Slashdot Log In
OpenOffice Five Times As Popular As Google Docs
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Nov 15, 2008 07:52 PM
from the still-small-potatoes dept.
from the still-small-potatoes dept.
CWmike writes "Confirming recent comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, an independent report released Friday found that OpenOffice.org's free office suite is five times more popular than Google Docs. This was according to a survey of 2,400 adult Internet users conducted between May and November. Microsoft's share was 10 times that of OpenOffice.org. Microsoft hopes to cement that lead with its upcoming Office Web, as well as online versions of its Exchange and SharePoint products to be announced on Monday. OpenOffice.org may provide some resistance, however. The latest version, OpenOffice.org 3.0, had a strong first week in October, with more than 3 million downloads. After one month, OpenOffice.org 3.0 had been downloaded 10 million times." And reader Peter Toi informs us of the open source release of yet another office suite, Softmaker Office. Its claimed advantages are its compactness and speed (making it suitable for netbooks), its excellent MS Office filters, and the fact that it can be installed to USB flash drives.
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Just in time (Score:4, Funny)
As soon as it has full ODF support.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Oh noes! it takes 20 seconds to boot!"
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Interesting)
"Oh noes! it takes 20 seconds to boot!" // as if those nerds have anything better to do with their precious time
The problem is not the nerd's time, but the perception of the MS users to whom said nerds show the suite. Startup time for OpenOffice programs directly conflicts with the assertion that wins OSS converts, that OSS software will better utilize existing hardware.
Parent
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Informative)
You're part of the problem. Usability is key, and if an application takes 20 seconds to start, people will complain. The IT department can railroad it in, but that will lead to resentment, especially if they have attitudes like yours. People who are using office applications are not necessarily nerds, you know.
Anyway, OO is nowhere near as bad as you a painting it. It does not take anywhere near 20 seconds.... I don't know where you got that from.
Parent
How slow? (Score:5, Interesting)
The boot time may not be 20 seconds on our machines, but the guy who wrote it might be running old hardware or a bloated box.
Anyhow, here is a real world example of the perception problem from a small office I support with a custom app.
I got OpenOffice accepted at an office with old Dell p4s - don't recall the speed of the processors - and I'm a software guy anyhow, so I didn't make much point of checking before installing OpenOffice on the machines. I do recall that there was plenty of ram for XP machines under their use scenario.
The customer had upgraded to Office 2007, but was having massive problems including unexplained resource locks that would take down machines and lose all unsaved data (this was a number of patches ago, so the MS product may have improved stability since this happened).
Open Office worked fine for everything they needed, but the boot time was at least three times that of the MS offering on those specific machines. Luckily, the controller wanted stability first - but her employees still grouse about her being a cheapskate. Even after using OO for a while they think of it as second tier and the only specific complaint they can back this attitude up with is that OO is slow.
I know their usage pattern and the only slow thing is the suite's boot time, and only then when compared to the older version of Office they were all used to using. So transitioning the customer to OpenOffice was actually harmful to the suite's reputation among the rank and file, and this issue comes up when the controller has to give out bad reviews to employees. Apparently some have cited having to use shitty software as a reason they cannot perform their duties well.
Now any manager in their right mind would think that those employees need to get new jobs, but MS penetration of the market has made it difficult to find rank and file that view OSS as anything other than a 'cheap' alternative, and small companies are not usually willing to part with long time employees over software issues.
Parent
Re:How slow? (Score:5, Informative)
I think there is also a "quickstart" app that pre-loads parts of it: i.e. make it behave more like MS Office.
Parent
Re:Just in time (Score:4, Informative)
I just tested it on my system (a core 2 duo laptop running Ubuntu 8.04). OpenOffice 2.4 loads up in 12 seconds and the splash screen appeared after 4 seconds. I closed it and ran it again, the second time it loaded in 2 seconds.
OpenOffice is also very fast for me at least at opening new files when it's already running. If I'm doing a lot of office suite work (like, all day at a job for example) how likely is it that I'll be closing OpenOffice completely and relaunching it every time I need it?
Honesty, I think the big problems people have with adopting free software are brand loyalty and natural resistance to change. Microsoft is out there constantly delivering messages to people that their software is empowering and helpful. Windows and Office are easily two of the most recognizable brands amongst people that use computers. It's easy to see how people will dislike an alternative that they had never heard of until recently. Especially if they equate cost with value as many do. Office is several hundreds of dollars, so OpenOffice must seem terrible if it's just given away.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wordpad (Score:3, Informative)
Unlike Notepad, Wordpad has bold, italic, etc - and no doubt there is a linux equiv (or ten). Launches instantly. Free. Perfectly good for 99% of uses.
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Informative)
And precisely why I ditched Acrobat Reader for FoxitPDF which is small and fast.
OpenOffice is a great alternative to Microsoft Office if you want open formats. OpenOffice is also fairly feature-rich. However the app does take considerably longer to start (cold or hot) than MS Office on the same hardware.
That complaint is not only valid, but one share by many OOo devs who complain themselves at the performance. OOo's codebase is mammoth (comparable to the entire KDE codebase, including Koffice) and ancient. It is also very monolithic, as the suite exists as one huge app. Throw in the occasional Java feature that forces users to wait for Java to fire up, and they're just not going to be happy with performance.
I believe that OOo provides all the features that 95%+ of the users will want. Really I'd like to see Sun/Novell/Whomever to focus on stripping legacy code, making OOo more modular (don't load every aspect of the program unless it is needed at boot, move some features/aspects into libraries that can be loaded later if needed) and improve the interface.
I don't believe copying the MS Office 2007 ribbon is the way to go, but a more intuitive, clear and attractive interface would go a long way towards winning over more users.
Derivative works like Red Office and Symphony have nicer UIs. How come OOo's UI has remained so static over the years?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I believe that OOo provides all the features that 95%+ of the users will want. Really I'd like to see Sun/Novell/Whomever to focus on stripping legacy code, making OOo more modular (don't load every aspect of the program unless it is needed at boot, move some features/aspects into libraries that can be loaded later if needed) and improve the interface.
At the heart of it all, I understand that OOo's immodularity is rather fundamental. Remember that it used to come with its own "Desktop" that would literally
Re:Just in time (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Just in time (Score:4, Interesting)
Take out Quick Load, and I'll bet the load time for Office is just about the same as for OpenOffice.
It doesn't. I've always disabled programs from pre-loading at bootup (for ongoing performance issues, not just initial boot times) and Word 2007 opens a fresh document in 3 seconds (no previously opened documents or Office apps). After closing Word and re-opening, it loads a fresh document in 1 second.
Comparing this to OOo 3 and it takes 7 seconds for initial launch and 4 seconds for subsequent launches. To me, this is pretty conclusive that Quick Load isn't the reason MS Office loads faster but probably speaks for the MS Office team doing a better job writing optimised, modular code. These test results are of course subjective depending on the hardware you have but it's the kind of thing people notice when trying to convert them away from MS Office.
It's been said before but OO's problem is the monolithic and legacy nature of the code causing it to bloat. I imagine if OO developers completely rewrote the code, stripped out all the shit and didn't use Java then they could compete with MS Office for performance. Maybe, just maybe...
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
If it gets ads, someone will fork it to remove them.
Re:Just in time (Score:5, Informative)
I recommend to everyone to use Novell's fork/not-fork located at go-oo.org as it is. It uses less memory, provides more features, runs faster, etc. Yes, Novell signed a deal with the devil, but they're putting out a good product for free, so using it isn't supporting Novell. It is just using the superior product.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
having used all three, i find the oo (especially the last version) to have the features, availability and deployment options i need and a price i don't disagree with.
Softmaker Office (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Softmaker Office (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Try loading a 100 page document under abiword. AFAIK, abiword starts becoming pretty unresponsive after ~20 pages. While 100 page documents might not be commonly used, it's pretty ridiculous for a word processor to choke. That's the main reason I tend to avoid abiword. So, any other suggestions on lightweight, full-featured word processing free software?
Re: (Score:2)
KOffice (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a big fan of KDE and their products, but KOffice is a very different beast than MS Office and OOo. To some that is a very good thing, but it isn't going to replace OOo for me, despite being lean and mean. I'm not entirely sure it is meant to compete in the same arena.
However, run it for yourself and make your own determinations. Pull the packages in your distro if you're on Linux, or grab them here on Windows.
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation [kde.org]
There should be native packages
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Softmaker Office (Score:4, Interesting)
also, the SoftMaker feature comparison (MS Excel 2003, PlanMaker 2008, and Calc from OO.o 2) page is rather deceptive. their screen shots seem to suggest that PlanMaker and Excel support AutoShapes whereas Calc does not, which is patently false. there are also intentionally manufactured discrepancies between the documents displayed in Calc versus those displayed in PlanMaker/Excel--such as using different gradient colors, font sizes, chart & graph styles, etc. to make Calc appear to render documents differently from PlanMaker/Excel.
i think this kind of intentionally deceptive marketing says a lot about the developers. i wouldn't be surprised if this "Peter Troi" mentioned in the Summary is an astroturfer working for SoftMaker, or that he intentionally lied about its being open source to mislead the editors and get free publicity for their proprietary office suite.
Parent
Say what you want about Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
But nothing beats Keynote.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, the same place you can put the Word document.
of course, you could just tell your dial up hold out friend/coworker to either deal with it or join us in the current century of broadband access.
Even worse! (Score:2, Insightful)
Google docs was found to be almost a hundred times less popular than World of Warcraft.
Whatever will Google do to escape from this calamity?
Re: (Score:2)
World of Goo [worldofgoo.com]gle, of course!
Re: (Score:2)
Introduce Elvish as a language option?
Re: (Score:2)
OOO Works on USB too (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps they haven't hear of http://portableapps.com/ [portableapps.com]
Or, more likely, they have but are just pretending...
Google Docs really isn't ready. (Score:5, Insightful)
It has most of the features of Microsoft Works 97. With less fonts. The UI is clunky and slow. Granted it is great for being web based however compared to Office or Open Office it is way behind. Also I think people like their documents to be on there system and be able to disconnect from the internet all together sometimes just so they get their work done without the internet whispering in your ear "browse me"
Re:Google Docs really isn't ready. (Score:5, Informative)
That's all true, plus no footnotes. Absolute deal-breaker.
I used it for a while when I was writing short texts that I wanted to access anywhere, but I quickly discovered that this offered no more advantages than writing these texts in emails I sent to myself. The formatting and other capabilities of GDocs are just that bad.
I also tried using it collaboratively, but I found that the changes I made while simultaneously working on a doc with a colleague were not instant enough to be of any synchronic use - we spent a lot of time discussing (on skype) what changes we did or would make. So again, not much better than asynchronous email.
Parent
Re:Google Docs really isn't ready. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's had footnotes for a few weeks.
I had never expected Google Docs to match Office in features. Feature bloat is after all one of the thing I was trying to escape.
I load e-mail attachments that are in doc format directly into Google Docs and in most cases they come out looking just fine.
For those that don't I use Open Office, at least long enough to convert it to a simple readable form.
For those that don't open in Open Office I contact the sender and explain to them how they are idiots for using special fonts that most people don't have, setting margins and table widths outside of page boundaries and using tables for bizarre page placements, often leaving huge numbers of empty cells from hours of tinkering, or worst of all, leaving change tracking on so that I see bits and pieces of every document they have ever created in what should be a one page 20K company newsletter.
Nevertheless it will be interesting to see the competition that this initiates.
Microsoft faces a rock and a hard place. If they make the online version too feature rich and also free, they will hurt their own sales. If they don't, Google will continue to grow its user base (and my guess is that Google is content for that base to grow slowly for now).
Beyond feature competition I think the game is who can most cost effectively do this with a combination of efficient server techniques, advertising, data center placement, etc. It's hard to imagine Microsoft winning such a competition and even if they win they will have significantly reduced their profit margin from what it is now.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You do realize that feature bloat isn't that much of an issue for a SaaS solution. As it is not your resources that you are filling up. In theory you have the Web Office Suit take a terabyte of code and it wouldn't effect you. As long as they made the UI clean enough to handle it.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
God forbid the Russians get your muffin recipe.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Independent" company does paid research for MS (Score:4, Informative)
The CEO of ClickStream, the independent company that did the research, used to do the exact same market research WHILE HE WAS AT MICROSOFT. Though they claim Microsoft didn't pay for this research study, they do say that Microsoft is a client for other studies...I'd hardly call this independent.
http://www.clickstreamtech.com/about.html
No surprise here (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people are accustomed to internet outages, whether the fault of their ISP, broken backbone, or individual sites. So, they are naturally reticent to use web-based utilities in favor of applications hosted on their local machine.
Until the 'net is bulletproof, on-line apps will never usurp local utilites and apps for critical applications--or even "casual" applications.
Anyone who thinks Web based Office suits are it (Score:3, Interesting)
... are truly delusional. This notion we all want to put our corporate documents, small business docs and more on Google's dime shows a glaring weakness in Google's strategy.
With Web Services available for companies to easily develop their own Corporate presences, it makes more sense to have WebDAV services for clients on your own sites, virtually deployed around the nation in various data centers to then route to the closest path possible. Let's not forget that 90% of the Industry doesn't need the "global reach" of Google since most of their clients are local.
What a bizarre conclusion... (Score:5, Insightful)
So first off, current incarnations of MS Office are considered the clear market leader. That's a fair observation. A traditionally installed local application manipulating files in a traditional way is popular.
OpenOffice.org is making inroads as a free alternative. More people are starting to find it a viable alternative for many circumstances, and opt not to explicitly buy MS Office. It behaves fundamentally the same way, and does basically the same stuff. Incidentally, I'm happy as it is a cross-platform application, but I think a greater portion of the userbase doesn't think about the source code or the cross-platform, they just didn't have to give money for it.
Then Google docs comes along. In terms of a strong brand to back the concept, it doesn't get much better than the word 'Google'. They find that despite the strong name and potential ability to fulfill at least the basic needs, people aren't excited about using it. The reason seems self-evident, people are more comfortable with traditional software models for this task. They feel they 'own' the software and have the most control over it. They may or may not back up to online storage, but they want to use a local application to edit it.
MS feels this means issuing their own webapp therefore would cement their lead. I think Google's failure indicates that such an offering is moot. People don't want subscription based software if non-subscription software can do the same thing or better. I've seen people throw out how it comes out cheaper in the long haul than buying the software every time, but it ignores the obvious, that people don't buy every iteration. I know people still using their copies of Office97 because they never had a reason to move. MS and many other companies hate this, but it is a simple fact.
tried it (Score:4, Informative)
I tried it. They have versions for Windows and Linux, apparently not for Mac. It's not open source. They have a trial version that you can download for free and use for 30 days. The trial version is crippled: can't save to any other format besides their own proprietary .tmd format. They also offer a non-crippled 2006 Windows version for free -- but not the 2008 version, and not for Linux. The download page wants your name, country, and email address, and tells you that you'll automatically be subscribed to their email newsletter. It doesn't say that you can opt out of the newsletter. However, down below the form where they ask for this information, it says, in microscopic type, "Leave empty if you do not wish to register." It works if you simply click through to the download without filling anything in. They have the Linux download packaged with installers in rpm, deb, and shell flavors. I downloaded the deb version, but it wouldn't install on my machine, because my machine is x64. I copied the deb to an x86 box, and it installed fine. It made menu entries for itself in the Gnome Applications/Office menu. The first time you run it, it wants to set up a documents folder for you, which defaults to ~/SoftMaker. (I find this kind of thing annoying, and believe that it discourages people from developing good habits for organizing their files.)
I'm a little bit baffled right now as to why anyone would choose it. They claim "compactness" as an advantage, but the download is 80 MB, which doesn't seem very compact to me. (The 2006 Windows version is smaller.) Their web site says, "The Microsoft Word-compatible word processor that is so easy to use that you will wonder why you bothered with Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org for so long," and then lists some bullet points. One is "Fast, powerful, reliable." Actually it didn't really seem any faster than OOo. On the machine I tried it on, the startup time was basically the same as OOo. "Reads and writes your Word documents seamlessly (Microsoft Word .doc 6.0 to 2007)" AFAICT the only advantage over OOo would be if it can read OOXML. (Although OOo can't write OOXML, I can't see why anyone would care; if you save in an older Word format and give the file to Word 2007 users, they'll still be able to read it.) The price is $80 US. Although that may be a lot less than full retail price for Word, it's a heck of a lot more than OOo. And of course I'd have to live with all the usual hassles of proprietary software. I won't get an x64 version unless they deign to compile one for me at some point in the future. I won't be able to upgrade without paying money. Sorry, I'm just spoiled -- apt-get and OSS work fine for me.
Just tried SoftMaker 2006 - impressed, but... (Score:4, Informative)
I like it, a lot, especially the very fine equation editor - it's top-notch, although I am used to the style in Open/StarOffice.
However, what I don't like that much is: it does not allow for creating of .pdf files, and it asks me for registration every freaking time I start it. It was supposed to be free as in beer, I thought!? Also, and this is minor, but still: the default document format is proprietary. It does allow you to save in .odf, which I think every non-MS office suite SHOULD do. It just would be nicer if this was their default format. I don't like the idea of yet another proprietary office format around.
I for one am really impressed (Score:3, Informative)
Kinda obvious. (Score:5, Informative)
Last week my mom signed up for a gmail account. A few hours later she called me up. "I sent someone an e-mail about about my car and then there were all of these ads for my model of car? Why are they reading my e-mail; I don't like it."
If someone feels uncomfortable with letting someone lean over their shoulders why they send an e-mail, they are going to feel even more uncomfortable letting them peer at their spreadsheet.
As a writer over at The Register put it, Google fixes problem no one asked them to fix.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Something is wrong with your setup, OO.o is snappy and responsive, even on my netbook.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)