Hi Lars, Bernhard, all, On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 3:25 AM, Lars Nooden <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2010-3-14 11:00 PM, Bernhard Dippold wrote: > >> During the last ten years we've been very successful in being as similar >> to MS Office as possible. > > That's very unfortunate that there are some camps that managed to get > inside the community that think that way. Or say that they think that > way. It has been a barrier to making a good product.
Perhaps... but what would OOo's market share would be if it decided to largely ignore what Microsoft Office was doing? How successful do you think OpenOffice.org would be if it hadn't tried to emulate Microsoft Office and market itself on that basis - at least for a certain period of time? I think Bernhard makes a very valid point, which is: yes, OpenOffice.org was this way in the past, but now it is sufficiently mature, well-known and regarded enough to stand on its two feet. > Please, Bernhard, you know better than to troll the list on topics > unrelated to OOo. I don't see how Bernhard's message is trolling. Microsoft Office remains OpenOffice.org's biggest competitor, so any major development there will likely have some bearing on OOo. There has probably been a large minority of users who have switched to OOo because they didn't like the ribbon, for example. We certainly should not be ignoring what others are doing (and that includes everyone: iWork, Symphony, KOffice, AbiWord, etc.) because what they do has a bearing on OOo, just as what OOo does has a bearing on them (as the discussions on this list point out quite often). At the same time, we should realize that OpenOffice.org is a unique product (a widely recognised one at that) that can set its own directions and conventions. This is the crux of the matter as I see it. > If you want to compare OOo to some products let's take a step back and > look at what's leading the market as far as being a good product. One > that stands out would be iWork, which apparently gets a lot of its > inspiration from the now defunct Lighthouse Design's presentation > graphics package Concurrence. > > However, that is more a UX discussion than a marketing discussion. Of course, other projects should be involved, but IMO it's a marketing discussion as much as a UX one. Regards, Ivan. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
