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Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office (Register)
Here's the latest set of Steve Ballmer quotes, courtesy of The Register.
"He blamed the success of Linux in the public sector
on influential academics, who favour it because universities are Unix
environments, and politicians reacting to 'noisy constituents - and
those Linux people are noisy.'"
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Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 6, 2004 15:37 UTC (Wed) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763) [Link] Well, Steve, we can always rely on you not to get it!
It's funny that he mentioned Star/OpenOffice as being like what Microsoft put out in 1997 - because strangely, millions of people are still using those old versions of Office, because they still do everything people want, and then some.
As for "value", well which would you rate higher: a suite that does 10x more than you need and costs hundreds of pounds [dollars], or a suite that does 5x more than you need and costs, er, zilch. Though to swing the balance still further, the free one has some extra features that you really *do* want: like PDF export, not being subject to supernatural forces, not munging documents at random, not changing its file format with the winds etc.
Thanks Steve, but I'll stick with OpenOffice. It even has the minor additional bonus of running on the operating system of my choice ;-)
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 6, 2004 18:45 UTC (Wed) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] As for "value", well which would you rate higher: a suite that does 10x more than you need and costs hundreds of pounds [dollars], or a suite that does 5x more than you need and costs, er, zilch.Wouldn't it be wonderful to have software that does 1.2x more than what you need and is free. It would be interesting to see just how many features can be dropped from an application and yet remain useful for 90% of users. For example, most people could get by with a bare-bones word processor with no "avanced" features other than a spell checker. Fewer bugs, smaller memory footprint, and a less cluttered UI -- all good stuff.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 6, 2004 19:42 UTC (Wed) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] It seems to me the source to do this is out there and I certainly agree that it would be a desirable thing for some applications. Think of it as a GUI replacement for vi like editors.
Note I'm not saying it should in any way be vi compatible. The reason I still use vi for most of my text editing though is that it is very small and fast and it does everything I want. Especially the vim version. Loading OO is overkill.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 8:32 UTC (Thu) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] Unless I'm not understanding correctly, what you're looking for is something like gedit.
You don't have to run a huge word processor for GUI text editing.
Personally, I use office suites as export filters mostly and OOo is my favorite, cost regardless.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 6, 2004 20:40 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] The "make a small app with the feature 90% of the users need" strategy hasbeen tried often enough, and has always failed, at least in markets where the user has a choice. In the Windows world, where software is basically gratis, everyone uses the application with the largest feature set. Nobody I know who uses Windows (about half my computer-literate acquaintances) uses PagePlus, Paintshop Pro or Microsoft works. All holiday snaps are edited in Photoshop. All text is written in Word. All totting up of expenses is done in Excel. It's the same with computers where real money changes hands: nobody buys the easier, cheaper stripped offerings, nobody buys the webtv terminals. Everyone get the screamer with gobs of memory and go-faster stripes. People _say_ they are confused by all the features, but they go out of their way to obtain the latest, greatest, most feature-full thing they can get.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 6, 2004 20:52 UTC (Wed) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link] The user never really had the choice. If it's not msoffice then it's word perfect. The key element here being VENDOR LOCK. "Features" really has NOTHING to do with it. People buy Lotus 123 or msoffice due to a perception that such purchases alone will allow them to exchange data with everyone else.
The features beyond "MS-DOS compatable" are largely irrelevant.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 8:25 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link] And MS made sure WordPerfect didn't work ... Don't forget, WordPerfect became dominant in a competitive market because users chose it. It is STILL my word-processor of choice - and it costs me a lot more effort to get it to work than Office would, simply because Windows doesn't like it!
Don't forget also, WordPerfect could read (and write) almost any other word processor format out there. If you came up with a document from any popular word processing program of the 80's, I'd fire up my old WP5.1 and read it.
People buy MS now because it is the only stuff guaranteed (well sort of) to work on Windows. Don't forget, DOS 4 was a pig. Why? Because it was *designed* to fail to work with 1-2-3. WPWin5.1 was a pig, as was WPWin6.0. Why? Because I am *convinced* that Windows 3.11 was designed to fail to work with it! WP6.1 and Office 95 are incompatible. Why? Probably because Office 95 was *designed* not to work with WP6.1.
If I choose vendor lock to WordPerfect because I like the program, that's my choice. If I'm forced into vendor lock with Word, because MS rig Windows to make sure that WP crashes, well ... you get my drift!
Cheers,
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 14:33 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Of course they had a choice -- I distinctly remember starting out with aPC/XT and having a choice of the Quill, WordPerfect, Word (for Dos), PC-Write, XYWrite and Sprint. I had (illegal) copies of all of them, and I choose to use WordPerfect. It had the most features. And there's choice for photo retouch apps. You can use Photoshop, Corel Photopainter or Paintshop Pro. File formats are unimportant for that type of application, but people use their pirated version of Photoshop. Nobody wants to get stuck with something that's perceived to have less features. Around 1990, I was still using Windows. I had a choice between an almost free DTP application (PagePlus, I believe), Ventura and a pirated Pagemaker. I used pagemaker. Didn't really need the features, but I did want to use the 'best' application. Pagemaker, of course. It had the most features. Light doesn't work for users in software.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 15:34 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] The "make a small app with the feature 90% of the users need" strategy has been tried often enough, and has always failed, at least in markets where the user has a choice.Not true. The statement "always failed" shows your bias -- there's no way you could have possibly had the time to research all software deployments to evaluate their success or failure. I've had great success moving Windows users off IE and onto Firefox. Previously I couldn't get anyone to even look at Mozilla 1.x, despite the fact that it is a much more complex application than Firefox. I've not had anyone want to go back to IE or Mozilla after using Firefox for a week.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 18:01 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] I'm curious what bias you think you're detecting... Anyway, yourcounter-example is rather silly. First off, Firefox has more features than IE, namely tabbed browsing, and as for Mozilla... There's something as making an application too ugly and weird. And then, it was a suite. Standalone applications are perceived to be stronger than suites, generally. There's not much that Mozilla can do that Thunderbird + Firefox + Dreamweaver cannot do. For the ordinary Windows user for whom every application is, essentially, gratis. Just saying 'Not true.' does not make an obvious fact untrue...
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 8, 2004 1:04 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] Just saying 'Not true.' does not make an obvious fact untrue...Obvious fact? What evidence have you presented to support your assertion that the "make a small app with the feature 90% of the users need" strategy has been tried often enough, and has always failed, at least in markets where the user has a choice? None that I can see.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 18:34 UTC (Thu) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] > ... In the Windows world, where software is basically gratis ...
...Huh?
MS Office (Word, Excel) is free? Paintshop Pro is free? Photoshop is free?
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 6, 2004 21:20 UTC (Wed) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] The problem is you have a word processor that does everything you want, but all I want to do is to write a school paper that needs an acute accent over a v for a little Cherokee. All he wants to do is to include a couple equations for his engineering paper. All she wants to do is to emulate the slightly complex table structure her grammar book uses. All her Korean friend wants to do is to type some Old Korean. If you're going to get all of our demands, it can't be 1.2 times what you need anymore, but if you don't get all our demands, then it won't be what we need, and we'll go to something that gives us 5x or 10x what we need, but actually does what we need.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 8, 2004 16:55 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] If you're going to get all of our demands, it can't be 1.2 times what you need anymore, but if you don't get all our demands, then it won't be what we need, and we'll go to something that gives us 5x or 10x what we need, but actually does what we need.This is the exact problem that every commercial software vendor faces. Since they are all in business to make money, they will add any feature that anyone requests so long as they believe the revenue they generate from adding the feature will exceed the implementation costs. Most high-profile free software projects follow this course as well, since most of them have a goal of replacing some commercial application from vendor 'M'. The result is the same in both cases: most people are using software that uses more resources than it has to, has a confusing UI, and is buggier than it should be, all for the sake of including features that they will never use. My 90% and 1.2x figures are arbitrary; it might be 80% and 1.5x, or something entirely different, depending on the application. It's not possible to tell for sure, since there is no way to accurately measure this -- it's too subjective. Most studies along these lines are funded, and they usually manage to find what they're looking for, which makes them fairly useless for their purported purpose. Probably a better way to make this case is to forget about what percentage of users will find a particular feature set sufficient, since it is impossible to determine this anyway, and focus on the size of the group (number of users) instead. For example, in North American there is probably a large group of people who would find a simple word processor, English only, with no other advanced features other than a spell checker, to be very useful to them. Loads fast, responds to user input quickly, has a clean and easy to use UI, and doesn't contain a lot of bugs. Nice software, the kind you don't see much of anymore. Adding Spanish would increase the size of the group by a significant amount. Adding other features, maybe not so much. At some point adding feature 'x' is more of a burden to the majority of users than it is a benefit to the small group that finds it useful. That's not to say that there shouldn't be applications with advanced or obscure features. But the rest of us shouldn't have to pay for them with our time and aggravation.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 10, 2004 0:46 UTC (Sun) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] What's an advanced feature? You probably know what features you consider not advanced, but they may not have anything to do with the features I consider not advanced. Footnotes and bibliographies are essential to your academic market, but not your business one. Your business market needs to embed spreadsheets, something your academic market doesn't. Many people don't need to import from other programs; many do. When you talk about your large group of North American people, which group are you talking about?
The problem is, adding feature 'x' is never a big burden to the majority. It always adds a negligable amount of time to the loading time of the application, one more item to a menu.
Does Wordpad fit your definition? If it does, then why do people buy Word at all? You still haven't explained why people purchase and use Word, when there are much simplier and cheaper substitutions.
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 11, 2004 17:01 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] You still haven't explained why people purchase and use Word, when there are much simplier and cheaper substitutions.Why do people buy MSFT Word to read email attachments? I don't know. Why do people buy a 5500 lb. SUV to transport their 200 lb. carcass to work and back?
Go Steve - those cavalry are eagerly awaiting your order Posted Oct 7, 2004 0:04 UTC (Thu) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link] It would be interesting indeed. The problem has always been filecompatibility. Microsoft makes a small simple package called Works. Adequate for most everyone, except it won't read Word files. So it is of very limited use in many environments. Derek
No problem; give me MS Office Posted Oct 6, 2004 16:52 UTC (Wed) by macemoneta (guest, #2717) [Link] While StarOffice is great, I wouldn't mind using MS Office it's available.
Mr. Ballmer- When will I be able to buy MS Office for Linux, so I can use the same office suite cross-platform (i.e., on my Linux system)?
I don't need MSOffice... Posted Oct 6, 2004 22:14 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] I use OO.o and KOffice, at work under Win32 and KDE/cygwin, and at homeunder linux.
Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office (Register) Posted Oct 6, 2004 17:52 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] "It's as good as what we were shipping seven years ago, it's not compatible with Microsoft Office and it's missing key applications like Outlook."
I'm gald they finally admit that compatibility with Microsoft Office was an issue with Microsoft Office in '97, and I found it to still be a problem in '99. Have they fixed this yet?
Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office (Register) Posted Oct 6, 2004 18:43 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] Steve:
When I write something down on paper and pencil, anyone who understands English (and can read my writing) can read what I wrote. They can also see (and hopefully understand) any pictures I might have included.
When I use my Home Studio to record a CD, I can give it to anyone with a CD player, and they can play it back.
When I go on the World Wide Web, or use my computer to write the *same sort of stuff* I could write with my pencil, why do I have to jump through hoops to make sure everyone can read my stuff, just like they could with a pencil-and-paper version?
Oh..don't bother with the "materials reqired" trick; I could have used a piece of charcoal to write on the paper, or made up my own ink from common household materials, or, in fact, just some stuff I find outside in a forest or something.
Point is, I'm getting sick and tired of software being incompatable with my data, version to version, programmer to programmer, company to company...Steve.
Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office (Register) Posted Oct 6, 2004 20:43 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] Not that OpenOffice doesn't have the occasional crash when trying to loada file created in a previous version... I needed to open a .sdw file I created in 2002, and the only current version of OpenOffice that could load it was SuSE's version for SuSE 9.1. Neither the vanilla download from openoffice.org for linux or Windows, nor the 2.0 beta, nor the OS X version could load that file.
Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office (Register) Posted Oct 6, 2004 19:10 UTC (Wed) by freethinker (guest, #4397) [Link] First they ignore you.Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
Ballmer calls for horse-based attack on Star Office (Register) Posted Oct 6, 2004 19:55 UTC (Wed) by jeroen (subscriber, #12372) [Link] I thought we were in the "Then you laugh at them" stage. ;-)
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