"After the incredible success of the Asus Eee PC, other manufacturers are ready to get their piece of the pie. This means that within the next few months we are going to see this segment go from just two devices - the Eee PC and the Nanobook (which has yet to come out in the U.S. but which we have been hearing about for some time) - to many more." Another article on the Eee says: "Five of the 10 best-selling notebooks, including the top three models this weekend do not run Windows or Mac OS X. In fact, they are different models of the same diminutive notebook the Asus Eee PC - that runs on Linux."
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Member since:2007-02-17
So just because OOo has a couple of features that Office doesn't have, it all of a sudden has more features? I don't think it works that way (and math agrees with me). "
Aside from support of ODF and PDF, the following are the "big picture" features of OpenOffice that MS Office is a long, long way behind in:
"Free (as in zero cost). Open (as in "freedom" - especially freedom from lock-in). Community support. Standards support. Cross-platform. Future-proof (no forced upgrades to new versions). Interoperability. In addition to all that, it doesn't burden you with any new "ribbon" GUI learning curve to cope with."
Only KOffice 2 (not released yet) gets even close.
MS Office misses out on most of the "big picture". Sure MS Office does a fine job as an Office suite, in terms support for a wide array of detail functions (formatting, tables, fonts, macros that type of thing)... just about everything you can think of ... but then again the other main Office suites have all that also. No-one will be short-changed for that type of feature, no matter what suite they choose.
However only MS Office users will have to suffer lock-in, forced training, excessive costs, forced upgrades, lack of interoperability etc, etc that MS Office burdens them with.
Member since:2005-07-06
You and I know the advantages of Open Source and avoiding lock-in and all that, but I'm just not convinced it's enough on its own to sell an Office suit to the general public.
I actually think KOffice 2 is a more interesting option, possibly with more potential than OOo, to sway people. When you look at OpenOffice you see a slightly crap clone of MS Office. When you look at KOffice 2 you see someone offering a new and different approach to many things.
Look at Apples iWork as an example. It gained popularity not by trying to clone Office, but by doing things differently in a way that many people appreciate.
Look at my original example of Photoshop vs. PWP. I chose PWP over photoshop not because PWP was cheaper clone of Photoshop, but because it did things differently in a way I consider better. The fact that it's much cheaper was simply a nice bonus.
Member since:
2005-07-06
So just because OOo has a couple of features that Office doesn't have, it all of a sudden has more features? I don't think it works that way (and math agrees with me).
But as has been said over and over again, it's not quantity of features that wins a person over, it's having the right features they need and having them work. I loath MS Office (and am no fan of OOo) and avoid it as often as I can. But when forced to use them I have to say I reluctantly prefer MS Office, not because it has more features, but because the features I need to use work better on Office than OOo.
As an example, I dropped using Photoshop for my photo editing in favour Picture Window pro (www.dl-c.com). PWP probably has less than 10% of the features PS has, but it has the right 10% that I need and those 10% work a lot better for me and are a lot easier and more powerful to use than in PS. Of course having only 10% of the features PWP will never challenge PS for market dominance, but I think the developers and all the users are quite OK with that.