On Sunday 24 Oct 2010 02:11:52 Frank Esposito wrote: > I posted a question as to why choose MS Office over OO on hacker news > and although I only got 4 responses, they kind of match my own > experience with OO. > here is the discussion: > > http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1816102 > > Problems with adoption as far as I can ascertain are as follow: > > * It is ugly
This is a very subjective call, so not worth consideration outside a "UX needs improvement in some areas" > * it does not match MS Office functionality exactly (this is what the > world uses, so to get people to adopt LO, they need to have what they > already need) > * It is slow Define slow, I have 3.2.1 on clients machines and is grease lightning fast, certainly faster than opening up all 4 of MS applications at the same time. > * It is clunky Define "clunky" in specific terms > * It has issues with MS doc and docx files (yes I know MS formats in > an insane way and does not follow standards) Not as many issues as MSO has with ODF, and LibO/OOo is standards compliant > unrefined Subjective again define > > > > As someone who has worked in corporate IT in the U.S., and now in > ecommence for a major U.S. corporation, This is the problem, :) I'll get to this further on. > here are my recommendations: > > * LO needs to match every single MS Office function, and then provide > what MS Office is missing It does that already, Forms and PDF functionality just an example. > * The interface needs to become refined (think iphone refinement), > maybe even adding the dreaded ribbon or option to switch between the > two types) I agree with this, except for the ribbon. Iwould suggest that LibO/OOo still has greater market share than MSO2007/2010 ouside of Educational institutions > * performance needs to be increased That's a given and that is being addressed continuously > * MS Office filters and converters need to be perfected "Perfect" is non achievable and a moving target > * Investigate a revision control system like such as Sharepoint or Google > docs This I agree with, I'd like to see a function in the installer of a business version that gives the option of calling up an install of O3 spaces > * perfect the spellcheck system and advance grammar and formatting > control systems Not sure why this, OOo is available in many more languages than MS and I'm pretty sure LibO will be there soon as well, spell check works well as far as I can see, grammar checkers are bad voodoo and are more often wrong than right, however they can serve a purpose. If you study document production work flows by someone who is a professional at the game, not an IT person who rarely has any idea about producing richly formatted documents, you will find that grammar checkers are more often than not used as suggesters of alternatives which a writer either ignores or adapts to suit their own style. As for formatting tools, Stylist kicks the arse of any similar tool in any version of MSO, once you have climbed the learning curve and unlearnt the really bad habits that using MSO has created. The only change I would make is having stylist docked and open by default and on file>new a "select or create template" dialogue opens > > > We could institute some kind of feedback program such as the test > pilot model that Mozilla uses > with Firefox 4. We can also look at how MS destroyed Word perfect in > market share to dominate the World Office suite business market. Read Clayton Christensen, MSO was cheaper and good enough and easy to get. LibO/OOo is in fact in that same position right now. The tipping point is coming, some would argue that in Europe it is already there and given MS recent marketing, it seems they may agree . > > Then LO needs to innovate new features and stabilize its current > feature set, this is how Firefox, and later Chrome won the browser > wars (in my opinion at least) A browser is an entirely different beast, the only thing they share is the fact they are software. It's like comparing going to the movies to driving a truck. Forget that, they are tools to specific audience > . > > > just my thoughts And many thanks for them and here's where I get stuff thrown at me! ;) The biggest barrier to adoption in business is the advocates themselves, jeez I used to fall into the same trap myself a few years ago. These days when I talk to people about OOo/Go-OOo (and in the future LibO) I know that I'm advocating for far superior software and given 15 minutes with a group of professional document producers I can prove that. I certainly don't go into an advocacy situation ready to apologise for OOo's seeming shortcomings, which from some of the mails on here, is what seems to happen. This is the reality: Any change to business workflow is disruptive. Any disruption has to be seen to be profitable to the business, anyone who is trying to advocate change but who has no belief in the superiority of what she is advocating and that it is in the Enterprise's best interest for a whole raft of reasons including increased productivity, is screwed from the start. Problem with OSS projects is we go after geeks, or the IT department, fair enough for CMS, Database and server and back office stuff, however when we are aiming at Front Office Productivity, we should be advocating to Management and HR. IT only sees an increase in support calls. IT rarely owns a company or is on the board, so their vision is skewed. Self belief wins, achievable solutions win. 20%+ market share in Europe against a multi million dollar marketing machine with lobbyists in every corridor, partner companies on every street, a legacy document pool in the millions of terrabytes and the natural resistance of enterprise to change. I tell you what, we must be doing something right. > > -Frank esposito Cheers GL -- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant. INGOTs Assessor Trainer (International Grades in Open Technologies) www.theingots.org -- E-mail to [email protected] for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/marketing/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
