Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> There's no *technical* reason, however, why somebody can't go out and 
>> implement an alternative office suite. (Apart perhaps from file 
>> compatibilty.) Yet nobody has done this.
> 
>   Nobody has done this? You yourself have at least heard of OpenOffice,
> which is actually quite popular on the free side of the world. There are
> other alternatives (many of which are more lightweight), such as KOffice,
> which seems to be rather solid. From the commercial side we have some big
> names like Corel WordPerfect Office (I'm pretty sure even you have at least
> heard of WordPerfect), among others. On the MacOS side we have iWork, which
> is Apple's own office suite, which usually means it's pretty solid (Apple
> tends to invest in quality and stability).

I tried KOffice. It works, but it doesn't seem to *do* very much, and 
it's infuriatingly fiddly to operate. (Especially the spreadsheet. In 
fact, I've yet to find any spreadsheet that works as well as Excel - 
which is worrying, considering that Excel wasn't work fantastically.)

I thought WordPerfect died about 20 years ago?

Similarly, the one time I was actually in an Apple shop, they told me 
about all the Apple software they could potentially sell me, "buy Apple 
don't have an office suite. You'll have to use MS Office". And I'm like 
"OMG, WTF? Doesn't that defeat the entire point of the Mac existing??" 
And he was like "yeah, Apple haven't invested in making an office suite 
yet."

>   The problem is not that alternatives don't exist. The problem is that
> MS has got itself into the lucky position of being the only known provider
> of office suites to most people, and even when people get aware of
> alternatives, these alternative will be always and forever be measured
> against MS Office ("will it open .doc and excel files?"). Sadly, for an
> office to have any chance of succeeding, it has to be able to hack support
> for proprietary Microsoft file formats.

I won't argue with that. I've seen people say "hey, can I borrow the MS 
Office CD so I can put it on my home PC?" "Well, er no, that would be 
illegal copying. You'll have to *buy* a copy. Or you could use 
OpenOffice; it's completely free." "Hmm, OK. Are you _sure_ I can't just 
illegally copy MS Office? Nobody will know..."

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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