Watching OpenOffice evolve from around 1.0 to 1.1.2 (I tried downloading 1.9.680 a few weeks ago but it didn't work and I didn't try to make it work that much since I had other things to do. I'm currently getting it again) I have formed a pretty good idea of what I expect from OpenOffice.org 2.0. I'm not trying to complain or bitch, these are my ideas and you might not agree but they are my ideas all the same. Maybe someone will agree with me.
the development branch is almost feature complete, you should try to install it first, is considerably changed compared with 1.1.x
1) FAST ---------- OpenOffice.org 1.x is terribly slow. I don't know what the problem is since I'm no developer or anything. I've heard good things about OOo 2.0 regarding this though and I'm going to take a look see in a few hours (slow connection).
i feel this as a kind of legacy, in my experience it was slow even in the StarOffice 5.1 time.
but some improvements are clealry visible, comparing 1.1.x with 1.0, the startup is *much* faster
Unfortunately I've found it too slow even when all I'm running are 2 open documents, a browser and XMMS (audio player). Now don't get me wrong but I always expect more from open source then I do from proprietary systems. Which is why I expect OOo 2.0 will NOT force me into an upgrade but actually run faster then its older brother.
i don't measured in any way, but on my computer 1.9.x feels about as fast (or as slow) as 1.1.x
2) SIMPLE ------------- Don't get me the wrong way or anything. Contrary to popular belief I actually don't consider myself an idiot. I may not be the brightest fellow on a radius of 100 miles but I don't think I'm dumb as a rock either. The truth is 75% of OOo's users only use about 10% of what the menus offer.
but every user has his own distinct 10% feature set.
Another thing. Many of OOo's users(I dare say most though I may be mistaken) are converted MS Office or KOffice users. Now a whole new
former KOffice users? this is funny! KOffice is the newest office suite, is even newer compared with Abiword/Gnumeric.
bunch of very complicated menus is going to mean their learning curve will be a bit more steep. If you're home user this is no problem, you do this in your spare time and that's it. But as a company, if you come to find migration is too costly in respect to time and that you're actually losing money instead of winning you won't migrate.
when you will finish to download and install the development version will see the layout is very similar with the one from MS Office, this was made to easily accommodate former MS Office users.
OK. Now here are a few ideas. (It's kinda late but there's always OOo 3.0 :) ) Let's look at the open-source world out there and see who the real successful folks are. Firefox is by far, the best example of successful OSS out there. And just as OOo they've been getting users through migration rather then new users. Of course they would have never made it if their app wasn't stable and secure (which are 2 of OOo's pluses as well) but there was another thing that really got them millions of users worldwide in an amount of months.
They kept it simple. The more you confuse users that are new to your products the more of them you'll lose. I mean Mozilla was around for a few years now offering the same features yet it's success never boomed as did Firefox's.
my two cents: Mozilla Suite was no big success for end users because of lack of focus to end-users an lack of marketing. at that time Mozilla was under Netscape and they had no intention to promote it because they wanted to promote Netscape instead for end-users. consider as arguments for this theory the ugly default theme in Mozilla Suite or the awful splash screen. or look at the current Mozilla website and compare with the one from two years ago - http://web.archive.org/web/20030209070925/http://www.mozilla.org/
-- nicu my OpenOffice.org pages: http://ooo.nicubunu.ro
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
