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Free Software Sets the Computing AgendaFree Software Sets the Computing AgendaPosted Jul 20, 2006 12:05 UTC (Thu) by jpmcc (guest, #2452)Parent article: Free Software Sets the Computing Agenda
Microsoft Office is one of the main cash cows for the whole company: any loss of market share here will have serious financial repercussions. This is where the story becomes really interesting. OpenOffice.org is more than good enough for the average MS-Office user, and since version 2 it's sufficiently compatible to make migration easy. So Microsoft suddenly finds itself having to try and differentiate itself in the marketplace, and put open-source equivalents into catch-up mode. The launch of MS-Office 2007 is postponed while the developers are instructed to 'make it look different'. However, the more 'different' MS-Office 2007 appears, the more MS risks upsetting its current user base, 80% of whom only use 20% of the current functionality anyway. Driving product development based on the needs of shareholders rather than the needs of customers is a very risky strategy indeed. Microsoft has made substantial marketing blunders in the past, but as a monopolist it was able to recover. With open-source competitors in play, one mistake could lose it business permanently.
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Free Software Sets the Computing Agenda Posted Jul 20, 2006 14:44 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] So Microsoft suddenly finds itself having to try and differentiate itself in the marketplace, and put open-source equivalents into catch-up mode.Yes, and in a competitive market there is no way that they can retain their current market share. Even the best run company in the world, with the best products, functioning in an oligopolistic market condition, would have a hard time retaining 50 percent of the market, much less 90 percent. At some point it's all down hill for Microsoft. I shall enjoy watching that even more than the SCO debacle.
Free Software Sets the Computing Agenda Posted Jul 20, 2006 14:44 UTC (Thu) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] Don't get me wrong, I would like nothing better than OpenOffice indeed being just as good as MS Office. Maybe it even is, for most users. Remains the problem (for me at least) that by copying all the features of MS Office, OOO has also copied several of the nasty ones, and probably some that could be called "bugs" as well. In daily practice working in an office environment where a lot of MS documents (text, spreadsheets and presentations) are thrown at me, there are far too many times when I run into trouble trying to view or edit these documents using OOO. If that were the only problem it wouldn't be too bad, but OOO annoys me about just as much as MS Office does when writing new documents. Too many things just don't work consistently - for example managing page / paragraph styles in text documents or spreadsheets, or dealing with automatic numbering or images.
Those and many more are my personal peeves with OOO, but I see a lot of people that have similar problems. Given the current basic layout, design and workflow of MS and OO office suites, I wouldn't be too sure that Microsoft's switch to a different look or workflow is something bad. It may cause grief with existing customers, but they may also actually achieve a significant improvement in their software by letting go of the past a bit.
I would be much more interested in seeing OOO move towards a higher level of usability than towards a higher market share.
Best word processor needs to be... Perfect! Posted Jul 20, 2006 17:41 UTC (Thu) by amazingblair (guest, #2789) [Link] hein.zelle,You say OpenOffice is copying MSWord in bad things as well as good, and they should go for "a higher level of usability [rather] than towards a higher market share". I agree. Perhaps they should be looking at a better model: WordPerfect.
WordPerfect X3 remains the superior commercial word processor. It handles most everything better than MSWord, and even knows how to - shock! - correctly print "page x of y" in your headers, a problem that has baffled Microsoft for years.
If WordPerfect adopts the ODF as one of its document saving options, then it will be compatible with OpenOffice. (OpenOffice ignored WordPerfect's format, so I've had to use RTF - Rich Text Format - to exchange docs between my Mandriva Linux laptop and my WinXP desktop.)
Occasionally they've made noises about releasing a Linux version of WordPerfect again. WordPerfect for Linux using the Open Document Format would be my heaven!
-Amazing Blair
Best word processor needs to be... Perfect! Posted Aug 10, 2006 23:06 UTC (Thu) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] I guess the issue there is that these days most users say "ugh, it's notOffice, I'm not using that"...
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