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

Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

blogs.computerworlduk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#41

Post by Sherlock »

arethuza wrote: post #5
rodh257 wrote: post #2

The video is pretty cringeworthy, but everything in it is true from my experience. Open Office as it is just isn't viable in a corporate environment. Staff members will despise it, poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly, training costs go up, it's a mess. Sure, most of it may be Microsofts fault for their .doc format or whatever, but fact remains, Microsoft Office is king in the corporate world…

I think that should be Excel is king - I suspect you could probably replace Word and PowerPoint for most users and they wouldn't notice that much.

Warning: user perspective ahead:

I have to agree with this. I work as an analyst in an investment bank, and my tools include MsWord, Excel, PP and rarely a python script. MSWord and PP are completely interchangeable with they OO or google docs equivalents, but Excel is just another story, and its not just the learning curve, the software has a lot of features and capabilities that their competitors simply don't have (even for my less technically versed coworkers)

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#42

Post by katovatzschyn »

billybob wrote: post #22
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when compared with Microsofts suit. In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect). Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking. The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the O…

I'm with you: I use OO, and I also think it's not great. I use it because the document format is open (I've lost documents in the past to format extinction), and because the software is free. I think it's not great because of tons of little bugs in the spreadsheet and presentation software. Like it doesn't remember my formatting for new cells in a column, even though I highlighted the whole column and applied it. Lik…

I use OO as well, because of Linux, but I dislike it very much. If I did not use LaTeX I would have switched back by now. I am nearly infinite calm person in general, but OO has cured me of this. It is the only program that has ever made me angry.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#43

Post by spinchange »

DougWebb wrote: post #26
jlgosse wrote: post #18

As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.

That could happen even if you both had Word though. Different versions of Word could do it, if you used fonts your friend didn't have would do it, and there may be other ways as well. If you want someone else to print a document for you, the only reliable way is to print it to a pdf file yourself and send over the pdf.

Yes, it could happen but the likelihood of it happening between various Word versions as it happens from OO to Word is not nearly as bad. Your point is completely valid, but the severity of the problem isn't as great between native versions of Word as it is coming from OO or another doc type.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#44

Post by ZeroGravitas »

arethuza wrote: post #19
mwilcox wrote: post #17

I went to a Microsoft Roadshow recently where they were demoing Office Web Apps - he specifically said it was being targetted towards home users, because "people don't buy Microsoft Office for home use. They use Open Office or they pirate Microsoft Office." If they're saying that in a promotional event, then it really shows the threat MS see from OO. They own the corporate market, but they have trouble capturing the…

Microsoft Enterprise Agreements often give users the right to have a copy of Office at home.

Often only for "business" use. Everyone of course ignores this since it's ridiculous and unenforceable, but that'll probably be what it says.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#45

Post by Splines »

drinian wrote: post #23
jlgosse wrote: post #18

As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.

To be fair, my understanding is that different versions of Word will display the same .doc file differently. Also, you should really do that sort of thing as PDF. Quite easy, considering that OO has PDF export built in.

There are back-compat features in Word to render files using old rules, so work has been done to help preserve your visual layout across versions.

That said, there's a ton of churn between different versions of Word, so there's no guarantee a bug-fix (or sadly, a regression) won't cause your document to display differently anyway.

FWIW, Word has PDF/XPS export built in as well. (I believe Word 2010 has it in the box, and Word 2007 has some silly downloadable component to enable this).

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#46

Post by tokenadult »

jacquesm wrote: post #13

Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when compared with Microsofts suit. In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect). Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking. The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the O…

The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.

Hear. Hear. The OpenOffice spreadsheet is very much of a kludge.

In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more.

And despite of what you correctly said above, that is also my experience. I have been able to run OpenOffice for years now, and since it was updated to open .docx files and similar files from the newer generation of Microsoft products, I can get my work done with OpenOffice.

Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

Yes, my collaborators and I are finding more users for Google Docs and related products from Google every day.

P.S. I expect to switch to Linux on my next personal computer, as my son the computer science major has long urged. All the younger generation in my household use various distributions of GNU/Linux.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#47

Post by nkassis »

spinchange wrote: post #43
DougWebb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could happen even if you both had Word though. Different versions of Word could do it, if you used fonts your friend didn't have would do it, and there may be other ways as well. If you want someone else to print a document for you, the only reliable way is to print it to a pdf file yourself and send over the pdf.

Yes, it could happen but the likelihood of it happening between various Word versions as it happens from OO to Word is not nearly as bad. Your point is completely valid, but the severity of the problem isn't as great between native versions of Word as it is coming from OO or another doc type.

I beg to differ, I was going to update my fathers laptop to Windows 7 but he really needs office 2003 because his employees use it and most of their documents fail in office 2010. I've been wondering why, I know it's because they do something wrong with tabs and such but as a Word newb, I can't figure out what it is. This almost doesn't occur when he wants to use open office but of course other issues arise with OO.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#48

Post by [deleted] »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #40
blasdel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be really fair, OO does the same thing, and forget about there being any kind of ODF interoperability between different FOSS packages. Hell, OO won't even save and reopen the same document unmodified on the same computer consistently.

Saying OO does the same thing as MS Office, after someone says that Office does the same thing as OO is a bit redundant. So just to be extra redundant, let me repeat that saving and opening Word documents in Word doesn't guarantee it looking the same (e.g. if you un/plug a printer, it can change the margins and hence the paging of your document) so it's hardly a damning indictment of OO. If you want to enforce how so…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#49

Post by zokier »

bld wrote: post #33

I wonder if the the biggest aid to OO adoption will be the new interface in Office 2007? OO basically clones the old Office menu-driven interface for everything, which I find easier to navigate by drilling down in context to find things. Switching to OO avoids the need to relearn how to use an office suite.

I think that's a double edged sword thing. OOo while similar, is still somewhat different than 'old' Offices. You might think you know it well because it feels similar, but the little differences makes your work inefficient, as you try to use it like old Office. On the other hand, new Offices forces you to relearn some things, and because of the visual dissimilarity you (hopefully) don't try to apply your old knowledge to it.

Note: I don't have anything to back this theory of mine up, so take it with a grain of salt.

Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

#50

Post by rbanffy »

eli wrote: post #31
drinian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people use the features in Excel that are missing from OO? Surely it's a small percentage of the total number of Office licenses out there.

For home users, maybe true. Though I'd imagine many home users of Excel would be better served by Google Docs. But it's a massive number of business users. Everyone at my company relies on at least one spreadsheet that has macros or complex pivot tables. It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business. My understanding is that Wall Street relies pretty much runs on Excel.

> It's a bit scary how much critical data is moving through Excel in the typical business

It's scary that people may actually do and allow others to do it.

Post reply on HN