Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

polytechnitis.blogspot.gr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 30 posts

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#21

Post by gizmo686 »

_delirium wrote: post #2

Hmm, there's a mixture of interesting and fairly mundane stuff in here. On the mundane side: one of the points is that Microsoft objects to the requirement to procure the lowest-price software that meets the specs, because there is FOSS that meets many of the specs (as written) and it's no-cost, therefore no commercial supplier can possibly compete. That's an argument you'd expect any commercial software supplier to…

If a competitor offers a product/price pairing that the consumer likes more than your product/price pairing, then you competetor makes the sale. If MS cannot compete on price, they need to compete on quality.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#22

Post by slurry »

leke wrote: post #10

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differentl…

Open/LibreOffice has never been that great and if I were considering a big install of it the fact that it's under Apache stewardship would give me pause. Apache does very good work but their specialty is server-side, highly-configurable, large systems that take a fair amount of skill to get up and running.

If I had to guess what direction OO development is headed in, I'd say things are headed in a more service-oriented architecture direction. It'll be great if you want a customed-out integrated groupware, collaboration, data analysis and document management solution, and you've got a large, skilled IT staff (and/or Oracle or IBM service contract) to set it up. I doubt it's going to be any good for standalone plain vanilla desktop apps.

Could be I'm wrong about this; but it's open to question where this is headed.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#23

Post by slurry »

dbaupp wrote: post #18
bitwize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rapidly changing commercial realities" haven't produced a tool as useful or flexible for analyzing large amounts of financial data as Excel. They also haven't produced an alternative word processor that can correctly read and format any arbitrary Word document. Go ahead, try and tell your boss that you never read that important memo he sent out because your office suite mangled the document. For interacting with the…

In many ways, Excel is too flexible and yet not flexible enough for data processing: it temptingly allows people to do some analysis but can very easily build up into a crufty mess of unreadable in-cell formulas and VB macros. Often a database, JSON or just plain CSV files, combined with R or Python+libraries, will give a far far better result (faster, maintainable, more flexible presentation, reusable, VCS-able).

Excel is completely terrible but it puts real analytic power in the hands of non-technical people. For most business organizations, Excel alone is worth the price of Office, even if only a couple of accountants or marketing people use its power features.

Better to solve the right problem the wrong way.

Come to think about it, "too flexible and yet not flexible enough" describes all the popular scripting languages, too - Python not least among them.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#24

Post by stephen_g »

leke wrote: post #10

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differentl…

MS Office file type import is one area where LibreOffice has been making major strides recently. The latest version, and 4.0 which is coming soon has greatly improved support.

It's nice to actually see it quickly improving now they've forked, given how stagnant Open Office development was when Sun (and then Oracle) was in charge.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#25

Post by stephen_g »

codeka wrote: post #16
bitwize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rapidly changing commercial realities" haven't produced a tool as useful or flexible for analyzing large amounts of financial data as Excel. They also haven't produced an alternative word processor that can correctly read and format any arbitrary Word document. Go ahead, try and tell your boss that you never read that important memo he sent out because your office suite mangled the document. For interacting with the…

I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it. 100% fidelity is not going to happen, but unless you're designing brochures or things for print, you don't need 100% fidelity.

If you're designing something for print, you shouldn't be using Office...

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#26

Post by Surio »

There are other "free" (if not FOSS) alternatives to the MS-Office UX that are not as clunky as Libre/Open Office...

http://www.kingsoftstore.com/software/kingsoft-office-freewa...

It is not 100% compatible with Office but does a very decent job. And the UI is Qt based, so it is quite sleek to work with

I must confess I ended up buying MS-Office during one of their special promotions for corporate employees because of all the interop issues.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#27

Post by pippy »

leke wrote: post #10

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differentl…

Microsoft Office is a superior experience to its OpenSource competitors, and definitely worth the cost.

However OpenOffice & LibreOffice (and possibly Google Docs) are functionality equivalent, and use open source standards. This raises the biggest question with OpenSource products: is the poor experience worth no vendor lock in?

Given Greek austerity mesures, compatibility assurance, the educational use of the product, and it will force MS to compete it's best Greece uses OpenSource.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#28

Post by bitwize »

codeka wrote: post #16
bitwize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rapidly changing commercial realities" haven't produced a tool as useful or flexible for analyzing large amounts of financial data as Excel. They also haven't produced an alternative word processor that can correctly read and format any arbitrary Word document. Go ahead, try and tell your boss that you never read that important memo he sent out because your office suite mangled the document. For interacting with the…

I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it. 100% fidelity is not going to happen, but unless you're designing brochures or things for print, you don't need 100% fidelity.

I've never seen an office application that so badly mangles a Word document that you can't even read it.

Back in a former job, I was managing documents for a big project. The government mandated the use of Word format. When I opened some of the documents up in LibreOffice, only a single, completely blank page was visible. This tended to happen with .docx files but not with .doc files.

So YES, open source office suites DO mangle Microsoft Office documents beyond readability. The only thing that's guaranteed to work is Microsoft Office, so governments and businesses will keep using it.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#29

Post by pktoss »

slurry wrote: post #22
leke wrote: post #10

Even being a Linux fan boy, I still hate OpenOffice/Libre because it's so clunky and doesn't play as nice as MS Office when you need to do some complicated things for the workplace. I actually even prefer Google docs now over OpenOffice and find the gmail/Drive integration so handy. As for the Greece thing, MS has a good product (Office), but a bad OS (for the money they charge). They need to approach this differentl…

Open/LibreOffice has never been that great and if I were considering a big install of it the fact that it's under Apache stewardship would give me pause. Apache does very good work but their specialty is server-side, highly-configurable, large systems that take a fair amount of skill to get up and running. If I had to guess what direction OO development is headed in, I'd say things are headed in a more service-orient…

LibreOffice is not Apache Licensed or driven by Apache. It is a fork lead by "The Document Foundation". You can read http://www.documentfoundation.org/.

Re: Debating Microsoft's comments on the Greek Ministry of Education laptops program

#30

Post by pktoss »

bitwize wrote: post #9
richardjordan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's your opinion on the pricing of MS Office and its commercial value - correct or otherwise. However, I think the question is whether it makes sense to mandate its use in the education system, in several years time, given the rapidly changing commercial realities and - good value for businesses or not - the high price of using Microsoft products in such an environment by a government that is virtually bankrupt. Y…

"Rapidly changing commercial realities" haven't produced a tool as useful or flexible for analyzing large amounts of financial data as Excel. They also haven't produced an alternative word processor that can correctly read and format any arbitrary Word document. Go ahead, try and tell your boss that you never read that important memo he sent out because your office suite mangled the document. For interacting with the…

This might be true for YOUR use case and company. We are talking about Greek high-schools, which use like 1% of the capabilities of Excel,Word or even LibreOffice's calc and writer. So IMHO this point is moot.

If nothing else I would prefer Greek students get used to the emphasis writer places on using styles instead of "ad-hoc" formatting.

Post reply on HN