Microsoft Disses OpenOffice.org with New Video

[JMcEntegart]

OpenOffice.org is an attractive suite of software applications for a lot of people, mostly because it's a money-saving alternative to Microsoft Office. However, Microsoft is eager to point out that the best things in (office) life often aren't free.

Microsoft Disses OpenOffice.org with New Video : Read more

 

[kelfen]

as long as it prints and it is free I am damn happy

 

[TheDuke]

well it's still free and more than enough for most people

 

[RailGun88]

Oh please. I use open office daily, an don't have to maintain it. The update manager does it. And also I have had no problems between MS Office and Open Office. I'm disappointed in you Microsoft. And anyways it took me only two weeks to get used to it.

 

[alikum]

[citation][nom]kelfen[/nom]as long as it prints and it is free I am damn happy[/citation]
That may be the case for home user. Have you ever thought of how a business is going to survive without Microsoft Office (or an alternative which doesn't suck)? They don't just view and print, they actually work with it. I have worked with both O and MS Office and I'm glad I never have to touch O again. Some software are necessities, MS Office being one.

 

[ruffopurititiwang]

Is it just me or did Microsoft make this video because it feels threatened by OpenOffice.org?

 

[cronik93]

Microsoft is disgusting.

 

[Guest]

Microsoft Office can do so much that Open Office can't do. All of it useful to the businessmen. For practical home use, Microsoft Office is a waste of money in most cases.

 

[mwilliam12]

Of course this comes on the heels of Microsoft increasing their prices for Office 2010 from 4% to as much as 10% per license! 10s of thousands of dollars for a large company to buy volume licenses for their product. I can see why "free" is an attractive option.

 

[mwilliam12]

Source... http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-office-2010-enterprise-pricing-you-win-some-you-lose-some/6134

 

[bpislife]

For home users there is openoffice.org. For offices that is StarOffice - though now it is oracle open office. "If it breaks, who fixes it?" Oracle.

Though I still love MS Office.

 

[-Fran-]

[citation][nom]alikum[/nom]That may be the case for home user. Have you ever thought of how a business is going to survive without Microsoft Office (or an alternative which doesn't suck)? They don't just view and print, they actually work with it. I have worked with both O and MS Office and I'm glad I never have to touch O again. Some software are necessities, MS Office being one.[/citation]

Well, I'm sure as hell you didn't have to deal with the "x" files vs the MSO2003 regular ones, huh?

Off course everything will work fine without giving another software some degree of support inside your own software, doh!

Anyway, free or not, MS Excel just kicks the hell out of anything out there in every possible way, that's truth. But Word, PP and Outlook? Not so much and they can be easily replaced with almost anything out there.

Big companies don't need flashy things for their reports IMO. There's no bling bling in memos.

Cheers!

 

[purist]

I regularly use the Word Processing and Spreadsheet functionality of both Open Office and MS Office and both products have their strong and weak points. There are certainly features that could be easier to use or better written in OO but MSO is hardly perfect either.

The most irritating thing I have found is that new versions of MSO usually require me to get used to a new interface and it can be wearing, particularly when moving from one firm to another with each on a different version. OO doesn't make me re-learn as much.

That said, both are excellent and do as much as I and my clients require. That OO is free makes it the obvious choice for the home or non-corporate user though.

 

[tayb]

OpenOffice works great for churning out word documents but that's about it. If you need anything else in the MS Office Suite the OpenOffice version can't even come close to competing. Try switching from Excel to OO spreadsheets and you will want to pull your hair out.

 

[jojesa]

All that crap in the video had happened to me over the years using Microsoft Office suites.
So what's the difference?

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]wasabiman123[/nom]How is this not expected from a free software, you generally get what your pay for...[/citation]

Flame bait.
Not to say that MS Office isn't better than OpenOffice.org but there are numerous example of free (both as in beer and speech) software that is superior to proprietary alternatives. For example, 455 out of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux. Two thirds of the web is served by Apache web servers. Firefox is also free. Etc.

 

[Guest]

of course ms-office is better than openoffice, but the $100 bills in my pocket is way better...

 

[liveonc]

MS Office is great, if you can afford it. I can't see how criticizing something free will make pirates want to pay for MS Office though. So unless MS wants to offer their stuff for free, they should at least be interested in people who don't want to pay, using something that's free. Even if people can afford to use MS, if they don't want to pay for it, they don't want to pay for it. ;-)

 

[Guest]

That OO is free makes it the obvious choice for the home or non-corporate user though.

I used to use openoffice at home; but now just use Google Docs, or MS Office on Windows Live. There just does not seem to be any needed functionality in OpenOffice that is really necessary for personal use; that you can not get out of the free web tools out there.

 

[killerclick]

Yeah, and Microsoft is doing this for a reason... I wonder what could it be...

 

[zachary k]

spellcheck? got it
read MS office and other file formats? got that.
print? yup
i am happy, if MS office was 60 dollars or less, and i can install it on all my PCs, i would buy it.

 

[kyee7k]

I might not like MS Office, but I need this software to maintain my resume and word skills.

 

[verbalizer]

it looked like most of those company quotes are from non us countries..

 

[Marco925]

maybe if the source code was released for Microsoft office documents, there wouldn't be such incompatibilities.... but of course they won't admit that.

 

[elel]

I have used OOo for some 5 years, and I just had to buy MS Office. Why? Because it was impossible to export RTF with OOo. It would just throw up; randomly change paragraph spacing, put a whole line in bold if you wanted one word that way, and stuff like that. My college requires RTF, so that was pretty much it for OOo. Other than that I can get by with it, but I hope that the new fork of it really gets better.