I personally don't like the google apps and prefer much better the zoho solutions. I think Google apps are incredibly slow and immature, I cannot understand people using them not to say government departments.

Does anyone else see the irony of Slashdot posters whining about MS shills?

Literally EVERY MS story posted here for the last 15 years has been full of people bitching about MS. And yet if ONE person posts a pro-MS message then "OMG YOU'RE A SHILL SLASHDOT IS FULL OF SHILLS!"

It just makes my view of Slashdot (and the FLOSS community as a whole) get that much dimmer.

As for the story? I guess I could be snarky and say something about how Google can only win if they sue people who don't pick them. That sounds like extortion to me! Plus Google Docs doesn't have OneNote... which immediately makes Office Web Apps better. ;)

Yeah, because no one on Slashdot ever bashes Google, right?

full tard

Or, to put it in more accurate terms:

1. Any user who hasn't been around for at least a decade is automatically a shill
2. "Vacuous pro-msft post" = "Actually made a bunch of real points that I refuse to address"
3. Identical to 2, but a list with only 3 items looks a bit anemic.
4. I only noticed the first few "MS shill" (read: honest pro-MS) posts because I have the attention span of a goldfish.

Other than the security nightmare called the Oracle JavaRE which it sits upon and is mandatory (for the office wizards) if you are to get any real use out of Libre Office, A product that together with Adobes Acrobat have consistently dominated the malware remote security exploit successes.

i would also rather not have "security updates" from a company that seems its acceptable to randomly offer me browser toolbars from seedy companies everytime i install their "security fixes", real professional stuff there, am i getting fixed or nailed this month ?.

So when LibreOffice gets rid of Java you might see it more, until then its just not worth the pain of maintaining Java for an office spreadsheet and a few docs.

That also works the other way around. What if LibreOffice saves one an average of 5 minutes instead?

Pardon me, but I think you're a bit naive. When one group presents a uniformly evil projection of another, you're witnessing zealotry. Democrats/Republicans, Socialists/Capitalists, Open Source/Closed Source -- both sides produce some good in this world. They wouldn't continue to grow, and good people wouldn't continue to put forth good efforts for their causes for very long if they didn't.

Also, you're ignoring the fact that Slashdot is/was actively squelching those with a pro- (or at least not anti-) position on MS. Believe me, there have been many cases over the years where the site operators were caught futzing with the moderation system to squelch. Speaking for myself, I mysteriously lost mod points, permanently, years ago... and I was never really a very bad boy.

I still enjoy reading the site, but decided not to contribute much to a site where the operators felt the need to be that underhanded in forcing their ideology. I know the site has changed hands and perhaps gotten less heavy-handed as well in the process.

But if you're not reading Slashdot (or any other source of news) with an eye toward teasing out the bias, you're a bit naive.

symbolset, you've discovered the difference between PR and Marketing; PR spins the facts while Marketing simply makes them up

As a government employee who had to plan and deal with sharing of information across thousands of systems, I often sat across the table from Microsofties who claimed that their software met our compatibility needs even though it didn't have even a basic IP stack at the time. We supported military engineers worldwide who had Sun, Apollo, Masscomp, Pyramid, and dozens of systems running a number of operating systems. Yet, they all had one thing in common - they were all POSIX compliant, and there were common tools and interfaces across all of them. Even when Windows finally got a native (sorta) IP stack, it still never got POSIX compliance. POSIX is a set of IEEE standards initiated in the 1980s, and was adopted into the NIST FIPS standards. The POSIX standards continued to develop until just 4 years ago. Most of the popular operating systems today are POSIX compliant, even certified. I wouldn't expect you to know that, though, being a MSoftie. Of all *mainstream* operating systems in use today, only Windows (in all versions) remains out of compliance. Microsoft has always fought against compatibility and portability rather than work with everyone else. The MSofties I knew were always trying to get us to drop all standards and just buy their stuff, with no care about how we could get it to work with what we already had.

It's quite possible that no company was willing to use LibreOffice in their solution.

The work of hosting the servers and making sure they're up is done by someone else.