Thread: Is anyone else encountering the same problem?

Yeah there is always a difference between ideal and real. OpenOffice is a nice bridge between the 2.

I wouldn't be surprised if OpenOffice ends up getting significant marketshare, though. Afterall, Firefox has done it. It was a very similar situation - a chicken and egg problem. People didn't care to write standard-compliant HTML because IE had a 99% marketshare, and people didn't use alternative browsers because they don't render pages "correctly". Firefox overcame that somehow, and now virtually the whole WWW is browse-able by all major browsers. And it all happened in 2 or 3 years.

OO doesn't even need to overtake MS Office (even though it certainly has the potential to, given the hefty price tag of MS Office, and the fact that most people really only need the basics). It only needs to gain 5% marketshare or so, which is the hard part. Then people will start producing accessible documents, and more people will switch to OO, and the chain reaction goes on. That's essentially what happened with Firefox. It "standardized" the web from Microsoft's grasp, practically. There's no reason OpenOffice can't "standardize" document formats.

It would be hard to convince people to run Linux. But a free office suite? it only takes half an hour or so to become sufficiently proficient, especially if the user only needs the basic functionalities.

Originally Posted by cyberfish

ISO doesn't cover .doc. The specification was just published by Microsoft.

Well heck I was right again now.

Originally Posted by cyberfish

For example, Photoshop.

I too agree. (Feel better this is quieting down).

But then Adobe isn't even on the same league. For one Photoshop has a much smaller market that an Office Suit. I can't quite explain why, but this is where you see a lot more sharing and interoperability happening.

It is however true that Microsoft has an history of predation. On the matter of Office suits, the real Office Wars happened in the 80s and 90s against Apple, IBM, and the straddlers of the 90s (Lotus, Corel, etc) and they were the driving force of what makes Windows the dominating platform today. The Apple's 80s slogan "Software Sells Systems" fits like a glove on Microsoft. The irony is tremendous, because it was exactly Microsoft early software development for Apple that made Microsoft and nearly destroyed Apple. And it's was Microsoft pulling off Office from OS/2 in the last minute that killed OS/2 and kept Windows as the dominating platform. (You remember OS/2 back then? Any doubts what operating system we would be using today had not Microsoft anticipated it? Hell yeah! OS/2 all the way)

Microsoft's Office Suit is at the core of their business. It's the reason the vast majority of paying customers use Microsoft Windows. And the vast majority of paying customers are the business market. Not the user market.

So they will protect this with all their guns including rape and murder against anyone pretending their nifty well-designed standard should compete with a company that employs hundreds of thousands of people across the globe and wants it to stay that way.

Originally Posted by cyberfish

People didn't care to write standard-compliant HTML because IE had a 99% marketshare, and people didn't use alternative browsers because they don't render pages "correctly". Firefox overcame that somehow, and now virtually the whole WWW is browse-able by all major browsers. And it all happened in 2 or 3 years. It only needs to gain 5% marketshare or so, which is the hard part. Then people will start producing accessible documents, and more people will switch to OO, and the chain reaction goes on. That's essentially what happened with Firefox.

They're not like, afraid of that or anything tho. I mean MS could shrink by like 50-75% and still be a huge corporation. I'm sure "Office" had a lot to do with the growth of their platform, but now it's what it is, they don't even need MS Office anymore.