On Mon, May 29, 2006, Jonathan Ben Avraham wrote about "Re: [OOo-Hebrew]
הפורום (שוב)":
> Hi Shoshannah,
> I am neither surprised or worried that the OpenOffice forum is not very
> active. I would not expect it to generate as much traffic as be as say a
> forum for mountain bike riders, or even a forum forum for Linux geeks.
I'd just like to add my two cents and say that Assaf's description doesn't
sound right to me. When I look at my friends, coworkers and relatives -
all of which (except my father...) use Microsoft Office - none of them EVER
used the Microsoft Office forum that Assaf described. I doubt that any of
them even know that it exists. I don't know where he got the idea that the
existance of such a forum is what makes or breaks a word processor.
In fact, I bet (but didn't check) that if you go to that MS Office forum,
you'd see somewhere in the order of 10 questions a day, from perhaps 1,000
users a year. Is 1,000 users Microsoft's install base in Israel? I wish
it was ;-)
So while it would be a real "nice to have" a vibrant forum, and we can
discuss ad nauseum what it would take to get more people other than Shosh
to post on it, there's a really big question mark over Assaf's underlying
assumption that a vibrant forum will cause mass adoption of OpenOffice
(or that a dead forum will cause mass desertion of OpenOffice). At least in
my opinion.
In my opinion, OpenOffice's quality is what will eventually make or break
it. Bugs like the sudden word reversals that I mentioned a few months ago
(and turned out to be caused by a new bizarre configuration variable),
or other instabilities, bugs and missing features, is, in my opinion, what
has the potential to cause people to stop using OpenOffice. So the more time
the OpenOffice developers spend on development - and less on answering
newbies - the better off OpenOffice will be. I think.
By the way, when you consider how much Microsoft Office actually costs
(last time I checked, it was more than 1,000 shekels), I'm surprised every
time I hear people argue for it and against OpenOffice. Does anyone *really*
find it acceptable to pay 1,000 shekels more just to get a software with
a more responsive forum? Or to pay 1,000 shekels for some feature-du-jour
that supposedly MS-Office has an OpenOffice doesn't have? This makes
absolutely no sense to me. Either MS-Office has some terrific set of extra
features (or lack of problems) that is worth the extra 1,000 shekels, or,
and the sad truth appears no - no individual really pays that 1,000 shekels.
Look around you - do you know of ANYONE that ever bought Microsoft Office
legally for his or her home? And when companies by MS-Office for their
employees, it's usually under the pretext of "ROI" (higher productivity
and interoperability for the higher cost). Of course, there's a much simpler
truth behind it: "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". It's the
safe choice for IT purchasers, and with the CYA ("cover your ass")
atmosphere in most corporations today, it's no wonder that this is the choice
that is usually being made. This is even true for the company I work in,
which in the newspapers supports OpenOffice but in reality 99% of its
employees use only Microsoft Office.
And all this ramble just to explain my belief that the fact that OpenOffice
hasn't captured the world by storm has nothing to do with its lousy forum.
> their own code, or 3) to organize a network of students to distribute OOo
> CD's at the beginning of the next academic year to every student in
> Israel.
This is an interesting idea. Another, similar idea, can be to try to convince
Israeli computer sellers to install, for free, OpenOffice on new machines.
--
Nadav Har'El | Monday, May 29 2006, 3 Sivan 5766
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Experience is what causes a person to
http://nadav.harel.org.il |make new mistakes instead of old ones.
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