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).

  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.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I said (or intended to say) that 5 years ago it was awful, and today it 
> isn't. It just isn't great either.

  Why are you comparing a software which costs Big Money against a software
which is completely *free*, and demand for them to be equal in quality and
features?

  You know, some people don't *want* to waste money on an office suite when
there are free alternatives, and they may be too honest to use pirated
software.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I don't count free open-source barely-functional MS Office clones as 
> "alternatives".

  Yeah, you have tried them all and concluded that they are "barely
functional MS Office clones".

  So, say, when was the last time you used KOffice or iWorks? How was the
experience?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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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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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Last time I checked, if you want an office suite, you can buy MS Office 
> or...

Open Office, Corel, Quark, LaTeX et al, Google Docs, whatever Apple sells, 
WordPerfect, etc etc etc....  Now, some of these may be out of business, but 
that's not really to the point, because they *were* competition when they 
were around, and they couldn't compete.

> MS carefully arranges it so that users have no alternatives.

No, it's because makign a full-featured office suite that people will want 
to use is *hard* and *expensive*. Nobody *wants* to compete, because 
Microsoft already has a product. Big consumer-grade software is a natural 
monopoly.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> If you want to use Apple software, you must buy Apple hardware.
> > 
> > iTunes.

> Question: Are there any people on Earth who *voluntarily* use this??

  Apparently something like 50 million people do.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> The suggestion was that if you're willing to pay money, you can buy an 
> office suite that's better than MS Office. I've yet to see one.

And somehow you think that's something that Microsoft is doing *wrong*?

You know they looked at something like 15 million users to figure out over 
the course of five years what the "ribbon" should look like and how it 
should be organized?  This isn't something you put together for free over 
the course of a couple years.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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On Thu, 13 May 2010 19:52:11 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> Don't forget StarOffice (or whatever the hell the minutely-altered
>>> edition of OpenOffice is called).
>> 
>> StarOffice predated OpenOffice; the two were co-developed for some
>> time, but are essentially different products now.
> 
> Interesting. So does StarOffice do something that OpenOffice doesn't
> now?

Probably not; openOffice is IME more advanced.

>>>> I use OpenOffice every day.  It's good.
>>> It's OK, and it *is* useful for fixing documents that MS Word is too
>>> stupid to open. But it's not nearly as effective is MS Office yet.
>>> Still, 5 years ago it was awful. Maybe it just needs time...
>> 
>> If the last time you used it was 5 years ago, then you haven't looked
>> at the current versions.
> 
> I said (or intended to say) that 5 years ago it was awful, and today it
> isn't. It just isn't great either.

Well, I find it is actually pretty good - having used MS Office for 
several years, I'd say that it's pretty much got feature parity (given 
that it can import most MS Office documents that I've tried without any 
issues at all, I'd say that's a pretty good way to tell how useful it is).

>> As I said, I use it *every* *single* *day* and it *isn't* awful, it's
>> quite good, and I find it provides all the functionality that most end
>> users need.
> 
> I used it to write my CV.
> 
> All of them.

And?

If your problems with it were "it's not Microsoft Office" (ie, the 
interface was different), that's one thing.  That's about learning to use 
a new tool, not about the quality of the product.

>> Oh, and I use it regularly to open MS Office docs (which I am often
>> sent by third parties) - both "traditional" files and OOXML files.  No
>> compatibility problems that I've encountered.
> 
> As I say, I sometimes use OO for fixing broken MSO documents. (MSO
> itself is apparently too stupid to do this.)

Indeed, I remember you mentioning that before.

Jim

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> There's no *technical* reason, however, why somebody can't go out and 
> implement an alternative office suite. 

Yes, there is.  It's called "money".  And "time". And "research".

 > If you want to use Apple software, you must buy Apple hardware.

And *that* is exactly the invention that made Microsoft rich, right after 
Digital Research showed them how to do it.  Write the OS that isn't bound to 
a specific hardware configuration. Let everyone else pay the price to build 
the hardware, while you pay only the price to design the software.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> There's no *technical* reason, however, why somebody can't go out and 
> implement an alternative office suite. 

Yes, there is.  It's called "money".  And "time". And "research".

 > If you want to use Apple software, you must buy Apple hardware.

And *that* is exactly the invention that made Microsoft rich, right after 
Digital Research showed them how to do it.  Write the OS that isn't bound to 
a specific hardware configuration. Let everyone else pay the price to build 
the hardware, while you pay only the price to design the software.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Ada - the programming language trying to avoid
    you literally shooting yourself in the foot.

Post a reply to this message