Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
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Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
1–10 of 73 posts
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#2The 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. Not sure that this video was really necessary, but I guess it could be good for I.T. guys to show to their boss when he decides they should swap to Open Office.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#3I almost completely disagree with rodh257. A large percentage of corporate workers don't create complex content and rarely interact with complex files created by their colleagues. It is completely reasonable for a CIO to engage his staff on a research study to determine how feasible it would be to migrate a significant swath from MS Office to OpenOffice.org (or LibreOffice). I have personal experience with this.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#4The 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…
One by one:
> Staff members will despise it,
This isn't a point on its own.
> poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly
What is a "poorly formatted document"?
> training costs go up
Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office.
> it's a mess.
How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#5The 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.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#6Hmmm. I don't think the comparison with GNU/Linux is 100% clear cut.
At that time Linux was making huge inroads into the server market and anyone not recognising that was going to be laughed at. Microsoft doing so was probably not the biggest driving force in subsequent growth.
The modern equivalent would be not recognising how much of a "threat" Google Chrome is to the other browsers with its brand and growth.
Now, Open Office. I am not convinced that it is a viable threat to Microsofts corporate sales. I know personally of very few (big) corps who could reliably switch to OO - for all manner of reasons.
It is a competitor, sure, and certainly making inroads into the home market. But a serious corporate threat? Not yet.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#7The 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…
One by one: > Staff members will despise it, This isn't a point on its own. > poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is a "poorly formatted document"? > training costs go up Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. > it's a mess. How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
I use OO on Mint Linux here at work where everyone else uses Word '07 + Win 7. So here is my experience:
> What is a "poorly formatted document"?
Had an issue with this today in a word document with tables, OO has serious trouble displaying full page tables properly.
There are lots of other subtle things, but I can't reliably produce documents in OO and send them to, say, a client as a word document without checking them directly in Word.
> Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office.
This is a non-trivial issue. And the same reason Linux is struggling to reach the corporate desktop. Re-training is, for an organisation, a quite complex business. Because of pay, contracts, organisation, finding the expertise, ticking all the legal/legislative boxes.
Another way to consider this is that a lot of people now are doing computer literacy certificates (I think some are even internationally recognised qualifications now). Employers can accept these as saying "this person can use Word fine" which saves them the cost of training and support etc. If they switch to OO this goes away (at least for a while).
>> it's a mess. >How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
This was some MS brilliance at work; because while the Ribbon bar was initially hated you will generally find that within a corporate environment employees find it quite productive and usable (at least in my experience). The look is so radically difference OO feels awkward (or so I am told by someone who tried it).
Generally speaking, looks, GUI and layout are the things that "turn users on" the most. a) they are familiar with the Word way of doing things and b) it has a really fancy looking GUI. This stacks up against OO.
>> Staff members will despise it, >This isn't a point on its own.
And yet, it is probably the main reason most organisations won't bother. Even if it takes just a few months for your staff to stop grumbling it probably doesn't feel worth it. And don't forget that the people signing off on such a swap (management) are "staff members" in this context - they will irrationally dislike it too.
I like using OO, and find it a competitive piece of software. I even convinced my parents to use, and like, it!
But I don't think it will break the corporate barrier for a while yet :)
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#8The 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…
One by one: > Staff members will despise it, This isn't a point on its own. > poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is a "poorly formatted document"? > training costs go up Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. > it's a mess. How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
> What is a "poorly formatted document"?
I just wanted to touch on this from another angle. I use OO here at work on my Linux machine. My main issue with OO is it's styles support is incomplete, to the point where it's impossible for me to keep my documents style appropriately. It seems like a small thing, but I'd much rather handle styling via style sheets then have to manually edit the items.
Here's the basic thing I discovered: OO gives you 80% of what you need from Office, but you still need that final 20%, and that's what Office gives you.
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#9The 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…
One by one: > Staff members will despise it, This isn't a point on its own. > poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly What is a "poorly formatted document"? > training costs go up Training costs only go up if you compare it against people already trained with Microsoft Office. > it's a mess. How? None of your points really said how, apart from the one below talking about .doc
Those actually are valid points, but he could have clarified it a bit. If people despise it and either A) start publicly berating the IT organization or escalating to the C-suite or B) stop being productive because they can't stand the software, it's a problem.
Formatting is a problem, especially when collaborating on complex Word or PowerPoint documents. Excel & Calc are the most interoperable. Also interestingly, OO.o (I'm basing this post on the OO.o v3.3 beta) is more compatible with MS Office 2007 than MS Office 2003 is, so your mileage may vary depending on the status quo.
Training is a problem, period. A lot of the menus -- and menu icons -- in OO.o are not logical, and it is extremely obvious that Microsoft invested mountains of cash in UX research. Not that MS Office is perfect, but since most people have been using it for a decade or more the incremental changes across versions make it much easier for them to familiarize themselves with subsequent updates. In a lot of ways, I'd compare the UX of the two like this: OO.o:MS Office::GIMP:Photoshop. The GIMP works great but is missing some functionality that a small subset of users find critical, and the multi-window UI is confusing.
I could go on....
Re: Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat
#10The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that impressive.
Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it (I mean, she really hated it.). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is that the school district is back to using MS Office.
[1] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...