Microsoft Disses OpenOffice.org with New Video
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.
Redmond recently posted a video to YouTube showcasing the complaints of former-OpenOffice.org users. The people in the video range from IT managers to school teachers and all seem to agree that OpenOffice.org sucks. Bailey Mitchell, Chief Information Officer for Forsyth County Schools evaluates his experience using OpenOffice.org by highlighting how happy everyone was to get back to MS Office.
"When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district," he's quoted as saying in the video. His is one of the more extreme pro-Microsoft comments present in the clip. Most of the comments revolve around cost for support and problems with compatibility. Some of the customers quoted in the video also felt that compatibility issues led to decreased employee productivity and low morale. All told there isn't a single good thing said about OpenOffice.org.
Ars Technica reports that Microsoft put the video on private soon after it posted a story on it but the video is now back to being publicly available. The ability to comment, however, has been disabled.
An Oracle spokesperson for OpenOffice.org declined to comment on the video, as did a spokesperson for Microsoft Office.
Source: YouTube via Ars Technica
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 OO.o and MS Office and I'm glad I never have to touch OO.o again. Some software are necessities, MS Office being one.
Though I still love MS Office.
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!
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.
So what's the difference?
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.
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.
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.