On Thursday, October 10, 2002, at 03:22 AM, Jesse Walker wrote: > You know, I wonder how far Microsoft is going to be able to push the > general public before consumers have had enough. I have thought many > times in the past that a particular incident or policy would finally > be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Unfortunately, consumers > never seem to "get it."
You're not going to see it any time soon. The whole IT industry has so much tied up in Microsoft training, experience and hardware that changing is prohibitively expensive. It's the same problem as converting to other superior technologies like hydrogen-based transportation or digital TV. The only time such changes can occur quickly is when the whole industry more or less agrees on a new standard and that new standard is enough better that the average user can immediately see its advantages, such as is the case with DVDs. > In regards to the public beta of Open Office, it is very positive > news. Unfortunately it is my understanding that this public beta is > still not the Aqua version that people are expecting. Rather the > public beta will still need to be run in the X Windows environment or > rootless with XDarwin running in Aqua. I read an interview with one of > the head developers who stated that an Aqua verion was still a ways > away. Let's hope some more developers get on board and get the project > clipping at a little better pace. The devs are really short-handed > last I read. Open Office is based on the source for Sun's Star Office, which I use under Linux. I've used Star Office quiet a bit and have dabbled with Open Office under Linux. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the Open Office beta for Darwin a few days ago. It has a long way to go. It runs under X11 -- which few people have installed -- and is slow as a lame snail. It works, but it's no threat to Microsoft Office on the Mac. It took them almost a year to port the source over to Darwin under X11. That was an enormous undertaking. Making the interface Aqua will likely take even longer because they have to translate all the X11 widgets over to roughly equivalent Cocoa system routines. Open Office is a huge project. It has something like 7 or 8 million lines of source code and the binary download of the whole installation is at least 150 megabytes. In fact, without help from Apple or Sun, I'd be surprised to ever see a usable native (Cocoa) version of the program running under Mac OS X. The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be October 22 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
