[odf-discuss] News on MS pluggin

[Thomas Zander]

On Monday 16 October 2006 11:41, Ian Lynch wrote:
> > That might be due to feature parity rather than UI. And the fact that
> > OOo has been around much longer than open source word processors
> > (StarOffice predates open source). Note: "due to feature parity" doesn't
> > necessarily mean "people actually need these features often".
>
> It could be a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons schools in
> particular get interested in OOo is not the feature list, its not odf,
> its not how long its been around, its that teachers, who don't give a
> monkeys about code or anything technical, have something familiar in
> front of them. Good filters for MS documents are also necessary. Other
> sales bonuses are not having to worry about license issues such as keys,
> FAST etc. In short, they want the least hassle possible. They have no
> great interest in technology, to them a WP is something you use to write
> with, end of story.

I've been around KOffice for a long time and your story is completely true, 
but has some conclusions that are not.
Yes I agree, most users just want the least hassle. Which definitely includes 
good interoperability with other users. Something that MS hasn't scored the 
best of points with, I have to point out. (each release has a new fileformat 
an old version can't open, for example).

The simple fact of the matter is that all the free software solutions have had 
one or more problems that made it too hard for the non-caring users.
Ranging from
* Doesn't run on Windows, and Linux is not running needed software.
* Is not a full solution (KWord doesn't do tables, abiword has its own 
problems) and you need two suites to do your work.
* File exchange. People send you .doc files, they also expect to receive files 
that can be opened in MSWord.

There are probably more.
Point is, OOo has been the only one that didn't really suffer from any of 
those problems.

Right now, the landscape is changing. Linux is becoming less laughable on the 
desktop, ODF is decimating the "I want .doc" problem and open source has 
gotten serious attention from industry and users. So KOffice and others now 
get the attention they need to get the needed features and to run on Windows 
etc.

I'm sure it will take many years before ODF reaches the level of maturity so 
it can be a viable replacement of the .doc fileformat. And OpenOffice is a 
required player in that time, to bridge the gap.
-- 
Thomas Zander
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