Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 26th Oct 2005 17:34 UTC, submitted by Valour
"With the release of StarOffice 8 and OpenOffice.org, and the rumors about MS Office 12, office suites are making their rounds in the press again. Microsoft's office suite is certainly the most popular on Windows, but there are competing suites from Corel and IBM. On GNU/Linux we have KOffice, GNOME Office, OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, and more. But no matter if they are free or proprietary, expensive or cheap, and regardless of what platforms they run on, the one thing that all software suites have in common is that they suck."
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Member since:
2005-07-06
"Programs like word processors, spreadsheets, and drawing programs were never
designed to be integrated with one another.
I don't know about you, but I have a tool box filled with tools that are each
designed for a single purpose -- and they do that single thing very well. If I had
to replace them with an all-in-one tool I'd be pretty frustrated, to say the least."
This is so true. In my experiece, programs that try to do too many things just end up doing all those things poorly. And programs that do few things tend to do those things very well. This is one reason why Unix has been so successful for 35 years - it has lot's of separate, simple utilities that do few things individually, but do those things very well, and then they inter-operate seamlessly.
I don't think you shoul look at it as a one-tool-fits-all kind of thing. It would be more appropriate to look at it as the tool box it self.
An integrated software suite is a tool box. The problem is that the tools in the toolbox can never leace the box and can thus only be applied to things that fit inside the box. As this article tries to put it, a box is a rather poor working envrironment. Imagine trying to stuff your car into your tool box and still have room to work on it....
What has to be done is to develop an environment where the tools are not stuck to the box. And where the user can choose what to apply the tool on free from the assumption of the tool designer. I have used hammers to crush ice. Cups to draw circles. Knifes to pick my teeth... well you get the picture, tools should be free from the box.