Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 10:20:54AM +0200, Shoshannah Forbes wrote:
This time in Maariv:
http://images.maariv.co.il/channels/13/ART/597/151.html
Great review. I learned a lot from it. Now where can I get MS-Office 2003
for 600NIS?
A number of counter-pointes:
* Some of OpenOffice's stronger points were not represented [fill in
please]
The reason those points weren't filled in is quite simple, there aren't
such points. MSO surpasses OOo in any conceivable way, actually this
review was quite pro-OOo, if he was looking at the real bugs (look at
issuezilla especially those concerning Heb+Eng text) he was shouting
"STAY AWAY!!". Even the PDF generator "advantage" was a hoax, a very
simple and inexpensive (and much more efficient as it's concerning ALL
other programs) Print-to-PDF driver could be added into MSO suite and
thus squashing any HAVA AMINA one once had of peeking into the OOo
homepage to determine what were they thinking.
* OOo is free. Really. No strings attached.
I think one of the stronger points concerning free is "Think about OOo
2.0 and 3.0, you'll eventually be forced to upgrade your system to them,
they'll ALWAYS remain free, just as their Documents you'll always be
able to use your older. However buying MSO 2003 will force you to buy
the 600NIS (and more) MSO2005 and that will force you using MSO 2008 -
each upgrade will might force a hardware upgrade and will eventually
cost more than the inconvinience of using a malfunctioning bug-ridden
office suit. Except of all that we should mention MS has about 10 years
of experience to build MSO2003, we've had only three and we're getting
better each version. Eventually OOo will come close to MSO
productability, and then all OOo users will be having a good free office
suit, where MSO users will have just the same super-expensive software
depending office suite, so suffer now in order to gloat in the future.
This is not an easy point to
get through, so let's use one little point from the article:
"MS-Office 2003 is only supported for w2k SP3 and on XP.". An obvious
question comes to mind: if you have a different system what would you
install to read MS Office 2003 documents? Right, OOo.
(Not a direct consequence, but a nice demonstration)
* MS's PR contact was contacted and has a nice comment attached. The
Nobody from OpenOffice/Sun/Hamakor seems to have been contacted
(right?)
Even if they did - what would we say? faint apologizes about software
quality won't make us look any better.
