Henri,
OOo has already succeeded as the many users of OOo can attest.
Wether OOo will displace MS Office or any other program is academic.
OOo offers a very good office suite that runs on Wndows, Mac OS X,
Linux,
BSD Unix, Solaris, etc. And it is localized to many languages that other
office suites are not. It is also open source and very inexpensive
compared
to commercial offerings.
While there are many things I might ask of an office suite that are not
perfect
in OOo, they are not perfect in other office suites either.
I do agree that it could probably be trimmed of a few bells and
whistles in some
areas. But given that hard disk space is very inexpensive these days
and RAM
is likewise getting to be less of an issue on all but very old
machines, the remaining
issue is load times. If you open and close OOo many times a day to use
one portion
such as Writer, it is a problem. If on the other hand you open it once
and leave it open
all day long as I do, this is only a minor annoyance at worst.
Ross Bernheim
On Oct 29, 2006, at 8:12, M. Henri Day wrote:
Dear James,
Interesting article, which should help to encourage a more open view
of the
possibility of using OOo among business users, who tend to be loathe to
experiment. As a home user I am not subject in equal degree to the
productivity constraints and switch-over costs that occupy such people,
while purchase costs perhaps weigh higher in my case. On the grapevine
the
most common disadvantages attributed to OOo are that the suite is
bloated
and slow. Stability is, if I have understood the matter aright,
generally
regarded as good. My question is thus: to the degree that the problems
mentioned above are real, what is being done to address them ? How
does, for
example, 2.0.4 compare with its predecessor in these respects ? Does it
require more or less hard disk space or the same ; does operating it
require
more or less RAM ? How does it compare in this regard with the
Microsoft
Office suite ? These are the pivotal questions - in addition to the
still
more basic one of whether tools of this kind should be computer or
web-based
- which in my opinion are going to determine the fate of OOo. For my
part, I
do hope OOo succeeds ; we all find ourselves very much in need of an
alternative to Redmond's products (and in particular, their marketing
practices) !...
Henri
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