Similarity is skin-deep, differences are deeper

Similarity is skin-deep, differences are deeper

Posted Oct 23, 2008 14:32 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: OpenOffice vs. Office 2007 by Cato
Parent article: Why OpenOffice.org Failed - and What to Do About It (ComputerWorld UK)

I'm surprised by this, and it would be interesting to know who designed this study

I don't want to talk about names on public (it was testing for one medium-sized firm which wanted to decide migration path, not something for magazine). But I can show you one example where failure rate for MS Office was 0% and 50% (sic!) for OpenOffice.org

The task was simple: add page numbers to existing document. In MS Office you go and insert Page Numbers. MS Office will ask if you want them on top or on the bottom - and you are done. Sure it took some time to find the new position for this operation in MS Office 2007 - but in OpenOffice.org there are no such function at all! The function which DOES exist there just puts the page number in the middle of the document - why will you need THIS?

Actually OpenOffice.org's approach is more logical: it does what it's asked to do! MS Office tries to "help" you. That's what makes it so unbearable to me and apparently that's exactly what makes it so attractive to "normal" users...

I also know someone at work who is on Office 2007 and actually uses OpenOffice on the same Windows PC, without company approval, because it's quicker and easier for some documents to use this.

Is s/he programmer or the a secretary? In my experience programmers actually prefer OpenOffice.org (not all but a lot of them do), but target group for Office applications are not programmers...

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