Why Microsoft Is So Scared of OpenOffice 421
GMGruman writes "A recent Microsoft video on OpenOffice is naively seen by some as validating the open source tool. As InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues shows, the video is really a hatchet job on OpenOffice. But why is Microsoft so intent on damaging the FOSS desktop productivity suite, which has just a tiny market share? Rodrigues figured out the real reason by noting who Microsoft quoted to slam OpenOffice: businesses in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe that aren't already so invested in Office licenses and know-how. In other words, the customers Microsoft doesn't have yet and now fears it never will."
Re:MS may not have much to worry about here (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing to worry about. Some very brave people have Forked it and created LibreOffice to replace it. Given the more flexible source contribution rules the development rate already exceeds that of OO.org. It's only a matter of time before Oracle isn't even relevant anymore in relation to office software. It's unfortunate that they didn't accept the LibreOffice request to coordinate development and direction as it will sideline them even more. Oh well.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:1, Informative)
Ballmer is that you?
Oh good grief. You don't use Office-like tools in a professional setting, do you? Otherwise you would not make such absurd comments. The facts are that Excel and Excel macro capabilities are one of the main reasons that businesses use the Office suite. And, OO (like with GIMP and Photoshop) simply does *NOT* measure up. Yet.
It's *NOT* about being a Microsoft "shill", it's a matter of being realistic and understanding that the Open Office product doesn't *YET* measure up in terms of professional standards and needs, what people that use such products in a serious business setting need.
Seriously, idiots like you hold Open Source back.
Re:forget these office suits (Score:3, Informative)
Been there, done that. You also forgot to add that with all of these you can keep clean revision and change control.
The problem however is that you are not alone. There is usually an organisation around you which cannot be bothered. Even if you are "alone" as a lone software contractor you have customers who want to be bothered even less. On top of that you have an army of buzzword bingo players, sorry recruiters, that will not accept a CV in anything but MSF Word.
So I have to admit - from writing everything in LaTeX 10 years back, never touching a spreadsheet, etc I have degenerated into using an Office suite. OpenOffice in my case.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:1, Informative)
I realize you're probably just trolling, but in what way can Open Office not compete with MS Office?
The GP specifically called out OO Calc. I have tried to use OO several times, in both business (engineering) and academic environments. In my experience, Calc is an abomination -- it crashed so frequently on me that I wondered if I was using a finished version of the software. I love the idea of FOSS, but for a power user of Excel, OO is a joke.
The difference between Calc and Excel isn't so much in the number of features, but stability, plain and simple. For someone who does data analysis or graphing large datasets, every crash is extremely frustrating. You might argue that neither Excel nor Calc are "serious" engineering tools -- but both advertise a set of features (such as linefitting and formatted plots), and in Excel the implementation is (roughly) usable and Calc is a horrorshow of bugs.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:5, Informative)
It's *NOT* about being a Microsoft "shill", it's a matter of being realistic and understanding that the Open Office product doesn't *YET* measure up in terms of professional standards and needs, what people that use such products in a serious business setting need.
For the one percent of people who actually _need_ them.
For the other 99%, Open Office is fine.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:5, Informative)
In most economies some 95% of companies and at least half of all employment is in SMEs. >90% of those companies will also never use any of the advanced features MS office has, and OOo is missing. Even sharing documents (as in: opening at the same time for editing - I once tried but failed in a recent version of OOo Calc; no idea on how MS Office is doing there) is often not done.
In large businesses I wouldn't be surprised if >90% of the users doesn't use those features. They probably don't even know it exists.
Actually I think 99% or more of the Office users wouldn't be able to name a feature that does not exist in the other suite, even if you would let them use both for a year for normal work, office and home.
We have to be realistic indeed (MS seems to be): how many people know what a macro is, and how to use it? What VB script is, or how to use it?
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, there are all sorts.
There -are- businesses which use Excel for the features. That is, they use features that are hard to use, or nonexistant in OpenOffice.
But there are -also- a lot of businesses that use Excel because, honestly, they've never honestly considered the fact that there even exists alternatives. Many of them never use formulas more advanced than basic arithmethic and perhaps SUM(..) - but nevertheless fork over the cash for Excel for their entire staff.
The former can't easily swap, but the latter could. And there's a lot of excel noobs, for every Excel guru, out there.
Re:OpenOffice on Android mobile phones (Score:5, Informative)
And, OpenOffice runs on Android mobile phones: http://www.alwaysonpc.com/aboutOpenOffice.php [alwaysonpc.com]
This is highly misleading. In fact, you just wasted about 3 minutes of my time claiming that, because at first I was all "oh wow! need to get that right away". But what they do instead is host a virtual machine for you "in the cloud", and provide you with a VNC client to connect to it. Needless to say, this is 1) online only, and you really need WiFi or 3G, 2) eats bandwidth like cookies, and 3) still slow. No wonder it's rated 3 stars on the Market (with comments along the lines of all three points)! And they want $20 for that... no thanks.
If someone did a proper port of OO.org to Android (redoing the UI etc), I'd gladly pay $100 for that. But this is mostly useless.
Also (Score:3, Informative)
Many of the open source tools just aren't up to par. Open Office may be for many things. I am not a serious Office user, I just do basic word processing and the like so I'm not in a position to say. It has a good interface though, so that alone puts it ahead of many.
However for a lot of programs, particularly those in the media area, they just do not compete with commercial software. I've found this in video editing. I tried to do it on Linux and just couldn't. None of the open source tools would do the trick. Not only were there some extremely confusing, unintuitive, hard to use, interfaces but the software just didn't have the features I needed. Not even esoteric stuff, but simply shit like the ability to capture and open DV video.
Unfortunately I think some people who recommend OSS alternatives do so out of a loyalty to OSS, without any real knowledge of if the solution will work. They don't use the software, or if they do they use it only in an extremely cursory way. They've never used the commercial packages they are advocating it as an alternative to. As such it doesn't end up working.
You always have to remember that just because a product is the same rough idea, doesn't mean it is a replacement for another product.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:2, Informative)
I live in Eastern Europe, too. I process text for a living. That means I take in fairly massive numbers of documents from businesses every week. I've never seen a file arrive in native OpenOffice format. Not once. Of course, everybody could be using OpenOffice to export as .doc, but I don't think so.
The truth is simpler. As the post above notes, MS Word is still ungodly expensive here – in Microsoft's shortsightedness, during the 1990s and later, it did indeed cost several months' average salary. The result has been a well-entrenched tradition of using the "free" version of Word. Even at the Ministry level, in at least one prominent case. Getting around an absurd system is also a very old tradition, for obvious reasons.
So the problem OpenOffice faces in catching on here is very definitely one of taking on another free-of-cost competitor. And in a region where people want so badly to catch up with the West, Microsoft has the cachet that comes with being perceived as the Western standard.
With a zero cost differential, the choice will seem clear to a lot of people. It's a very difficult perception to beat.
Re:Switching from Openoffice to MS Office... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be shocked if an other product better supported MS' proprietry format than MS' products. Yes, MS Office is better in supporting MS Office macros. But OpenOffice is better in supporting OpenOffice macros.
Re:Switching from Openoffice to MS Office... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:5, Informative)
Problem: Excel doesn't ask for a delimiter.
Solution: Excel won't even ask for a delimiter.
And that's not even the first time I hear Microsoft fanboys rephrase the problem as the solution.
I've had the same problem. Excel expects that a CSV file is always separated with a comma. If you use the US version. En the European version, Excel expects that a CSV file is always separated with a semicolon.
If you have a file that's not separated with the separator Excel expects, everything ends up in column A. Even if you try to import a euro-style semicolon separated file into a US version of Excel.
Re:Microsoft talking smack business as usual (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:3, Informative)
You have to install the grammar checkers for OOo as extensions. Which grammar checkers to install depends upon which languages you want to do grammar checking in.
Amber
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:2, Informative)
Probably because the dead-simple tasks, such as "resize an image" have always been extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken when compared with Photoshop. If GIMP can't even get that right, why should anyone use it?
PaintShopPro is a less-expensive alternative to Photoshop which actually works, though.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, if clicking on the image -> scale menu is "extremely primitive and clumsy-feeling to the point of being downright broken", then I wonder how Photoshop does it? A telepathic interface, maybe? Photoshop knows instinctively what size I want the picture to be and reshapes it without any command from me?
Your argument seems pretty desperate, like you are grasping at straws to find some shortcoming in Gimp. If you need to do it, then it seems like Gimp has improved to the point of being a serious contender to Photoshop by now. Good to know that.
Re:forget these office suits (Score:3, Informative)
You shouldn't be using TeX unless you're a programmer. If you just want to bang out some documents, you should be using LaTeX, which is TeX, where programmers have already set up a bunch of useful macros so you can focus on what you actually want to do.
Or, LyX. I have not found a better program for typesetting scientific papers. Even emacs with the latex-preview feature installed pales in comparison. There is simply no more efficient equation editor on the market than the one built-in to LyX. Sciword is a joke compared to it.
LyX is gui, and it spits out LaTeX-like code under the hood (or straight LaTeX if you ask it too), but it shows.. not quite what the finished product will actually look like, but enough so that you know what you're working on and aren't distracted by fiddling with the fonts or carriage returns or whatever.
If you haven't tried LyX, then you really ought not criticize the learning curve for it based on trying to typeset a document using straight up TeX. Also, you should give LyX a try. It's pretty good for letters, too.
Re:Switching from Openoffice to MS Office... (Score:4, Informative)
When I started working at my last job, we were initially using Openoffice for almost everything except for any documents that needed to go to clients, because documents that we created with Openoffice would not reliably open with the same formatting by clients who were using Microsoft office, particularly if indentation or outlining was used.
Unless things have changed somewhat, neither will even the same version of MS Office always show consistent formatting. If the document author is using 'printer X' and the document is opened by someone using 'printer Y', then the whole formatting can change.
Re:I'd be scared too (Score:5, Informative)
The full truth is openoffice sucks and is hardly usable for real world use.
Have you actually used OpenOffice.org in the real world? Five or six years ago, I was in the mortgage industry and I used Calc to create some pretty complicated spreadsheets such as amortization tables (including adjustable rates loans). In fact, I used such spreadsheets as a sales tool because I could show a client how much he or she could save by refinancing or the potential impact of rate changes on an ARM.
"Hardly usable for real world use"? Bah. Hyperbole not based on real world use. Is it right for every situation? No, it's not but it is sufficient for about 95% of real world users.
Re:Not really (Score:4, Informative)
"you call those things special features? export to web?"
It exports _interactive_ spreadsheet. I.e. I can quickly draft a report with adjustable parameters and nice 'dashboard-like' visualization and expose it on a corporate portal in a matter of minutes. And this spreadsheet can connect to OLAP backend, using connecting user's credentials.
This is certainly not a 'trivial' feature.
I'm ambivalent about ribbon, but a lot of users like it. Besides, Word has a number of nice features, like Russian language grammar checking (Russian is a flexible language, so simple spellcheckers suck).
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I'd say that's true of any office suite. In a large enough company, you always wind up with someone in some department somewhere deciding they can avoid going through all the bureaucracy to get a proper system in by solving their problems with a spreadsheet, some VBA and a few formulas. Possibly some Access thrown in as well.
Six months later it's become critical to the business and the first you hear about it is when the person who threw it together's left the company and your helpdesk starts to get calls about it. I don't think you'd see a drastically different outcome if you were to substitute OO Calc for Excel.
Take away every iota of similar functionality and you'll wind up with an office suite that a lot of people simply will not touch with a bargepole. The people who will be making the noise are the people who have serious traction within the business, generally because they're either directly generating money (sales) or they count money and try to reduce the money going out (finance).
IT is seen as a sort of necessary evil within many companies, and trying to tell sales and finance that they can't put together their own little apps in a spreadsheet - particularly if you're not in an industry where you can point to a big scary regulator who explicitly bans such things - is a hiding to nothing.
Re:Also (Score:3, Informative)
Cinelerra was the program. Now, the latest Ubuntu comes with a decent FOSS video package and there are a few out there now.
By decent I mean I've actually used one of them to do a quick and dirty very simple video and I didn't want to kill something afterwards.
Also - different topic - I gave a presentation once to the local chamber of commerce explaining the concept of Free and Open Source Software. I went through several examples of expensive commercial software and the open source equivalent.
I made sure to tell them that not all of those examples would work for everyone, but the point is to make them at least AWARE that such a thing is out there, and that there is a definite possibility that they could take advantage of something.
Pretty much everyone there had no idea such a thing as legitimately free software existed. This, in a community where even major government agencies openly pirate MS Office.
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:3, Informative)
I've written a pretty awesome Star Fleet Battles software (sound effects, full rules) for Calc.
It won't run on Microsoft Excel without changes. I can't count on all my SFB buds having Excel but I can count on having Calc on my memory stick. (it won't run well from the memory stick so I have to copy it to their hard drive-- too slow).
If the writer of the D&D utility wanted it to work, it would work. The macro languages are very similar- just not identical.
Re:What support? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I've always thought about this when I hear that line from Microsoft about "poor support".
I've been working in IT for 15 years, and I've worked in a few different companies of different size and in different industries. I have never been aware of anyone getting support from Microsoft beyond searching their website knowledge base to clarify obscure error messages.
The only times I have called Microsoft for anything (or heard of anyone else doing it) was for 1 purpose: product activation. I've had copies of Windows and Office spuriously decide that they weren't legitimate, and I had to call Microsoft to get them to fix it. So the only use Microsoft's support personnel have been to me is when Microsoft broke my computer on purpose, and I had to get them to undo it.
Re:Obvious (Score:3, Informative)
Keep in mind that when you talk about "Overpricing" in emerging markets, it's way much more than you can imagine. Down here in Argentina a Dell computer is about 3x the price of a generic machine (already assembled by your local computer tech), yet in developed countries the price is similar. An XBOX 360 or PS3 goes for almost USD 800 for the basic version (while it's not over $200 in the USA). And NO, I don't accept the "taxes" excuse. Taxes aren't really that high.
So the point is: companies have been trying to squeeze money out of emerging markets for years, and now they're basically whining because they never sold anything (except maybe to corrupt governments).
It's not that difficult to do: just sell your product at a price that the market can pay (no, this isn't impossible. McDonald's has been doing this for years. A Big Mac doesn't cost the same in every country). But the problem is: companies don't want to go through all the "hassle" needed to sell a product. Look: Microsoft doesn't have "offices" here in Argentina. They have a whole , like [highbuenosaires.com]IBM [wikipedia.org], and I'm not sure why, but there is a 30+ story building with a Sun Microsystems logo near these. So if they can invest that much money in a developing country such as mine, why can't they put a little, just a LITTLE effort in selling their products as well?
Why do I have to pay almost 2 months salary for a game machine that any European or American can get for 1/5 of their weekly salary (and even less)? Why does a Windows license cost MORE here than what it costs in the USA? Are you really, absolutely, positively sure that they can't sell a product here for what the market can really pay for? No? Really? Then why does 3D cinema on a saturday night cost $20 (USD 5) here? I know it costs way more than USD 5 in USA. Oh, I know, because people would buy the overseas version of Windows to pay less? Really? Really? Joe Sixpack will order Windows from Argentina (in Spanish for Christ's sake!) to pay less than the american version? Really? Oh so we make a castrated version of Windows, call it Windows Starter and sell it to all the poor bastards that don't deserve to open more than THREE apps at a time.
Really? Really, FUCK Microsoft, Sony, and every other company that doesn't give a fuck about the third world and then comes whining when they are "losing" a "potential" market share. Potential my ass: you won't sell your crap for what you want to charge.
Thank God we have piracy (because open source just doesn't do it sometimes).
Re:Open office != MS Office (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, OpenOffice does this as well. Two weeks ago I was creating a spreadsheet of contact information. Every time I entered an email address, Calc would turn the email address into a link, change the background color to grey, and then would not let me edit the address in the formula field. Don't believe me? Open Calc and enter "address@example.com" in a field, then hit return. The "lightbulb" helper (OO's Clippy) appears in the bottom right to tell me that "An URL has been detected and a hyperlink attribute has been set".
Re:Not really (Score:3, Informative)
We actually use Excel with our own backend (a custom Java application on a Linux server working with PostgreSQL), via web services. Excel indeed works like a report template builder.
We're certainly not using it to store data. But it simply shines in data visualization.
Re:OpenOffice on Android mobile phones (Score:3, Informative)
Right now if you don't plug your mac in at the conference or at the class. Your out of luck. And more and more conferences are demanding that the talks are uploaded onto a single computer to avoid the laptop changeover time.
And they pick the lowest common denominator. Powerpoint. Not keynote. However they do almost always allow pdf. Animations are for wimps and communists