James Knott wrote: > H.S. wrote: >> I read a recent comment in slashdot by someone who said that if OOo >> being a free product cannot impress people while MS Office worth $500 is >> holding on to the market tells a lot about OOo! >> >> > > Or perhaps people are convinced they need MS Office and won't even give > OOo a chance. Take a look at how Microsoft has used various, often > illegal methods to block out competition. On the other hand, some > people think MS isn't doing as well as claimed. > http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/38350 >
Yeah, I read about it somewhere in the last some days. Main point the investors made was that too much is being spent on R&D with no corresponding returns. In any case, the poster on Slashdot compared OOo with Firefox. Both are free and open source. Yet Firefox grew by leaps and bounds but OOo has never shown similar rise in popularity. In the corporate world, I think one of the main reasons for MSO's popularity is its integration with Exchange and Outlook. Before we get an Exchange killer application/system in Linux, the best chance OOo has of gaining strong foothold, I believe, is in its adoption in small home office, personal and academic areas. However, even here I do not see OOo gaining as I had expected a few years ago. Some of the reservations are: - No outline mode (now this is one long standing feature request if ever there was one) - No robust and easy interface for creating bibliographies. But Zotero seems to be filling that void quite satisfactorily in the last some months. Shame OOo appears to have failed here. - No support for ligatures and glyphs. That is one argument for the use of LaTeX in academia (mainly Mathematics, Physics and engineering). - No grammar checker (but it appears that there is some progress in 3.0.1?). No matter how one argues that it is not a replacement for learning correct grammar, the fact of the matter is that the feature is quite useful for catching common errors and typos which otherwise are not caught easily. - No easy way to label and number subfigures (figures within figures). (Actually, I have made some of the the above points in some of my earlier posts based on my personal experience using OOo for technical report writing). However, improvements in comments and collaborations are very impressive in the recent releases. Looks like Impress has improved a lot too (yet from what I hear, still is long way from competing with Powerpoint). Improvements in figures and charts also appear to be quite nice. Now, for personal use, I really do not see any problems with OOo. That is why I strongly recommend OOo to all my friends for such uses. The other category of users I recommend OOo is the granny-type new users who are just starting out learning how to use a computer. Works very well in these groups. -- Please reply to this list only. I read this list on its corresponding newsgroup on gmane.org. Replies sent to my email address are just filtered to a folder in my mailbox and get periodically deleted without ever having been read. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
