Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org 170
ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."
Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:5, Interesting)
Christ, kids, for the last time, OpenOffice is part of a patent cross-licensing deal between Sun and Microsoft that resulted from all the anti-trust cases that Sun won. If OO is detached from Sun, it loses that umbrella patent protection and would likely be targeted by Microsoft. Looking at the big picture it would take a tiny amount of Oracle's R&D budget to improve OO. The first thing would be to support macros. A bi-directional translator would be acceptable. A more viable OO could do nothing but help Oracle in its epic battle with MSFT. So piss off.
=Smidge=
Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.
Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a very good point.
When Sun was buying MySQL, there was a lot of FUD how it was going to ruin it, but looking at MySQL job trends [indeed.com] it seems as if MySQL adoption has increased.
Even after the acquisition, people try to paint Sun in a bad light over what's been going on with MySQL. For example, when it was announced that MySQL was going to come out with some features that would only be available in the closed source, enterprise version, the decision was attributed to Sun, when it seemed like it was really Mickos' decision. He was the former CEO of MySQL AB.
When Sun reversed the decision, the news was the MySQL made the change.
Even recently, what's been going on with Monty Widenus leaving Sun has been used to make Sun sound like it was hurting MySQL, but if you read Monty's blog [blogspot.com] about why he left Sun, it sounds more like he was unhappy with MySQL management, and not Sun.
I get the impression that Monty wasn't all that happy with MySQL AB even before they were bought by Sun. When Sun bought them, he was hoping for things to improve but that never happened.
Unfortunately, even a company like Sun is not the same as a startup before VC money and board members come in. It seems it's not as stifling as other companies though, but not what Monty was expecting.
People like Monty probably aren't meant for that type of atmosphere. Probably why people like Andy Bechtolstein come and go frequently.
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Curiously, PostgreSQL job trends [indeed.com] show an almost identical percentage increase (if 10x lower in absolute numbers).
Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, there was definitely a jump in postgresql [indeed.com] around that time too, but the slope for MySQL appears to have gone up. There wasn't any sort of mass exodus from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Maybe some of that was people afraid of what would happen to MySQL as a result of Sun's acquisition but it could also be a result of Sun providing support for PostgreSQL [sun.com] and including it in Solaris 10. Around June 2007 there was a big spike and that was when Sun came out with the first industry standard benchmark Sun put out with PostgreSQL, Sun Java App Server on a T2000 UltraSPARC T1 server [toolbox.com].
I could really care less what happens to MySQL, I'm more concerned what happens with Sun's future contributions to PostgreSQL.
Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you sure? I thought it was StarOffice that was protected, but Sun was indemnifying Open Office users as well?
In any case, the agreement was back in 2004 and nothing has happened since then.
I had a thought in the past about house Sun could improve their OpenOffice development to include more outside contributors. It would be true for any of their open source projects.
One of the big issues with big companies dealing with open source projects is that they aren't required to use the public colaboration tools. In fact it's harder for them to do so.
Instead of Sally asking a question or presenting an idea to Joe on the mailing list, where everyone can see it, Sally might run into Joe in the hallway or walk up to his desk. So all these ideas that Sally and Joe are exchanging are "closed".
It may be ore productive, but it doesn't include the community.
It might be better for the community if employees working on open source projects mostly worked from home to encourage them to use the community collaboration tools.
I think Sun might understand this. The disadvantage of meeting someone in the hallway is something I heard in a presentation from a Sun employee. That might be why they have been working on the Wonderland project [java.net].
With Wonderland, you can get all the developers in one virtual conference room without having to really see or smell them which can be a very good thing. I've had my share of marathon coding sessions.
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Ooops... Forgot the link [itwire.com] to a story about the deal as it relates to OO.o
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Uhmm... We've had those 'virtual meeting rooms' since like 1992. They are called 'IRC chat rooms'.
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what umbrella patent protection?. (Score:2)
What umbrella patent protection?. According to this Microsoft gets Sun to find any 'patent violation, and pay for any subsequent litigation. Not much protection then. I don't know any other company who would have the cohones to get a rival to sue it's own custo
Doesn't IBM use OOo as a product core? (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't IBM use Open Office as the core for one of their products as well? If that's the case, it would seem that a Mozilla or Apache license would be needed to allow them to continue development and shipping as well.
It's a big step for a project to shift from sponsored to self-sustaining. I hope the OOo team isn't biting off more than they can chew with their plans to shift to an independant project.
Re:Doesn't IBM use OOo as a product core? (Score:5, Informative)
Lotus Symphony [lotus.com] is based on OOo, and the various OOo programs are integrated into Lotus Notes 8 Standard as optional Productivity Tools.
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"Symphony" should have been an extension of SmartSuite especially since SmartSuite has:
- A multi-award-winning end-user-friendly relational database (Approach) that trounces the hell out of Base
- A spreadsheed (1-2-3) that has STILL got some superior chart editing features that Calc hasn't got
- A word processor (WordPro) that has true WYSIWYG facilities that Write hasn't got
- A planner (Organizer)
- A presentation application (Freelance)
The first 3 alone are worth the $300 IBM asks for, but REALLY wish that
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"Symphony" (a previous Lotus product that, IIRC, was pretty much like a 3-D database/spread sheet before even ms came out with Excel)
i remember using symphony on one of the old compaq luggables with the tiny green screen. it was a rudimentary spreadsheet program booted off of a floppy, and i think predated 1-2-3. not a lot of info about it online, for some reason. it was the first off-the-shelf spreadsheet program that my dad the accountant used, prior to that he was programming his own accounting tools in COBOL.
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Here are my various comments over the years:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171938&cid=14319700 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=300993&cid=20659515 [slashdot.org]
This one is my comment about how IBM could get around the patented stuff, but they have not yet seemed to show any desire to do so:
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=302369&cid=20670579 [slashdot.org]
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Lotus Symphony, which you refer to, is based off of OOo 1, because that was the last version that IBM could fork a closed-source app off of.
I think Oracle should partner with IBM to allow Symphony to be based off the latest OOo 3 base.
IBM should be able to sell a top-notch threat to MS Office, while OOo could benefit greatly from an improved UI that Symphony offers.
Count me for 3 (Score:2)
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Office 2007 (and apparently 2003 and XP, although I haven't tried on them) has had an optional plugin for 2+ years that enabled ODF support (for all the od* formats that I'm aware of, at least). It's an open-source project sponsored by Microsoft and listed on Sourceforge: http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I use it to open/convert, edit, and save/export ODF files, and it works fine. Mind, if you prefer OO.o over Office 2007 (I don't, even ignoring the risk of OO.o getting the MSOffice formats wring - some
Long Way To Go :( (Score:3, Informative)
> Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months.
They have a long way to go though - the last release of Office probably had 10 times that. They probably also had at least 10 times that in legal purchases too....
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And while I praise the effort of OOo devs, everytime there is an update, people download it again. Conversely, one may download it once and the deploy it to 1,000 machines. Downloads are sadly not an accurate indicator of users.
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Or like me and most of my friends, that use OOo, having downloaded and installed from our distro repository.
I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, I would still download it for free, because I'm cheap. But I would suspect plenty of people would be willing to dish out $50 or so for it, and being in a full retail box with a jewel case and printed manual adds "legitimacy" in the eyes of many consumers.
And I suspect Oracle could help bankroll such a push much better than the open office foundation themselves could.
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Walmart doesn't carry it, but there is a retail box version.
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/ [sun.com]
Re:I for one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Walmart doesn't carry it, but there is a retail box version
Which feeds into my point; sure you have a retail box version but >99% of computer buyers have never seen that box. There are a great number of people who still haven't heard of open office; if they could get it into places where more people shop they could increase the familiarity of the brand and the product.
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I think if they marketed it as one of those $10 applications that Walmart sells in jewel cases, they might have some success. Heck even stick a "Pro" or "Deluxe" version close by for $49 or $99. There is still some misinformed portion of the populace that equates price to value. If the app is free, then they'll scoff at it ("You get what you pay for!" - that lovely little baby boomer war cry that is so irrelevant when it comes to computer products that it's time it was retired). With that crowd to get t
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I suspect rather the opposite. People see OO for $50, and MSOffice for $300, and thing "Wow, what's this cheap knockoff? Only $50? I better avoid that, cheap knockoffs could have bad things. I better get the 'real' one, just to be safe."
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Even fewer people will be happy they lost the $50 for such an inferior product.
The only people I've seen that like OO are the ones who would rather use a text editor and think that HTML in email is evil. That statistically irrelevant portion of the population really doesn't matter.
Let me follow that up with, I prefer text only email and store pretty much all of my documents as plain text, and I'd STILL much rather use MS Office over OO, its just a co
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http://www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-us/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
If you are a student, the student version is $60.
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In a tight economy I bet they will be less likely to say that.
Open Source to the rescue! Again! (Score:2)
That is what is so great about open source. You don't need to wait for Sun or Oracle to sell Open Office. You can do it yourself. Just make sure to include the source code on the CD, and the GPL notice in the manual, and on the box.
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Retail path to glory? I think not. (Score:2)
I for one...Wouldn't mind seeing a "retail" version of open office on the shelves at the local best buy or walmart, and the open office group would likely need a large corporation to launch such an effort. If open office was sitting on the retail shelf for, say $50 in a nice box with all the open office apps, next to MS office at $300 with all the apps, we could see its acceptance really start to soar.
Granted, I would still download it for free, because I'm cheap. But I would suspect plenty of people would be willing to dish out $50 or so for it, and being in a full retail box with a jewel case and printed manual adds "legitimacy" in the eyes of many consumers.
Ah, yeah, two words for you on the retail idea: Mandrake Linux.
Sorry, but I didn't exactly see their revenues soar through the roof when they hit the Best Buy shelves. As a matter of fact, where the heck are all those distros at Best Buy...
Bottom line is it's a long hard road to go against the monster that is Office. Don't know if retail channels is the path to glory vs. something like pushing the suite into the cloud.
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Ah, yeah, two words for you on the retail idea: Mandrake Linux.
Sorry, but I didn't exactly see their revenues soar through the roof when they hit the Best Buy shelves. As a matter of fact, where the heck are all those distros at Best Buy...
Indeed, Mandrake fizzled. However, there is a distinct difference between selling an OS at Best Buy, and selling an office suite.
After all, every computer sold at best buy comes with an OS. Almost none of them come with a functioning office suite. Very few customers at best buy have a need or desire to install an OS on their system beyond what is already on it; almost every customer will at some point need to read and write to an office file for something.
Hence since the customers there have already
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That's what Star Office was... it was the more polished version of Open Office that Sun was selling.
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It's been tried on Amazon with 79 cent CD-ROMs.
Ranking somewhere around 39 in sales of office suites, as I recall.
The chances are really quite good that you already qualify for a legit free or steeply dis
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The chances are really quite good that you already qualify for a legit free or steeply discounted version of MS Office.
But will it work with Wine?
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You know, you could look [winehq.org] it [winehq.org] up [winehq.org] yourself [winehq.org]. It's not very hard.
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If they packaged good documentation in book form, I might even consider buying it. And I know enough to download it for free.
Does Canonical support it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering that part of the argument for "Linux is great" is "look, you get an office suite for free," Canonical should be Oo's biggest supporter.
Personally, I use Oo in Linux and Windows, but I think it's got a long way to go to compete with MS Office. I hope it catches up.
(And before you ask, I have neither the skills nor the time to contribute to the code myself.)
Re:Does Canonical support it? (Score:5, Informative)
This is what gets me. Ubuntu is getting all the praise, but the two companies that pay devs to really push for upstream development are Red Hat and Novell. Novell has a great fork of OpenOffice (go-oo.org) and has really been pushing OpenOffice development.
If anyone is going to circle their wagons around a community fork, the go-oo fork would be where I started.
I believe both Oxygen Office, and Neo Office use it as a starting point for their forks.
Re:Does Canonical support it? (Score:4, Informative)
Go-oo is not a fork. It is a set of additional features and modifications on top of OO.o. It's constantly synced with OO.o
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I'm not saying Ubuntu does nothing. I'm saying Ubuntu gets almost all the credit for Linux development, when they do a very small portion of it.
As Nedposeur posited, it is to Canonical's benefit to have good products like OpenOffice they can tout. But they aren't pushing much upstream. Shuttleworth did say last year that they will invest more in the future in upstream development, so that might change. But to this point, Canonical gets more credit than they deserve.
And while I disagreed with the Novell/
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Well your right that Canonical is highly praised, but its for bringing a desktop distribution thats usable by ordinary people. Honestly there are huge numbers of people that have tried other distributions and given up and gone back to Windows. Canonical's six month release schedule keeps things interesting and gains more users with each release and more developers. It's good for other distributions too as users mature and are prepared to try a different distribution. They might hate it but they are far more
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No doubt I will burn some karma here, but I don't think that Ubuntu is any more user friendly that openSUSE or Mandriva or PCLinuxOS or Simply MEPIS, etc.
Ubuntu has pushed some nice things, but they aren't the only distro that features an easy install, a good package manager, and a nice desktop. And since I'm a KDE user, it is hard for me to praise Ubuntu's desktop. I loathe Gnome, and Ubuntu has been shipping really broken KDE 4 packages for the past year and a half. I hear good progress was made for Ku
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Almost certainly now there are many good alternatives to Ubuntu, but when I was first trying SUSE, it was a pig. Dependencies drove me up the wall, trying to network with windows PC's did likewise and KDE was so unresponsive, i often opened a shell for example 2 or 3 times.
from I think around 8 to 9 Suse was getting usable but I haven't touched it since.
I would put that down to inexperience and under powered hardware to be honest. I'm still adverse to KDE although there are some really good applicat
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That's not right, they only happen to get most of the credit in the desktop/home niche, and you got to accept that red hat/Novell/Sun never really made that a priority - which to their bussiness is a good thing. But in the desktop, Linux needed and needs a lot of polish, and canonical did exactly that, I mean can you believe X would just crash giving lame errors un
How 'bout the Interface? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows if this will be modded as a troll or not, but, with each new version of OO.org, I download it, try it out, and then head back to Microsoft Office 2003/7. I know not everybody is a fan of the ribbon interface (which I particularly *really* like), but, in general, OO.org just feels clunky. I really can't put my finger on what it is exactly, but it's the reason I can't get myself to adopt to it. I want to, but the interface and speed of OO.org must be improved.
Re:How 'bout the Interface? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who knows if this will be modded as a troll or not, but, with each new version of OO.org, I download it, try it out, and then head back to Microsoft Office 2003/7.
There is nothing wrong with Office 2003/2007. They are very good products. If you -have- Office 2003/2007 and you need to be saving as .xls or .doc anyway, you might as well use it. I can't really imagine anyone who HAS office 2007 switching to OOo unless they want to use odf, or are switching to Linux... or something like that.
However, if you didn't have Office 2007, ask yourself whether you find the free OOo so 'clunky' that you'd shell out $150 for Office Home and Student just to avoid using it at home? Or $400+ to use it at work?
Maybe you would... maybe you wouldn't. But I can tell you a lot of people wouldn't. And are happy to put up with OOo's relatively minor shortcomings to get off the MS Office upgrade treadmill.
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You make a good point, except for one thing: ODF is available in MS Office as well. It's a open-source plugin (sponsored by Microsoft, hosted on Sourceforge) and integrates pretty nicely. I've been using it all the way back to when "Office 12" (as it was then called) was in beta, and I've yet to find a file it couldn't open correctly, or one that it saved which opened incorrectly on another office suite.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
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Doesn't help if all you need to do is a few basic documents and spreadsheets and you run in Linux most of the time. I actually own Office Home and Student, but although though I find it to be more polished for even basic tasks, I can't be bothered to try to get it to work under Wine, so I stick with OOo.
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I find that Office 2003/2007 has a "fit and finish" that is light years ahead of OO. There are little things like the visual indicator when you have copied a region in Excel, that I find I miss in OO. However, when 2007 came out I switched to using OO whenever possible because I just cannot stand the toolbar. (And I also think it unbelievably presumptuous to require all users to switch en masse between hugely different interfaces. It's either lazy engineering --- Borland's office tools let you pick your men
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Actually that makes me angry. One of Microsoft's biggest arguments against OOo has been the retraining cost - but then they turned around and forced anyone who wanted to upgrade to retrain anyway! It's a very slimy thing to do, IMO.
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I understand that many folks are pleased with the ribbon. I'm happy for you. However I am not pleased with the ribbon. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't have kept the traditional menu as an alternative.
When Microsoft experiments with a new interface, it also has a huge effect on the installed base. If 20% of users don't like the ribbon that's probably 100-200 million folks who've had their productivity shot to hell. Bring on the ribbon as an alternative.
How about a mix? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Move to less control by Oracle, but keep it selling under the Oracle/Sun umbrella. Oracle WANTS to destroy MS's monopoly, the same as most ppl in our industry. After that, we can have innovation again.
Microsoft has a monopoly on product X as much as Lotus 123 has on spreadsheets.
Their stock price has decreased to about 1/2 of the value 10 years ago. I can't think of a compelling product or service that they have to change that fact. In comparison, Apple's stock is over 10x the price it was 10 years ago.
A monopoly would suggest an opposite trend.
On a different topic, if you can see my .signature, its not a ploy on Microsoft, but rather I find the truth of the statement, err, interesting.
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StarOffice originally to save Sun Windows licenses (Score:5, Informative)
Sun bought StarOffice to save money on Windows licenses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_office#History [wikipedia.org]
The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft. (Simon Phipps, Sun, LUGradio podcast.)
Sun open sourced Star Office because they could, but that was a secondary motivation.
Does Oracle have the same objectives? Probably not, since I imagine their employees have a lot of other software that requires Windows.
Since Oracle doesn't need to use Star/OpenOffice internally, then they have less motivation to control the project that Sun does.
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Could IBM in turn purchase the Star Office division from Oracle?
IBM only has access to the OOo 1 codebase for Lotus Symphony currently.
Bad deal then (Score:2, Insightful)
$73 million / 42000 employees = $1700 per employee. Would have been cheaper to buy 42000 StarOffice licenses for $2.1 million.
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Actually, it was a great deal (Score:2)
Reply to parent and grand-parent...
Buying StarOffice *ONCE* cost more than buying 42,000 Office97 licences in 1999. But guess what, Office 97 (AKA Office 8) was superceded by Office 2000 (AKA Office 9), *AND OFFICE97 WAS NO LONGER AVAILABLE*. So all your new computers and new employees will now end up with Office 2000 (AKA Office 9), until 2002, at which point Office XP (AKA Office 10) was introduced. That was followed by Office 2003 (AKA Office 11) and Office 2007 (AKA Office 12).
Supporting multiple ver
Re:StarOffice originally to save Sun Windows licen (Score:2)
It's hard to tell when Sun is telling the truth. It was only a few years earlier when Mcnealy was saying he had banned office suites at Sun. How can you save money replacing MS Office when you're not using it?
You need more than OpenOffice. (Score:4, Insightful)
The geek sees an office suite.
What Microsoft really sells is the MS Office environment.
Integrated Client-Server solutions for damn near everything your people will ever need - solutions which scale "effortlessly" from the home office to the enterprise. On-line resources and third-party support that are miles wide and deep.
The geek doesn't have a clue.
Recruiting workers who are comfortable and productive in the MS Office environment is trivially easy for anyone based south of the North Pole -
and even there you could probably set up shop on the remnants of the ice pack without much trouble.
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Integrated Client-Server solutions for damn near everything your people will ever need - solutions which scale "effortlessly" from the home office to the enterprise
When do they start selling this to normal customers? I have newer seen the word "effortlessly" used to describe sharepoint and exchange before.
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You can only use IE to really get anything done, which means you have to use Windows, every time I connect to our internal one it has 3 or 4 different fucking htaccess-style login boxes I need to ok because it pulls things from multiple places. I'm sure IE has something behind the scenes to make that all invisible, but it sure as hell isn't a web standard.
What happens is that you're in the domain, and IE uses integrated Windows authentication to silently authenticate you to all Intranet sites as needed using the credentials with which you've logged into the system (and will only show the login box when that authentication fails). There's no reason why other browsers on Windows cannot not support that, and, indeed, Firefox does - it's just disabled by default, but you can enable it [markmonica.com] if you want.
Oracle and OpenOffice seem like a perfect fit. (Score:2)
Having to deal with Oracle on a daily basis, and comparing that to my OO experiences I'd say they are perfect together.
Both feel and look like they would have been awesome around 1990, but suck ass compared to any modern alternative.
I know, Oracle is the best at some things, but someone should let them know that they can have a good product that doesn't feel like you have to enjoy computing like it was in the 70s to use their products.
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:5, Insightful)
More and more governments finally realize they have been lured into the Microsoft trap, and are now freeing themselves by madating the use of open standards for documents. Hopefully they also understand that OOXML is not an open standard and they will use ODF in the future. If MS doesn't incorporate ODF very fast in their products they will lose a significant part of the market in the coming years.
one trap to another... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because you move from Microsoft to an FOSS platform does not mean you are becoming more free nearly as much as you just trading service providers. Whether you get your browser from Microsoft or get it from Mozilla foundation, your Office from Microsoft, or your office from some Open Office foundation, doesn't matter. In all cases there's some other body that ultimately controls the direction of the software.
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It's not about the software. It's about the documents.
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But when you move to a platform built on standards instead of proprietary systems, you gain increased mobility after the initial transition. If you're on a Microsoft platform, with everything in .doc, and you find that you don't like where MS is taking things- you've got a painful transition. If you're on a standards-based platform, and you find that you don't like where your current vendor is heading, you can move to another vendor with comparatively minor cost (possibly some retraining, but at least no co
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The grandparent is talking about document formats. If Microsoft reads/writes ODF then you are free to use *either* MSOffice or Open Office, and probably a dozen other choices.
Astroturfers are usually easy to identify, they act as though it is physically impossible for any software other than Open Office to read/write ODF. Unrelated but it is also common to act as though it is physically impossible for commercial software to run on Linux.
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"Whether you get your browser from Microsoft or get it from Mozilla foundation, your Office from Microsoft, or your office from some Open Office foundation, doesn't matter. In all cases there's some other body that ultimately controls the direction of the software."
Yeah, unless you are willing to write your own software. Then it matters very much whether or not you have the source code.
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Yea, and 2010 will be the Year of the Linux desktop.
MS Office isn't going to go away until something better exists.
I can't stand many 'features' of Office 2007, but I'll take it ANY day over the shit that is known as OpenOffice. If you really think OpenOffice is that great you have unbelievably low standards.
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Whether a person finds OOo "great" depends in large part on the particular feature set used by that person.
For example, if all you use Calc for is basic spreadsheets with simple formulas, then you'll find Calc to be amazing; on the other hand, if you find yourself needing to use a lot of Office 2003-format Excel documents, perhaps with a sprinkling of VBA, you're going to find Calc lacking.
(A note to the OOo fanboys: I'm not saying that Calc is only good at simple tasks; don't read too much into the specifi
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The only thing that matters with regard to government documents is archival. For that purpose, standardization is necessary. PDF is a natural choice, especially now that it has features like forms and menus which allow for a little bit of interactivity.
Hopefully the guys in the government (or corporate) offices are little more forward thinking than you. I doubt it, but I can hope. Archival is of limited (but not no) value without the ability to modify or expand on old docs. Who wants to copy and paste the old document into a new one when you can just load the old document, tweak it, and save it under a new name? Especially when the old document was the source for a PDF file with forms and menus and such. Or when dealing with new laws that require mor
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The only thing that matters with regard to government documents is archival.
Really? It's my experience that government (and I assume businesses and education as well) have a lot of 'live' documents at any one time, and a non-trivial portion of these are on network shares for a reason. So requests for upgrades (and accompanying licenses) to $LATEST_VERSION is a massive cascade after the first document in $LATEST_VERSION's format is encountered (usually from an outside vendor). One convert creates the need for more, because the documents $LATEST_VERSION tries making in $OLD_VERSION's
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When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using.
Yes, and that's exactly why it's so important to push for the use of formats that can truly be called "open standards". In fact, some governments have instituted legal requirements for the use of open formats for their own documents, and that's a very good thing.
If enough governments and companies have policies requiring use of open standards, then Microsoft will be forced to support some kind of open standard in their products. That will allow real free-market competition, since the competition will be
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:5, Interesting)
Hate to say it, but I think Microsoft Office is a flat out better product than OpenOffice.org. It starts up faster, it has the whole macro system, it's just a lot more powerful.
What makes you think there isn't free-market competition right now? OpenOffice.org users can open MS files and save to the format as well. There are a few bugs, but those are true among Microsoft products too (open the same document in Word 97 or Word 2000 or Word 2003 and they look different). Open standards are great, but I highly doubt it will make a dent in Microsoft's hold of the office software market.
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Sadly- and as someone who hates Microsoft Office- I have to say that I agree with you.
OpenOffice is okay at certain things, and fails miserably at many others- while being amazingly bloated, slow, and painful to interact with. Every time a new version comes out, I give it a try- and every time I feel lucky that I don't have to deal with document writing in that format but infrequently.
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And if you legislate it, Microsoft will come.
Already on the way. One of the major features in Office 2007 SP2 is going to be ODF read/write support out of the box.
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And how can one not be impressed with how consistent Microsoft Office is across all its applications. Things that stand out in my mind are its handing of color pallets, windowing paradigm, dialogue boxes, cut/paste semantics, embedded object management and file handling.
Try these tasks in both MS-Office and OpenOffice:
- Configure a corporate color pallet so that each application logically defaults to using the colors appropriately and are easily available from the tool bars.
- Open two documents of each typ
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:5, Interesting)
With the advent of web-based office solutions, does OO really matter that much any more?
More and more I find myself working with Word documents in Google Docs. Granted, Google Docs has a long, long way to go to be considered a serious contender, but in terms of convenience, it's second to none. I work with very basic documents, so once I open them they are stored on Google's servers, and I can access them wherever I am -- home, office, yacht club, city morgue, etc.
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,br> There are times when your not online that you still need Office software. Plus Google Docs isnt robust enough for everyone yet; someday it might be.
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What I think OpenOffice.org really needs is an integration with something like Google Docs but open so others can implement it.
Basically, Google Docs serves as a content revision system and OpenOffice.org is the fat client to it, but you can also connect and edit in Google Docs as well.
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:5, Insightful)
Reason 1: As soon as the "cloud" is unavailable, you are screwed.
Reason 2: It does nothing for anyone who has real work to do. People still need to do complex design documents including diagrams, charts, tables, etc. Why would I want to spend time in one app (ArgoUML, Dia, Viso) creating a diagram to then upload it to a browser so it can be in the final doc product?
Reason 3: For anything more serious than a shopping list, I do not trust an advertising company to be the primary repository for my data.
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All of the above may soon be false for the one simple reason following: Most large creators of such web apps already have or are working on offline versions - and on each version, they are making great strides to make it feature compatible to standard office suites (MSO, OOo, etc). These versions will or already do allow you to locally store your files and work on them with or without an Internet connection. GoogleDocs is one example.
Google Docs Offline [google.com]
Google Docs [google.com]
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Your post answers the question you asked, so it's rendundant and not interesting. The only mildly interesting thing is that you use Google Documents while in the city morgue.
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So you ask:
And then you proceed to point out that:
Uh, isn't that the point? Google Docs is still a toy compared to your average office suite, and will likely remain that way for a long time.
Ah, and now I see. You don't actually represent the kind of people who really use MS Office on a day-to-day basis.
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Google docs are a great product as an auxiliary tool to aid your favorite office app, but they can't really replace it, I mean really...
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Though the migration towards Office 2007 (whatever version it is that comes with Vista installs) has been going on apace,
It has?
Migration to Office 2007 causes a severe productivity hit. I mean, I'm an expert Word user, and generally great at picking up a program I've never used before and figuring it out, but I'm feeling like I could use a couple hours of formal training on the new interface. I just spent a good two minutes looking for how to turn on my ruler that was on by default in the last several versions of Word, for example. And I'm the test case... after I've been using Office 2007 long enough to feel comfortable
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MS Office is rarely if ever bundled with retail PCs and is usually a separate billable item if you order through Gateway or Dell.
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Usually it's Microsoft Works. I honestly have no idea why Microsoft wastes development time on that particular product; it would be smarter to bundle trimmed-down versions of Office.
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I couldn't agree more, i simply can't see OO ever being more than an MS clone (although its not like abiwordits or gnumeric are doing amazing things either). I mean its great that there is an option if you want that, but i doubt anybody will ever get excited over a word/spreadsheet/presentation program and generally the alternatives (koffice/goffice/etc) seam to run faster.
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Actually, there have been times when I've had to have my husband parse out text in Vim so that I could use it in Excel.