"Two years ago, the number of developers writing applications for the Microsoft Windows platform fell, while the opposite was true for Linux - this has now become a trend. Instead of the Web stealing away Windows Users, as people have predicted for years, it's Linux and handheld devices. According to analysts at the Evans Data Corporation research house, 64.8 percent of North American developers are writing software for Windows, down from 74 percent only a year ago. The decline in popularity of the world's most prevalent operating systems appears to coincide with the rise of Linux, as the number of developers targeting the open-source environment has gone up by three percentage points from 8.8 percent to 11.8 percent in the same year."
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Member since:2005-07-06
*throws hands in the air* you believe what you want to believe - if you want to belive there is some sort of grand unified conspiracy theory against Microsoft competitors, then go ahead. Simply avoiding the real issue, the lack of features equal of Office, will simply result in never make any inrodes into the market.
OpenOffice.org has only been biting away at Corels marketshare; Microsoft has either stayed static or grown - if there was to any impact of OpenOffice.org, Microsoft would have had reduced revenue or major defection of customers - the fact is, neither have happened.
Neither have happened because of issues far beyond the redherrings you bring out about file formats issues. If OpenOffice.org developers can't be stuffed fixing long standings and lacking features, whose to blame for that? I certainly don't think its Microsofts fault for poor programming on OpenOffice.org part.
Edited 2007-07-09 22:51
Member since:2006-03-12
"if you want to belive there is some sort of grand unified conspiracy theory against Microsoft competitors"
That statement doesn't really work. The think about the word conspiracy is their has to be well people "conspiring", you don't get this Microsoft is one entry and is fairly transparent. The thing about theory is that it needs to be unproved. When Microsoft not only has *history* of abusing standards for lock-in, and has blue chip companies actually crying foul over their formats. *I* didn't write that report I linked to showning Microsoft's abuse of its proposed document format. In fact is *one* of many reports on Microsoft Lock-in.
Now when you start claiming long standing bugs and missing features in OpenOffice you show what this is about. You think this is some sort of Office smackdown, its not. OpenOffice is good enough for most user. In fact its had Microsoft's Office *most requested feature* for forever which is PDF export.
Whats interesting is you actually moved into lying, talking about *poor programming*, *lacking features*, *long standing bugs*. Saying these things doesn't make them true. In fact OpenOffice has regular updates that add features, improve code, and fix bugs. In fact OpenOffice 2.3 is getting a new interface. On their todo list there has been a "most used options first" so I wonder what that will be like.
But again OpenOffice is one of many competitors to Microsoft Office I believe Google amongst others. Even supermarkets have a version of Office.
Member since:
2006-03-12
@kaiwai You need to stop this "bash Microsoft" language.
Again this is not a an Smackdown, thank you for you large post, but your missing the main points.
* Microsoft is a Monopoly on the Desktop
* Microsoft is not the producer of Office Packages
* OpenOffice is one of *many* alternatives.
* Microsoft Office is Several times more expensive than the nearest
This is *nothing* to do with OS platform. This is to do with competition, something you don't seem to understand.
Microsoft Office *cannot* compete fairly with competition without lowering its prices *drastically* to compete. Because the feature set of alternative offerings is *good enough*, even earlier editions of itself are *good enough*.