On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 10:22 +0000, Andrew Brown wrote: > But, again, almost all of this is catchup. Supplying dictionaries, spell- > checkers, proper documentation, user support, and so on, is tremendously > important, ad, when it is complete, will bring the program up to the > level that MS Office was, in most languages, eight years ago.
So why is this at all surprising? If you start from nothing it takes time to fill a void and you have to do a lot of boring and mundane things. Let's look at two innovations that OOo has that MSO hasn't. Pdf export - nice to have and arguably MS could have implemented it but didn't. XML file format. Something fundamental and innovative that MS is now playing catch up on. That's without the inovation that you can freely download the software without being bothered by license keys etc. Who really cares about some obscure feature hardly anyone is ever going to need? Office software has matured and there is not really much in the way of fundamental innovation that is likely in terms of features. The fact that OOo has provided leadership in the file format is remarkable because it enhances the prospects of other competing products such as Koffice that adopt it. That provides more customer choice. Its newsworthy. Stop thinking in terms of market domination, that night or might not happen but its not the only sign of success. The fact that there are bugs in OOo is not particularly interesting either because they will get ironed out and who would really expect anything different in a very recently released product? -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
