Mike Hall wrote:
Charles,
I think an appreciation of this point is absolutely crucial to a
successful product, which is why I bang on about it. And I'm only
faithfully recording my own experience.
Unfortunately there is a difference in quality, which implicitly you
seem to recognise. Yes, it's true that there have been several poor
MSO releases, but in a large organisation those are not normally
deployed on the corporate desktop until the problems are fixed. MS
does eventually retreat on its silly ideas and there are, to all
intents and purposes, almost bug free MSO versions so far as the vast
majority of end users are concerned. This isn't the case with OOo/LibO
- there has never been a release of such a quality that support costs
could be contained at a realistic level. I wish there were and I can
fully understand why this community would be very inclined to argue
black is white here. Further, it's pretty frustrating to report bugs
and find that they aren't fixed within a reasonable period. I don't
think you would deny that that is a fairly common experience and
complaint from OOo/LibO users. I see that on many bug reports.
My perception and experience of the choice of application software in
large organisation is that it is much more rational and hard-headed
than you imply. The main cost is not the licence, for which in any
case large organisations generally pay very little per desktop. It's
user support that is costly, ie overall cost of ownership.
Mike
I am one of the multitude of end users of Writer who hope that it can
become something that we can all take pride in because we all helped in
whatever way to make it what it is.
Over the years I have used MS Word, and OOo, I simply don't ever use
spreadsheets, presentation programs or any other part of MS Office or
OOo except for the word processors. That said, I find MS Word to be
unstable for long documents. Writer does a better job, but it has some
severe shortcomings that would be very easy to fix if anyone would
bother. My prime example, the word list in the spell checker is
PATHETIC!!! There is almost a total lack of compound words in it, and I
have had to add well over a thousand of them in order to get the spell
checker to operate at an acceptable speed. The only alternative is to
consider the spell checker USELESS, and to just permanently turn it
off. No business would ever consider that to be an acceptable
alternative, and would instead consider the price for a copy of
Microsoft Word a bargain compared to the hassle of trying to use a word
processor with a nearly useless spelling checker.
Naturally we cannot purchase a word list to use, because anything sold
would be copyrighted and therefore useless to us. Likewise, as I
understand there is no Open Source or other non copyright word list that
is sufficiently better than what we are now using to be worth bothering
with. Therefore we must create our own. I don't think that most of the
work of doing this would require the skills of a programmer or software
developer. I think if someone could tell some of us end users where to
find our own word lists that we have had to add hundreds or thousands of
words to, turn them into email attachments, and send them to LO, they
could be combined, stripped of unwanted proper nouns and such, and used
to create a very good and complete word list to incorporate into LO
Writer. And of course once we have such a word list, every release from
that time on will have a very good spell checker.
I am a computer hardware expert, but not a software expert, at least no
more than most end users, but perhaps this is something where someone
like me might just be able to help. Robert Derman
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