I think you keep thinking about Openoffice from the aspect of a computer geek. The fact is for the MASSES who use MS office, Openoffice will work just as well, if not better in some applications. For the anount you spend on MS Office compared to a free program, you cannot compare. PERIOD. Openoffice.org is just better.

Not everyone is as computer savvy like you, to say the the program stinks or is not very good is actually a joke. Tell that to some poor kid who cannot afford MS Office who uses Openoffice every day and works just fine!!!

The program is still evolving and has come along way. Yes there are some problems, but so does MS office have problems, dont you send those Error Messages every few days or so?

"...my goal in life is not to beat Microsoft at its game, but rather to make Microsoft play on my turf."

Dave: If you're looking only to OpenOffice to beat Microsoft, you're sadly narrowing your scope.

That's why OpenDocument is the plot and OpenOffice merely the McGuffin -- that little element that gets your attention but passes as a red herring in the end.

What OpenDocument does is create the vibrant competitive market for office applications you crave; without which Microsoft would continue unmolested.

So OpenOffice is sacrificing itself, mimicing MS Office to sever Mental Feature Lock-ins; then, Writely or Workplace or ______ will come in and deliver innovative ways to take text editors to the moon...where they could never go before the file format became open and standard.

Look also to Apple, to Google, to AOL, to IBM, to the USPTO, to others to participate in making the environment tolerable, for the very first time. OpenOffice is just one of a thousand points of light. And not the brightest by half (which is to take nothing at all away from the OOoProject or Sun's, Google's & Novell's engineers).

Right on, bro! You make some very valid points. I sure as heck don't care much if OOo is successful. But I do care about the tools I do need. As a developer, those tools don't often include an office productivity suite. But if MySQL has a bug in it, I'll be the first to check the bugs database to see if it's already been reported, and most often has, MySQL certainly being a developer-aligned open source product.

And judging from the comments on your earlier post, not personal experience, I'd say that there seems to be a large barrier in participating in OOo, the legal agreement, the gargantuan code base, etc.

As always, thanks for speaking your mind, even knowing you'll be chastised.

Hey Sam--Matt wrote this, but I will weigh in as well.

I have written previously how I think that OO.org is not ready for primetime. The frustrating part from my perspective is that I think if it were more usable than it would be adopted in businesses which lead to more Linux on the desktop, blah, blah, blah.

Really why OO.org is disappointing is because it's the only real challenger to MS office and it's not a great answer.

I like Open Office. I like Microsoft Office. But lets look at it the way we looked at the first (MS) windows software.

Windows was the pits. Nothing was stable, and the gui presentations were horrid. Windows 3.1 improved on that, so did word97, and excel. (Not to minimize IBMs Lotus, and Word Perfect's word processor), but OO is integrated, and it is Open. Future releases will be faster, and future releases will be more perfect (large bug reduction, to where it will be legacy quality code).

The initial author was describing his work as a programmer. From my reading between the lines, none of his programs are for end-users, who require an operating manual, or similar documentation, and if I am right, then VI will do for him.

But a good manual has paste-ins, etc, as we see with magazines, brouchures, etc. And this is what OO does well.

In closing, give OO a chance. It took Microsoft 10 years to get to when windows 2000 was released. OO is there now.

One final comment, I bet your Windows XP machine is a P4 3.4 or better machine, with the "horsepower" to provide rapid response time. I believe that many if not most linux desktop machines are P3 1,5s or slower in clock speed, and are incapable of running Microsoft software with any comforts. But it is great for Linux and OO.

Yes, I do run OO on Microsoft XP as well. It is nice to be able to take my file from Linux to XP and back again.

I'm chiming in a little late here and it looks like Sam has already beat me to the punch, but here's my take on Matt's issues with Open Office.

In the first article, you wrote that OpenOffice "stinks", but didn't say why. Then, after everybody points out that *your article* stinks, all you have to say is:

- "OpenOffice isn't a piece of software that most developers care about"
- "OpenOffice has a small community"
- "OpenOffice is very hard to develop, unless you're an active, deeply involved contributor" (MS Office is much easier to develop, eh?)

And the gran finale: "who cares if OpenOffice is successful?"

Come on! You didn't point a single problem in the product... again!!! How can you say it "stinks"?

OpenOffice is a great software.

OpenOffice.org is pleased to announce its first Developer Contest. It started 1 February and the first deadline is 28 Feb.; there will be deadlines at the end of each subsequent month. The goal of the developer contest is to generate more developer documentation, such as articles on porting, add-on and filter development, bug fixing, and so on; whatever is of interest to you and helpful to other developers. Every month a committee will pick the best article from the pool of submitted articles. Articles that did not initially win will stay in the pool, so that they can still win later.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org_Developer_Article_Contest