Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice.org 277
CWmike writes "Preston Gralla has a decent idea that could move the office needle: If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs, and sell support for the combined suite to small businesses, medium-sized business, and large corporations. Given the reach of Google, the quality of OpenOffice, and the lure of free, it's a sure winner. Imagine if a version of it were available as a Web service from Google, combined with massive amounts of Google storage. Integrated with Google Docs, it would also allow online collaboration. For those who wanted more features, the full OpenOffice suite would be available as a client — supported by Google. wouldn't be at all surprised to see this happen. Just yesterday, IBM announced that it was selling support for its free Symphony office suite. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine Google doing the same for OpenOffice, after it integrates it with Google Docs."
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
And why would Google use OpenOffice to fill that gap when they could just improve Google Docs?
Basically, they already do (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if Google wanted to give OOo a nice grant, that would be most welcome
OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:5, Insightful)
So far from a knockout punch, I think OpenOffice barely registers in terms of it's disruptive influence. I don't use it, my employees don't use it and everyone I know who has to use it hates it. Perhaps it's time as a community we considered alternatives. The "quality" of OpenOffice isn't something I think people are particularly happy with.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
you can swap back and forth. You can use google docs to store your files pass US customs and download them again quickly and easily once you have passed customs.
i am not seeing the point of the article.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe under ideal conditions - like, oh, the same sort of environment that would make Crysis happy -it's "fine", but it's not an Office killer.
It's a bloated pos that's nothing more than a clone of Office. Not a very good one, at that.
Show me an Office-compatible suite than I can install on a PII / 300MHz (one of the boxes within my reach), that doesn't have performance issues, and I'll show you The Office Killer.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:1, Insightful)
(1) after entering seven slides and deciding to order them, all text disappeared from seven slides. I found it again all on slide 1, off the bottom.
(2) Arrowheads rendered as squares when I opened a
(3) When saved as
So, I gave up and just installed PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn't buggy enough to drive me to Impress, but Impress was buggy enough to drive me to paying for PowerPoint.
(And before the usual crowd chimes in with the "you have the source; why didn't you fix the bug yourself, you leech?" line, it's of course because I've got a job to do, and those slides are just a means to an end. My job isn't to singlehandledly build all the tools I need to do my job; it's to do my job, and even hundreds of dollars for a commercial tool is cheap compared to the time it would have taken even to begin to set up to modify the Impress code.)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not running in a browser on AJAX, the stupidest application 'platform' ever congealed?
Working reliably when offline?
Working reliably with large documents, with embedded images etc?
Performance? Even if you thought OO.o was slow, you'll be amazed at how badly you can bog things down if you implement it in mighty javascript, inside a browser.
And why would Google use OpenOffice to fill that gap when they could just improve Google Docs?
You mean by making google docs a real application instead of a gimped web based browser hosted mess? Why re-invent the wheel? Just enhance oo.o to store docs to google's servers and call it a day.
Personally though, I don't know why anyone would even BOTHER with google docs. If you want web based document access I think we should be striving for remote desktop hosting and application publishing.
Citrix already has this, and if you've ever used MSOffice as a published Citrix web application, you'll know what I'm talking about. None of this flaky ajax crap. Accessible from anywhere. Documents exist on the corporate server. It costs a bundle to license though and I don't know if it supports linux. -- but isn't that where FLOSS shines? I'd rather see this over another half baked AJAX app.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, it provides an interface that's familiar to people, better than google docs. For a nerd like me or most of the people on slashdot, google docs works just fine; for people like my parents, OpenOffice is more familiar. Google can make internet browsers sing and dance, but the browser just can't replicate the experience as well.
Third, it gets existing OpenOffice users to switch to google docs. The ability to save to google docs as easily as to the hard drive would be a compelling feature, at least to me. I run a DnD game online and I use google doc's spreadsheet to manage characters; this would make it a lot easier for me and my players to use it all.
I would use this for my DnD game and most of my documents that I could possibly want in multiple places (and that wouldn't be interesting to law enforcement or identity thieves).
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a heavy office user.. I mainly use it to write an occasional report... maybe draw a diagram.
But it's SO damn buggy I can barely use it! For example, I was illustrating a graph algorithm with Draw, and it was working quite nicely until I had to undo several levels.. then the alignment of everything went screwy. Nothing that moved during the undoing was anywhere it should have been. A redo didn't fix it either. (Not that alignment is ever quite right in that thing...)
Writer's a bit better, but I've seen problems with it too... and almost all of my problems involve undos and redos... stuff which I do ALL the time.
I was quite dissapointed, because overall I like OO.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not the point.
We need a Linux based application *server*, preferably one that is FLOSS.
Publishing OO.o from Windows 2003 Server and Citrix Presentation Server to a linux client almost defeats the point if you ask me.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Also Impress seem to be the worse part of OpenOffice, Write and Calc are pretty good, at least for the last two years of using them I didn't notice any significant problems.
lowest common denominator software (Score:3, Insightful)
>user that Google Docs is lacking?
Why should we ever improve on software? Why should software ever do more than perform basic tasks poorly?
These are the attitudes behind your statement. Google docs is not as good as open office. Open office is not as good as microsoft office.
The arguments that people usually make are, "do you really need those extra features?" and to some extent it is true. I don't *absolutely* need everything that Microsoft Office has to offer, and so I save myself some money and download Star Office via the google pack.
Indeed, a lot of free and open source software tries to succeed, not by being the best software of its kind, but by being the *cheapest* software of its kind. Sometimes that strategy works, and sometimes it doesn't, but as a *developer* I'm always kind of disgusted by it.
Really, what's the point of being a software developer if all you ever aspire to do is put out crappy software that people will only use because it is free?
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Web apps are shit, period. If you want security, run in a virtual environment, or just stick with apps from people you trust, like Google.
Otherwise you get flaky, embarrassing, unresponsive bollocks which fails the second there's a network problem anywhere between the servers in the States, thousand of miles away from me, right up to my ISP and the little bits of metal connecting to me. Plus my data isn't being sent halfway around the world for some spotty bedroom boy to packet sniff and/or fuck about with. That's the worse possible solution.
Surely you want the opposite - apps downloaded from the net, run locally, with internet access as and when needed - infrequently, probably.
The Problem with OpenOffice (Score:3, Insightful)
All these improvements could be contributed upstream, but because of Sun's tight gripped control, they won't be. Sun isn't just going to hhand it over to Google, and I doubt Google is just going to sell Sun's product, unless Google felt like they had a strong-enough influence in the product's development.
I agree that Google Docs is poor in its execution, but I doubt that OOo is the way to go for them. I see a product like Zimbra, that was developed with the web in mind, not an app forced into a browser, and that is where the future lies.
When Google has an office suite that was designed with a web interface in mind, that works as fast as Zimbra, please let me know.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, not a whole lot of people need that kind of functionality most of the time. For what I do, it's actually a great asset - it sure beats the hell out of emailing a document back and forward a dozen times over the space of ten minutes. And the functionality, again for what I do, is plenty - I'm just sharing lists of ideas with colleagues and clients 95% of the time. All of your points against Google Docs are very much valid, and I was going to point them out myself. The accessibility during offline time is the real killer for me, as I don't have a cellular card for my laptop and can't be bothered to pay for wifi at hotspots, so it certainly can't replace a desktop text editor. Some combination of a desktop editor, the "push FTP" of DropBox, and the realtime collaboration of Google Docs would be THE winner, but that's asking for a lot.
At the end of the day, there's no one tool that's right for everyone right now. OOo is free, functional, and will get the job done for most people. Word is expensive, more functional and stable, somewhat faster, and has advanced features for power users that most people will never go near. Google Docs is free, limited in functionality, but doesn't require installation or local storage.
(Yes, I know I didn't really address the whole Word/Citrix thing; however, assuming you have VPN access then you're already able to get to the central repository and then there should be no reason to bother with the published web app through Citrix thing since you could just locally install OOo/Word - the file access is the crucial thing there more so than the app itself. Yes, this still isn't quite what you meant, but humor me)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Basically, they already do (Score:2, Insightful)
Since they aren't, we carry bigger devices around and do a poor job securing them, but we live with it, because it makes the most sense given current network costs, hardware costs and hardware capabilities. When network costs, hardware costs and hardware capabilities change, people change their behavior in response to the new situation.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should Google care? (Score:4, Insightful)
Were there a lot of people running around in 1980 saying Apple Computer had to start building mainframes in order to knock out IBM? I mean, that would make just as much sense.
IBM tried to knock out Microsoft with OS/2. How'd that work out?
Novell tried to knock out Microsoft with its purchases of Unix, Digital Research, and WordPerfect. How'd that work out?
Sun has been trying to out Microsoft with Java and StarOffice and whatnot. How's that working out?
And now, Microsoft's been obsessively focused with trying to knock out Google, pouring billions more into MSN. How's that working out?
Re:Basically, they already do (Score:4, Insightful)
Google earth. Google desktop search. Google Chat.
Their goal is not producing web services, it's making data more accessible. Making it easier to access google docs from a desktop office application may very well fall within that scope.
As others have noted here, google docs does not perform terribly well. For performance-intensive things, desktop applications are still better solutions than web-based ones. Office applications are one of those things -- they have tons of functionality.
Google would do well to:
* make it trivial to save and load google docs docs from within OO.o
* add real-time collaborative editing of google docs to OO.o
It's just not possible to get all the functionality of OO.o into a web app, and have it perform comparably on the same hardware.
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't remotely on par with a native app either. And even google's flagship gmail -- it isn't that hard to confuse the UI to the point buttons stop working, context menus won't appear/disappear or render funny, while javascript is just grinding along in the background away slowing it all to a crawl, while the page loading icon spins endlessly...
Sure I've seen MUCH worse. But really all AJAX 'web2.0' apps just aren't very robust.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:4, Insightful)
I like OOo since Writer and Calc do what I need, Base is rock-solid where it counts, and Draw is at least adequate.
But I am one of the few clear seers who know that the first and biggest step to improving an organization's performance is to ban the use of PowerPoint. (The second step, which would also result in a significant boost in efficiency, is to limit the use of MS Access to persons who have the training to know when it is actually the right tool for the job-- which, in corporate America, is roughly 3.72% of its current usage.)
OOo sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
OOo is a piece of crap. No, really. I do not think you could come up with a worse productivity suite without specifically designing it that way, and you certainly wouldn't have as much adoption.
OOo is a (bad) clone of Word, mixed in with XML-pedantry and a really bad case of the second-system effect (made all the worse because none of the people involved had anything to do with the first system, which is Word itself).
It, in a nutshell, shows the reason why getting free software onto the desktop has been so difficult: half the community is focused on feature-for-feature competitiveness and replication of the original product, and measures its success in market-share, and the other half of the community just hates MS software and tries to do the exact opposite, under the guise of "doing it right the first time." As a result we get something that actually manages to be slower than its MS equivalent in every respect, because on top of all the original features we copied without trying much in the way of procedural abstraction or optimization, we have even more stupid ideas bolted on, like using compressed XML files for the native data format, questionable default parameters that someone decided are "more correct", and the occasional bizarre bug.
The same sort of thing is starting to happen to Firefox, too. It started out just trying to be fast, but then a number of advocates got on board and decided that more people should use it, and in order to get them to do that the browser should try to be all things to all people. Now Firefox is getting bigger, more bloated, and slower, and in a few years will just be another bald, fat, middle-aged, useless browser program that got passed by.
All this is a long way of saying that Google shouldn't touch OOo with a ten-foot pole. It goes against everything they stand for: simplicity, usability, obviousness.
[1]: Except Orkut. Sorry.
Re:Sounds like a (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OpenOffice just isn't very good. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've tried using OOo on and off since, including quite a major project recently. It's just so buggy! Write would never apply my user-defined styles properly, seemingly forgetting changes I'd made at random.
KOffice has much more potential. It's cleaner, faster, and with the new version based on Qt4, cross-platform.