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(sigh)(sigh)Posted Jan 26, 2005 15:13 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285)In reply to: (sigh) by nedrichards Parent article: OpenOffice.org database application: A first look review (NewsForge)
I think that's a really limiting mindset. Sure, there are a zillion things that OOo can't do that Office can. So what? The vast majority of the market don't do those things. Apple went ahead and created their presentation tool, deliberately not matching Powerpoint's feature set, and it was successful enough for them that they repeated it with Pages.
You are partially right, in that the corporate IT 'checklist' mindset, combined with lack of obvious security holes in Office, might make such a thing harder to get into the corporate world than Firefox. But individuals will adopt it. Hell, one of OOo's biggest problems is lack of outside contributors- you don't think being more performant and easier to use would maybe make some of abiword and gnumeric's contributors more likely to work on OOo?
[BTW, I think the correct comparison for Firefox is not IE, but Mozilla- Mozilla was around for ages, was big, featureful, etc., and up against a very insecure IE, but never made the slightest dent in IE's market share. The important question to ask is 'why did firefox make such an impact when Mozilla did not?' And the key difference, of course, is speed and ease of use.]
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publicity and timing Posted Jan 26, 2005 16:34 UTC (Wed) by alanbcohen (guest, #27495) [Link] You are missing the timing effect. At the same time Firefox was being announced (and publicized), there were many reports of IE's security problems being reported. Firefox rode that wave, along with the 'new' and 'improved' to it's current popularity. I am not saying Firefox doesn't deserve the attention; it does. However the majority of Win users out there really don't notice the speed or even the security advantages. They are just following the good press.
(sigh) Posted Jan 26, 2005 16:35 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] You are partially right, in that the corporate IT 'checklist' mindset, combined with lack of obvious security holes in Office, might make such a thing harder to get into the corporate world than Firefox. But individuals will adopt it.In that case OOo would remain firmly in the margin, and MS Office would continue to rule the corporations, and most of the rest of the world: Even most individuals would remain with MS Office because using the same tool at work and at home is for most more convenient. The "checklist mindset" is annoying, but to get OOo past IT managers, you really need to show OOo matches at least most of the features of MS Office. It is not all stupidity. Remember that corporations these days use MS Office as a platform for localized small apps. Surprisingly many of its features actually do get used, although not necessarily by every user in the same company.
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