Quote:
Originally posted by fracturedmind
I find Office a lot faster, and its like 14 bucks for students.
OpenOffice was always shotty and annoying in more ways than 800, imo.
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Aside for the fact this ignores that Office ISN'T $14 for the majority of people out there, it seems to me by your passive tense that it's been awhile since you've tried OpenOffice. A LOT changes in open source projects in short periods of time.
Quote:
Originally posted by Holo
thing is if you have more money to burn than time to migrate MS will always be in business. You pay for the right to point a finger, for professional tech support, and you can't afford to be a rogue and move over to something taht in the longer term may not be usable. This is exactly why MS doesn't make their formats public...obfuscation is over 50% of their business. If they make compatibility too easy they'll lose ground they desperately need to keep. I myself have no need for an office suite, but If I did I would get OO becuase it's free. A business can't risk it in case it doesn't work the exact same or they have format problems with other businesses. Easier to bite the bullet and pay up. When OO can match this single point it will take over.
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While this is a valid point to certain degrees, I strongly disagre with the concept of something not being usable in the long term. That's directly due to the nature of open source. Microsoft, due to their great control, can simply say "we're not gonna support Office 7 anymore and were gonna make it so that it doesn't work well with our new OS." You simply CAN'T do that with OSS. Only way I would see OpenOffice becoming "unusable" is if something better came along. This is assumign of course, that people use it and there is demand and interest. The biggest problem with OpenOffice has very little to do with OpenOffice itself but with people's reluctance to use it. For example, if people used open document formats (especially something other than the horrendous .doc format) then there would be no issues of compatablility in documents. Nice and simple.
I think you see where I'm going with this.