he rates as enough reason to leave MS Office behind all by itself.
That’s an example of ‘doing it better.’ And OOo wins there and has for years. But Gernot may be right – unless OSS projects compel the user by clearly doing something better, they risk being marginalised.
Why then have so few regular computer users even heard of OOo? Or the vast assemblage of other excellent open source apps?
Simon couldn’t get up there just after Gernot and ignore the comments about OOo, but I’ll bet Simon quite likely agrees with the sentiments just expressed.
I partially agree that OO is ready to take on the big boys. In my organisation many would be able to use OO because it “is good enough” and cover the 10% features some users require.
The problem for me is that I am cubing data from our ERP, CRM, Data warehouse systems and doing very complex analysis work. For me there is only one choice today. Therefore to keep consistency and ease of support etc I am willing to pay for the license to keep my organisation on a single platform. Yes it does cost me some money to do it, but I also have only one platform to support, so reducing the on going costs. I want my users to have a single experience interfacing our corporate environment, as for many the office apps are the real interface to many systems as users are comfortable in them.
For me to move I need all the advanced features of spreadheeting to work seamlessly, until then I am stuck.
OO needs not be a “me too” piece of software but something that adds intrinsic value to all levels of users then it becomes a worthy choice for the desktop.
Hi Fred,
considering how many applications are becoming web-enabled, and that the office worker of the future may only have to have a web browser, the whole discussion may be mute within a few years 🙂
Also, I think in many environments it isn’t having access to more “advanced” features that keeps people on Microsoft Office, but rather being used to that particular set of features. People don’t like retraining, and moving from a comfortable spot is hard.
Better the devil you know and all that 🙂
Anyway, as a community we are innovating in so many areas that we are changing the rules in other areas, even if in some areas we are playing the feature catch-up game.
I totally agree that web enabling apps poses the potential death nell for all the “standard” office apps as we know today. The issue is really only Microsoft and Oracle provide the existing capability to move what I need back into the data warehouse so a web enabled client can acces and facilitate the same same data. I am sure if the interface is a browser more database vendors will introduce the reporting services neccessary to facilite this client shift.