An answer
For those of you who puruse my friend Phil, I feel the need to pose a counter example to his continual blasting of all things corporate.
As a poor, but morally upright, college student, I have found the need to use open source software for my main office suite over the past year or so. I had illegal copies of certain expensive softwares at my disposal, but I have been attempting to stay pirate free on my computer. So, I experienced the monstrosity known as Open Office. This free download attempted merely to copy MS and did so very poorly on all accounts. It was very counter intuitive. It was extremely buggy. It was non-compatible to other major software suites. When writing a paper that actually required formatting, I found the system so lacking, that I just wrote the words in Open Office and then transported it to a different computer to do formatting. Even then, it corrupted the formatting when viewed. I have found wordpad to be a better text editor then OO. So, I finally bit the bullet and spent the $100 for a full office suite that not only gives you powerful controls on all the details in how you present your papers, but also allows for powerful computing tools and amazing presenting systems that have revolutionized business presentations.
Sometimes when you pay somebody for their ideas, you get better ideas... ;-)
posted by Secretwallaby @ 9:29 PM
7 comments
7 Comments:
Heh. You won't see me singing the praises of OpenOffice! I try to avoid using it myself. Have you tried using Abi Word? It is much leaner and doesn't try to copy MS Word in every single aspect. It's actually quite usable, and it's not nearly as memory-hungry as (MS|Open)Office.
My question is if WordPad worked for you, why did you spend the money on Office? And why bother using OO.o in the first place if you're just going to format it elsewhere. You should be using a text editor, not a word processor.
Probably the reason OO is in this state is that real hackers know better than to trust formatting to a WYSIWYG tool. Your documents will be a lot more flexible and easier to handle if you format them with a real formatter like TeX or troff.
Oh yeah, and using an example like OpenOffice to claim that proprietary software is of better quality is a pretty serious straw man. Nobody is (well, nobody should be) claiming that OO.o is the paragon of how Open development works.
Well, first off, WordPad did Not work for me. I have to do any major formatting elsewhere, and it is lacking many of the tools that I commonly use. That is one reason I am spending money on Office. Also, Wordpad is not an Office suite. Nobody else makes powerpoint, and excel is also very powerful. These are two programs that I use, and will use, frequently and need to know proficiently. Nothing you have suggested comes close to fulfilling these needs.
In general people are visual, which is why I do not think WYSIWYG tools will every disappear. There is a place for something like TeX, and I am sure I will use them when I start writing more technical papers, but until then mouse commands on a screen are quicker, more intuitive, and a better fit for my common paper needs.
If open development wants to make a strong impact in the office arena, then they will need to develop useful, powerful, and intuitve office suites. Not ones that require secretaries and compter-semiliterates to learn a language to write a paper, but something equivalent to MSO.
I'm skeptical as to whether Open Source will ever significantly take over the public market, since OS is largely written by and for hackers. There just doesn't seem to be the needed pull to make the software as user friendly as necessary for mass market, since the hackers do not have the same needs and there does not seem to be much economic incentive to provide for other needs. However, there are prominent OS products due to the areas where the spheres of needs intersect.
But, I am no where as nearly OS savvy as Phil, so I can only comment much less authoritatively than he can.
However, there are prominent OS products due to the areas where the spheres of needs intersect.
I think you're on to something here. The first big successes of OSS have traditionally been in areas where there is big overlap in needs: Firefox, Gaim, Apache. (Yes, everyone needs a web server, whether they know it or not.)
There just doesn't seem to be the needed pull to make the software as user friendly as necessary for mass market, since the hackers do not have the same needs and there does not seem to be much economic incentive to provide for other needs.
That's where things get interesting. I can name a few projects that suffer from usability problems which would be really useful to the average person. Then a company notices the potential for profit and goes in to build and support a user-friendly version of said project for money. (I'm thinking of Cedega, but you could also say most distributions are an example of this.)
And there are lots of hackers who are supremely concerned about usability. The biggest examples are the folks at Novell and IBM, who want to be able to move their secretaries etc. off MS Office and such, so they put lots of work into making the Open equivalents more attractive.
In short, 'economic incentive' doesn't always look like you'd expect it to; it can show up in interesting and subtle ways when interesting and subtle people enter the market.
Oh yeah, and next time you think I'm "continually blasting of all things corporate" let me tell you how cool Myst is. (Not to mention Novell!)
I'm taking a TCP/IP class right now for the AF and my teacher's great. One of the great things is watching him when he gets on his Microsoft soapbox. As we go through our course, which was meant to be taught from a Microsoft perspective, he keeps pointing out where Microsoft will reinvent the wheel (badly) or just plain restrict the user's abilities, which for all intents and purposes looks either like incompetence or greed. I trust this guy too, he's been doing networking since the beginning and really seems to know his stuff.
But, that's not to say that I'm completely anti-Microsoft. There's good and bad.
But, that's not to say that I'm completely anti-Microsoft. There's good and bad.
Indeed. Word 5.1 for Mac was a really great product.
Can't think of anything since then though.
BTW, another reason OpenOffice is a terrible example of Open Source is that it was originally a closed source office suite named StarOffice. It's only relatively recently that it was freed, and the vast majority of the code doesn't have the benefit of peer review that is typical in most Free Software.
Post a Comment
<< Home