Forrester Research Shows Steep Decline in Free Office Suite Stats 337
An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users (and others) are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. ... The poll included [shows totals] over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising, Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client."
Office 365 (Score:5, Insightful)
So to avoid locking our data into a Windows-only proprietary format, we'll lock it into a Windows-centric Microsoft-owned cloud? Oh yeah, that's going to work much better.
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Insightful)
So to avoid locking our data into a Windows-only proprietary format, we'll lock it into a Windows-centric Microsoft-owned proprietary format cloud? Oh yeah, that's going to work much better.
FTFY
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Insightful)
As a practical matter, you are "locked in" to whatever Office program you use - online or otherwise. OpenOffice is free and open source, but unless you use it company-wide, you will have compatibility issues with whatever the next guy uses. For instance, if you bring your presentation to the conference room and they don't have OpenOffice installed, then you will have problems (yes, you can use PDF but that has limitations for presentations). Yes, there is no excuse for not installing a free program - except that you may not have Admin rights on the machine or other IT issues.
At home we tried to use OpenOffice (actually LibreOffice) exclusively. We struggled, mostly with PowerPoint, but also with Word formatting glitches when collaborating. In the end, I sucked it up and loaded MS Office. My wife simply has to be compatible with the rest of the world - same reason I keep one functioning Windows box around. I can RDP into work, so I don't have that need.
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Yes, there is no excuse for not installing a free program
I don't want to install java on my mac so that is my reason for not installing libreoffice...
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I don't want to install java on my mac so that is my reason for not installing libreoffice...
You, uh, do realise that Libreoffice doesn't need Java, right?
No, clearly you don't.
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Well, maybe you can tell it to stop nagging me about java when I run it every time.
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I'm too lazy to test this, since I'd have to uninstall Java, but I'm pretty sure you can just shut off the Java stuff in Preferences -> LibreOffice -> Advanced -> Use a Java Runtime Environment.
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When did you last try out of curiosity?
I had some issues (yes Powerpoint mostly) early on but nothing in the last 2 years or so.
Everything just opens and saves perfectly.
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About a week ago :)
Made sure everything was up to date. Two problems prompted the MS Office install:
1) There was an annoying problem where we would fix the slide formatting, save the file in PPT format, and everything would look fine. Then we would re-open the file from the PPT and the text would all be off the edge of the slide. Saving and loading it in the native format was fine, so I think it was a problem with the PPT exporter. Unfortunately this needed to go on a USB stick for a presentation on a fixed
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That seems silly. I use libre office and if the document needs to travel simply do it in the doc format, one that very early version of M$ Office can open. In fact I achieve greater compatibility by doing that rather than using the latest versions of M$ Office as that can create enormous problems and confusion with earlier version of M$ Office because of people expecting compatibility that is missing. So internal only documents are in open office format and external documents are in M$ Office format/early
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Ditto. Even Office 2000 SR3 with its 2007 compatibility pack does way better than the free Office suites. They can't even open password protected docx files which happens once in a while from other people. :(
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To be fair, even being a fully paying Microsoft lock-in customer doesn't always eliminate this problem. Try to collaborate when one person has Office 2003 and the other Office 2010. Mix in Office 2011 for Mac if you want to make things really interesting. You'll see the same class of formatting glitches as moving between Office and [Open|Libre]Office. You have to exactly match Office version, platform, and sometimes even installed fonts to make collaboration seamless, even when you only have Office to d
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at OwnCloud if you want to host your own stuff "in a cloud". But the sales pitch for Office 365 is that they do all the "icky computery" stuff, like backups and upgrades.
Of course the drawbacks of cloud are well known, too: you need to be online, you need to pay them monthly, and it can be read by anyone with a warrant (or not a warrant, if they're the NSA. )
Vendor lock-in changes, too. Sure, you can download an Office 365 document to import into Open Office. Today. And just because the TOS says you can today doesn't mean those terms can't be changed tomorrow.
There's a lot to dislike about cloud solutions. But they sure meet the needs of a lot of people - at least those who don't think about it too much.
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Look at OwnCloud if you want to host your own stuff "in a cloud". But the sales pitch for Office 365 is that they do all the "icky computery" stuff, like backups and upgrades.
Of course the drawbacks of cloud are well known, too: you need to be online, you need to pay them monthly, and it can be read by anyone with a warrant (or not a warrant, if they're the NSA. )
Vendor lock-in changes, too. Sure, you can download an Office 365 document to import into Open Office. Today. And just because the TOS says you can today doesn't mean those terms can't be changed tomorrow.
There's a lot to dislike about cloud solutions. But they sure meet the needs of a lot of people - at least those who don't think about it too much.
Just throw it on any server at work or on an ISP. This is FOSS like apache where a user can do whatever the hell he or she wants. Office 365 is managed by someone else. This would be managed by you and your ISP backs it up or your IT department, or yourself. This is a we cloud instead of a their cloud.
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the benefit of cloud-based office software? I understand it allows the service provider to demand rent indefinitely. What benefit does it provide to the end-user?
Easy. I can view my docs anywhere. From my phone, home pc, work pc, whatever. Dropbox has some of this but office file compatibility is a problem for example when it comes to spreadsheets.
Second, it is a damn pain in the ass to setup software to be updated and pushed on thousands of PCs in a work envrionment. With this you push a group policy for a hyperlink. Sovled as the website or intranet site takes care of everything. No hunting down damn Outlook archive folders when upgrading a PC. If a company wants something confidential they flag it and it instantly is unavailable elsewhere. On the cloud means it wont leave on flash drivers either.
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A friend of mine has them at work. Somehow he manages to get stuff done with it.
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In no way can you guarantee security of your data when it is on the premises of someone else.
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As a compromise, for sensitive documents, Citrix applications seem to work. This allows viewing of docs pretty much anywhere, but the items are stored in a secure area (namely the business's data center) and not stored by a third party who realistically has little to no legal responsibility for the documents getting compromised.
A business pays for the servers, either at their own data center, or at the cloud provider's data center, so might as well keep the data where one physically knows where it is.
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Citrix can be fiddly, but I've seen pretty decent working setups. It definitely isn't a perfect solution (Citrix servers are another point of failure, and they can go down), but they are sort of a middle ground between all in-house versus all in the cloud.
If it does work, it makes life easy because clients only need a Citrix client as opposed to an office suite.
Another alternative are packaging utilities. A few years ago, there was a program called Thinstall (now bought up by EMC.) I had good success wit
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I just had management freak out over this at my workplace last week. ... even though I am not the damn IT guy at the other company who setup Citrix!...
Anyway you need to set the default printer and then open it Citrix remote desktop. If it is not default then they call you and expect you to fix another company's system that is remote ... and fix the internet while you are at it.
Citrix cost some employees their job as IE pops randomly do not go up when it gets busy and they can't read HIPPA documents to cust
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Interesting)
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> Easy. I can view my docs anywhere.
Anywhere that's supported. There are already cloud services for which this is a problem. Some platforms and devices aren't supported. This even includes combinations that are by no means obscure alternatives.
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To me, none.
All an attacker has to do is get admin access to the cloud servers, and every single user and company is theirs. With data stored locally, an attacker would have to pick and choose targets by risk/reward value.
Cloud storage has its uses (especially if I do the encryption locally before it is sent up, such as via a TrueCrypt container), but writing documents on a cloud provider can spell out bad news, especially if someone decides to compromise the provider, tar up all the storage directories, a
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No, that's not how it works. The "Cloud" is nothing but a bunch of servers somewhere else. You can have fine grained access to different servers / folders / howeveryousetitup. If you have half a brain when you set your data in the "Cloud" you have more than one password and / or other method of authentication.
The security problems with remote servers are more complicated that ones that you can physically protect but it isn't nearly as easy as you seem to make it. Further, there is plenty of data out the
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eventually find the way to start playing the social engineering job.
Barclays Bank got cracked because someone claiming to be a Cisco Certified Network Asshole showed up demanding access to a network room, and because every CCNWhatever operates at the same level as the deities themselves in too many organizations he was able to install a remotely accessible KVM. Then there's my former employer's standby for testing site security, show up in a uniform with a badge, a ladder in one hand, a tool bag in the ot
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In my company we use it for certain documents which must be edited and viewed by multiple people.
Pretty useful, but not critical.
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the benefit of cloud-based office software?
If you work in an enterprise with 1000 users running Office, with cloud-Office all you need to do is give your users a hyperlink. No suites to install, no version management, no software to maintain, no IT staff that you need to keep employed. And if your users collaborate around the country or around the world you don't have all these giant email attachments flying back and forth - It's all in the cloud.
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Insightful)
And the NSA have a copy of everything, so there's no need to back it up yourself.
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If you work in an enterprise with 1000 users running Office, with cloud-Office all you need to do is give your users a hyperlink.
...you mean like you can now with SharePoint, or simply drop a document onto a disk share somewhere and give them the URI for that, right?
(note that the latter has way less, feature-wise, but it works rather well for small groups).
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It also can be cheaper. I don't use office normally, but a company I consult for uses msft cloud. They had some word and ppt docs they wanted me to read. Instead of buying a multi hundred dollar license, it was $15 for the month.
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Informative)
No there isn't any such possibility. You can export your data eg. from Excel as a read-only view but you can't export from Office 365 to anything. Office 2010 "is supported now" but it won't be forever, you can't use OpenOffice or similar to access your O365 content.
Adobe right-out says their cloud solution is not backwards compatible with their desktop products, once you convert you're stuck in it. Microsoft says "Although the full Office applications go into 'reduced-functionality mode,' you can still use them to read and print your Office documents."
Re:Office 365 (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe right-out says their cloud solution is not backwards compatible with their desktop products, once you convert you're stuck in it.
Huh? Adobe's "Cloud" is just a stupid marketing term for their subscription service. The only thing that is remote is a couple of gigs of storage you get to synch your application settings and to act as a half assed Dropbox clone. The applications are run locally. And most of the Creative Suite applications are pretty backwards compatible for at least two or three versions. That is the same problem that everybody has - software developers have this annoying tendency to try to improve their products which occasionally means that files created in older software will have to be changed.
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You can export your data eg. from Excel as a read-only view but you can't export from Office 365 to anything
Wow, what if you want to send a document to someone who doesn't have an Office 365 account?
The whole Open/Libre Office thing hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's the full reason for the decline, but it didn't help. At first we were pushing Open Office at work, and then one day we had to start pushing Libre Office. So, people would say "What's wrong with Open Office?" and then you say "It's complicated... blah blah blah." And then they say "Okay, we'll just use regular Microsoft Office then."
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seeing as Oracle was going to CLOSE SOURCE "OpenOffice" and "make available" a LITE free version
everyone ( almost) at OO quit and moved to LibreOffice
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The idiots who renamed Open Office should all be smacked.
Do you have a better suggestion for a name? I'm sure they all sat around agonizing over what to name the thing when this happened, and LibreOffice was probably the best they could come up with that didn't sound completely stupid.
Re:The whole Open/Libre Office thing hurt (Score:4, Informative)
FreeOffice sucks because English speakers (Americans in particular) will think it sounds worthless, since they don't understand the difference between libre and gratis and equate "free" with "not very good".
OpenSuite actually sounds like a good possibility.
"Bundled Collection of Office Applications" is ridiculously wordy and completely uninspired, and sounds like a name Microsoft would come up with.
But you're right that dumb Americans won't know how to pronounce "Libre". I wonder what the nationalities were of the people who picked the name.
Re:The whole Open/Libre Office thing hurt (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the answer is staring us all in the face... To appeal to Americans, but yet stay close to Libre in meaning... LibertyOffice. They could use a red, white and blue theme.
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Making the name heavily American centric is a pretty bad idea, given both the lack of worldwide respect for the US's foreign policies and the decreasing percentage the country makes up in the global market. "FreedomOffice" might have worked as a less US-centric name. Maybe give each copy out with a coupon for some Freedom Fries!
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Dude, it's 2013 now. A large chunk of the world has a Linux based smartphone in their pocket, Facebook and Google are everywhere with free services having commercial angles, and both ad support and pay to upgrade applications are everywhere. The idea that people will think free software is automatically of poor quality is pretty outdated FUD at this point. "FreeOffice" was the obvious renaming choice, and whatever low quality association "free" has is surely outweighed by the low recognition of "libre" a
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Re:The whole Open/Libre Office thing hurt (Score:5, Informative)
Well you can blame that whole debacle on Oracle. As another responder said, they were going to close-source OpenOffice and only have some shitty "lite" version for Free, and as a result, all the devs quit and forked the project. This isn't a bad thing, it's one of the big strengths of open-source software: if some shithead gets control of the project (e.g., Oracle or David Dawes) and does something unacceptable, other interested parties can fork the code and continue development instead of having to start from scratch. The only downside is they can't forcibly take over the name, so they have to come up with a new name, which may or may not be as catchy or memorable. "LibreOffice" is a little odd-sounding to the ears of an English speaker, but can you come up with anything better?
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"LibreOffice" is a little odd-sounding to the ears of an English speaker, but can you come up with anything better?
StillOpenOffice
Re:The whole Open/Libre Office thing hurt (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. The Oracle-paid devs stayed working at Oracle (until they fired them all six months later), but most of the non-Oracle and non-IBM contributors got up and left - that is, the people who'd spent ten years giving OpenOffice [wikipedia.org] a public reputation at all. Then Oracle threw it to IBM to do Apache OpenOffice [wikipedia.org], which is ridiculously behind in development (and is now wondering on its mailing list how on earth it can actually get any outside developers interested). (AOO partisans will deny both points, but those links are to the Wikipedia articles, which have ridiculous quantities of citations to this effect.)
155 Forrester Clients (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't really a survey of businesses, just people who buy Forrester Research products.. I wouldn't say it's a representative sample of much of anything.
Re:155 Forrester Clients (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point... this is a survey of 155 Forrester clients. People who are Forrester clients are the dinosaurs of the business world. They have to pay Forrester to get a clue. I wouldn't put much stock in these numbers.
(Interesting that the article shows 13% use Google Docs... maybe that's where all the users went.)
Re:155 Forrester Clients (Score:5, Insightful)
None of my clients use open source software, and it has nothing to do with Forrester.
The fact is, if your business is in an industry where you have to share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc), then you kind of have to stick with Microsoft Office. The free stuff just doesn't do a very good job of reading doc and docx formats (and spreadsheets are unusable if they have any macros in them). Yes, a company *could* go with free software and just take a little extra time with formatting and training, and it wouldn't be an issue for most of what they do.
But why bother? It's just easier and cheaper for them to buy Office and move on with actual work. For that to change, entire industries would have to change, or at least the biggest players in the industries would.
Nit pick - legal uses Wordperfect. Libre reads fin (Score:5, Interesting)
A very minor not pick - the standard for law is Word Perfect. You said "share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc)".
More significant is the claim "share or READ". I've found that LibreOffice is MORE reliable for reading files from various versions of MS Office then MS Office itself is. For collaborative editing, sending a complex document back and forth, sure you'd want to both use the same version of the same software, if you forgot that much better collaborative platforms are available, such as Google Docs.
For collaboration, working on the same document via Google docs really works better than emailing different versions around and changes. That actually leaves a pretty narrow set of circumstances for which MS Office is actually the best choice. You realize that when a newer version of Word comes out that doesn't handle your existing Word 200x format documents properly.
Peope use what works (Score:3, Insightful)
Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it
I still use Microsoft Office 2003 and the reasons are simple:
- It works. Creating a document today isn't any different today than it was in 2003 or 1983. You type stuff onto a page. I have yet to encounter a situation where Office 2003 can't do exactly what I need. Newer versions of Office simply add extra bloat.
- Microsoft's god awful "ribbon" which has rendered all newer versions of Office unusable.
- Office 2003 has none of Microsoft's "activation" bullshit.
Re:Peope use what works (Score:5, Insightful)
I hated the ribbon at first, but it's actually quite usable once you get accustomed to it. I still think the classic menu is more efficient from a UI standpoint, but saying the ribbon makes Office unusable is unfair.
Re:Peope use what works (Score:5, Insightful)
You may call me unfair from now on.
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I find using Office without the ribbon unusable. I can't find where anything is at now.
Does that mean menus are inferior? No. It means I got used to a different way of doing them.
Now if you want to argue that I am stupid and do not know how to use a menu I would like to point out I have used Office since the 3.1 days and knew it fairly well before 2008 when my brain still reserved these things in memory as it was important to remember. I also remember hating the hiding function in office 2003 where you had
Re:Peope use what works (Score:5, Insightful)
I find using Office without the ribbon unusable. I can't find where anything is at now.
Does that mean menus are inferior? No. It means I got used to a different way of doing them.
Sorry, but after 5+ years of dealing with the ribbon I still regularly use Google to find out how to do something I know I could do in Office. Many of the functions in tools like Excel are not easily found behind the limited ribbon.
This whole ribbon thing was the start of a bad trend. From Unity to Metro, this dumbing down of the interface to the 3rd grade level shows how organizations see their customers.
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This is Slashdot. Just be glad he didn't say "the ribbon caused Hitler".
"Bitching about Microsoft technologies you obviously haven't even used" is basically the default post here.
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Don't be silly. The ribbon IS Hitler.
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That is true. The ribbon is cumbersome and it has certainly slowed me down. The main problem for me is the tools are now hidden behind tabs, so you're constantly click, click clicking your way across to find what you need (apart from web browsers, I really hate tabs). I much prefer to have ALL my toolbars laid out in front of me, and they're static. Add to the fact that there is no standard 'File Edit View' style, then you're stuck with having to try and memorise each ribbon for each different program.
I got
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The ribbon is bad I don't care if it was invented by a joint collaboration between Gandhi and Mother Teresa. It's bad. Bad design. Bad use of screen space, Bad presentation of items. Bad useability. After 4 years of it being forced apon me I have yet to find one redeeming quality of the ribbon. Except maybe that I use Office items so much less now. If it wasn't for Outlook I could almost escape any exposure to it.
Re:Peope use what works (Score:5, Insightful)
>saying the ribbon makes Office unusable is unfair.
People said you just need to get used to the ribbon. Guess what? I has been 6 years now, and I still look for various insert commands on the Insert Ribbon. Where they are not.
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I've been using that ribbon for three years and still hate it. Every time I need to find something I haven't used in a week I end up spending a minute poking around that ribbon trying to figure out where it is. The menus are far faster to deal with.
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The problem isn't that Office 2003 doesn't work for you. It is that people around you have newer versions, and your copy of office will not read the newer formats. From office.microsoft.com:
Although you can open Office Word 2007 files in previous versions of Word, you may not be able to change some items that were created by using the new or enhanced features in Office Word 2007.
It's the "What Works" Part That is Key (Score:3)
People use what works best for them. Open Office an Libre Office are not the only alternate office products out there. There is that crap that people try to pawn of on other in Apple products (Pages I think), and Corel's kick at the can, and KDE's stuff, and likely a bunch of other commercial stuff. Even Microsoft's light version of office that they put on home computers, that no-one uses if they have to. And out of all of them MS Office, for better or worse, is the king. Everyone in software knows that if
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Ribbon isn't too bad once you get used to it. You can also hide it, which keeps it from taking up the vertical space, which is nice. I didn't like it back in 2007, but it's come a long way since.
On a side note about 2003 activation; I'm not sure what you're talking about. 2003 requires activation and, if it fails, you still have to call the 800 number and spend 5 minutes speaking numbers into the phone.
I agree with you about the newer features not being needed, however. I've yet to actually take advanta
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Even updated Office 2000 and 2002/XP, with the 2007 compatibility packs, are fine for me! Sure, they're unsupported but they work. I don't use Office a lot anymore at home like I used to do for school work, so I care not if they have missing security updates.
Re:Peope use what works (Score:4, Insightful)
Geniune Office 2003 has to be activated. Oh you mean you have the warez version of 2003, ok fair game.
But the warez versions of office 2007 and 2010 also don't need activation. So I don't get your point.
Yeah I do get it, you prefer to use pirate software istead oif paying for Office or using a 0 cost free software.
Who is to say that the GP didn't actually purchase 2003? He could very well have purchased it, but opted to keep it sealed in its package and installed a cracked version instead due to the fact that having to go online and get additional permission to use what you have already paid for is USDA grade A bullshit?
In fairness to Microsoft.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Office 365 is a good piece of software. Okay, so it's complete shite to use but it's not just an office suite, it's a platform on which you can run your business. IMO for the first time in 20 years, Microsoft has actually come up with a good piece of software. They've certainly leveraged their proprietary format lockin in order to get businesses to use the platform, but using the platform isn't any particular problem.
The platform itself provides the fundamentals of what businesses need to get up and running. It's pretty stable and not horribly expensive. There are other competing platforms out there (some even much better) but they still don't fully support Microsoft's proprietary format. So Microsoft leverages that format but creates something that not only provides the tools you need, it empowers small business. They've done an excellent job to keep the Office brand running and kudos to them for that.
Any open source competitor will need to be hosted, provide better facilities, have a clear migration path and have format compatibility for any hope in the future.
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Okay, so it's complete shite to use but it's not just an office suite, it's a platform on which you can run your business.
So they have reinvented Lotus Notes?
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Where I work just moved from Lotus Notes to Google Apps. I cannot express just how much happier we all are.
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Lotus Notes was an amazing product. The problem is that Lotus Notes was not a competitor to Exchange but rather a platform for company internal databases which also did email. Notes supported properly requires a Notes programming group (i.e. 1/2 dozen + dedicated developers) and an administrative team. Under those conditions Notes is fantastic. Treat Notes like Exchange and have 1 guy or worse part of 1 guy and it sucks.
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What this really tells us is that many do not need any of the innovative features developed over the past 10 years, and the use of MS Office is mostly to write memos, which can be done using any software. With 365 the consumer costs are low, but it does allow MS to generate revenue even if consumers do not need new features.
Fortunately for MS people do have a lot of
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Quite possibly the stupidest thing ever said on the Internet. Congratulations.
I'd send you a postcard to thank you for your comment but I'm not sure which bridge you live under.
Office 2003 (Score:3, Informative)
Office 2003 was the last truly good version of Office (in my opinon at least). It worked properly then; without the quirks of Office 2000 (and still works perfectly now, having full compatablity with the new Office file formats via an update), didn't have the deliberately obtuse ribbon user interface - which steals a large chunk of screen space, and if hidden to reclaim that space, requries more clicks than simply having a toolbar did. I fail to see any good reason to switch, as unlike the move from XP to 7, no new features of any consequence have been added, and no (positive) updates in speed or behaviour have been made.
I cannot speak for OpenOffice, as the last time I used it was ~7 years ago - and at the time OpenOffice felt like something from the Windows 3.1 era.
I also cannot speak for LibreOffice, as I have never used it.
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Have you tried Office 2010? Try the ribbon for a week? Afterwards you will see you can preview changes with just a mouse hovering over items. Hit the alt key and you have smart tags showing all the shortcuts with it which is nice with a laptop.
Office 2010 is much better. I saw the research back then and was exciting to learn something new as real scientist had data to show it is better and statistics back them up with real usage. It is not Metro by a longshot or pushed by marketing folks unlike Windows 8.
Of
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Large companies require resumes in Word formats because they run them through screening/grading programs before a human even gets to them. By the time an interviewer sees a print quality resume in big business now, it's usually gone a round of computer screening and a round of HR messing with things.
Re:LibreOffice (Score:2)
Version 4.1 (incorporating the "experimental features") that Oracle put into OpenOffice is good. In fact, I'd say it's on a par with Office 97 overall. (97 was the acme of Microsoft Office, in my nostalgic recollection).
A lot of bugs were fixed in LO 4.x, and it's possible to use styles effectively. It's still too hard to make, manage, and use templates, though. And there's still no outline mode. But apart from that, it's very good.
Good news?! (Score:2)
The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction [...]
How is this good news?
Neowin is the anti slashdot (Score:2)
Posting that here is like someone on Moveon.org hyperlinking an article from www.redstateblog.com (or whatever the hell the right wing version is).
I read Neowin as well. I like balance.
I notice they have things like Windows Server 2012 R2 launch details that slashdot feels is not important. But if it is Linux related, I feel a link from there is like reading a link here about a non-baised spin about IE and Windows on slashdot if you know what I mean?
I wonder if those statistics include governments that trie
Want to fix it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Want to stop the decline? Make a version of LibreOffice or another FOSS odt/odt editor that works on my tablets.
Full report (Score:4, Informative)
I wanted to read the full report. You can too if you go here:
http://www.forrester.com/Market+Update+Office+2013+And+Productivity+Suite+Alternatives/fulltext/-/E-RES102262 [forrester.com]
$2495 for a fucking survey? Get fucked Forrester. Now there's no way for me to verify if the survey is legit or not.
The world is windows... (Score:3, Interesting)
...and managers don't know any better.
The reason is simple: most managers don't have a clue about IT. To them the financial success of MS and its ubiquitous products mean that they are the best. It also gives them accountability, if something goes wrong. Who do you pass the blame to when something breaks? They love to call vendors or contractors and scream at them to fix something. With OSS there is no one to scream at and who the fuck is the apache foundation anyway, some kinda hippie native american powwow? To them open source is unprofessional because there isn't a guy in a suit with billions in the bank to prove its success. They live in a different world where success is measured by money and status. OSS eschews that mentality and is looked down upon because of it.
My manager once told me that he wished MS made all of the software we needed: ERP, CRM, CAD/CAM etc. He just liked how everything was tied together and interoperated. Another thing that annoyed me was once our router crapped out, a Netgear business router with VPN and dual WAN ports. I quickly hacked together a router using PFsense and a bunch of NIC's in an older P4 desktop which worked out quite nicely. My manager saw the setup and didn't like it. Why? Because how can a computer be a router? He just couldn't get his head around it and called in our IT contractor who installed another shitty Netgear router. Even fucked up my secure automation network that was isolated from the other networks and the separate wifi network. When things broke and he asked me why I told him to call the contractor and complain to them because they broke the system I had installed. Nothing was done because as doing so would admit that he was stupid. Thankfully he no longer works for us and I relieved myself of most IT duties.
Bad stats (Score:3)
As usual bad stats are meaningless. So they polled how many companies had office installed? 1/3rd of them had office 2003? So that translates into open office failing and MSFT winning? wtf?
Maybe, just maybe, the days of business being done in word documents and spreadsheets are fading and we're now moving towards business getting done in specific applications and instead of documents we're storing things in a database. My current job is maintaining a Database and CRM. We basically get contacted by some department whos business processes are a mess, they've been using Excel and word to do everything for 10 years, and we build them a front end for the companies database. Now records are stored forever, or less, depending on the need. Required fields are actually required. We don't have one off versions of documents stored on someones hard drive only to be lost when they leave the company. We've even done away with most email. Federal regulations that specifically target email are nasty. Simply giving giving employees chat clients let them do their normal human chit-chat without leaving a messy legal trail should a court case arise. Now requests and such are logged IN the CRM. It's clear to the person using it that they shouldn't put their Banana bread recipe in there, so they go to chat.
If anything I'd say the stat regarding people using Office 2003 is very telling. They're only keeping it around for legacy purposes. It's not that open office is dieing, it's the entire concept of "documents as files" that is dieing.
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As usual bad stats are meaningless.
I wont go that far. They mean a lot to the company that paid for the survey, to show what they wanted to show.
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I think it's the interpretation of the stats that's interesting.
I read it as "the majority of businesses who bought Office 2003 haven't switched in all these years." Neither up nor down for open source office formats, but a slam against Microsoft for failing to introduce any kind of "must have" features in over a decade.
No longer about Word (Score:3)
Slow down, cowboy. (Score:2)
An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats.
To frame the argument this way allows you to ignore the maturity and focus of MS Office apps. Pre-press work can be outsourced to a printer. Everything else moves at the speed of the anonymous clerical worker. Full time staffer. Office temp. Senior volunteer and so on.
The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client.
Office 365 includes lightweight web apps.
But the heavy lifting is done using the more familiar, versitile and locally resident MS Office Suite. With full versions of the apps streamed to other PCs or Ma
This is odd because (Score:2)
I know of several small businesses (under 50 employees) who use libreoffice (and open office before that).
Is forrester focusing on large businesses or is there some kind of unintended filtering effect in play?
Or perhaps large businesses grow into office.
You have to understand... Office is some gaudawful expense like $500 a copy BUT, it costs about $large fee + $10 per copy for an enterprise license.
I own the latest office. It cost me $10 since i worked for a large corporation they let me buy a copy and the
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Forrester Research somehow always finds that the situation is favorable to their paying client. It is passing strange.
(That they are called "Research", that is. Truth-in-advertising should require them to be called "Forrester Ego-stroking".)
Because MSFT Office is better (Score:5, Insightful)
There, I said it.
I work with documents frequently.
The open source alternatives are not as good.
Further, pretty much anything can read/write to .docx format, which is XML-based, so you're definitely not locked in.
There's just a discernible difference in quality and when you're trying to make a good impression on the job, that's important.
The way to compete might be to not compete (Score:5, Insightful)
Google docs isn't too bad and brings the whole cloud thing to the table fairly well but I just don't see your average document generating office drone begging their IT department to help them with the switch.
Here is a simple set of examples. Years ago I worked in an office where the secretaries used Word Processors. That is they used machines with big 8 inch floppies that could only do simple 80 characters per line word processing and print it to a printer that was basically a modified typewriter. In the office there was a shiny new IBM machine with Word Perfect and a sort of good quality dot matrix printer. The secretaries were super happy when I got it working and almost immediately were fighting over it. A few years later I witnessed secretaries demanding to upgrade to windows and Word for windows because it could make the new laser printers dance. The key there was that Word Perfect 4.2 for DOS liked to display things in 80 monospaced characters. But a laser printer could do around 132 characters per line and thus a WYSIWYG interface was a huge leap. Keep in mind that all of the above secretaries were very very good at using their previous systems and thus these switches were painful but there was something they wanted so they demanded it and learned it.
So fast forward to the present and present your average Office user with Open Office. What is the win for them? For most people there is only a loss as things like the bad dictionary, and the slightly different interface will just be a pain. Maybe the CFO is happy with the lowered cost of operating but that is not how you win the hearts and minds of the average user.
So the key to getting people to switch over to Open Source non Office environments it to offer them something that they really want. The reality is that they will give up many office features and put up with other pain if they are getting something super cool. So matching MS Office feature for feature is not needed in the winning product.
This is where I come up empty. As I say the simple products like bean are good enough for me. Maybe the solution lay in a cool way to accomplish the work presently being done in the MS office suite using your mobile? Something where all the existing might of MS doesn't get them very far. Plus something truly innovative would no doubt be initially dismissed by MS as "missing the point".
I'll say it. (Score:4, Informative)
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kids ... (Score:3)
My son's school has a "use whatever you want as long as you can collaberate" policy so of course I encouraged my son to use OOo and LO... He found it practically impossible to work with fellow students with Microsoft Office... So unfortunately, it's a non-starter.
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A market with two companies is still better than a market with only one. And a market with two products is not as efficient in the short term, but it is healthier in the long run.
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Sorry to burst your bubble, but Joe Sixpack doesn't give a shit whether his security holes are fixed or not... he just wants to use his software.
It's true that he *should* care - but he doesn't.
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I used Win2K for years after it was EOL. I had far less problems with security than I now have Windows 7.
IMO: Win2K was best OS Microsoft ever released.
Re: Who paid Forrester Research? (Score:2)
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Base (the database component, filling the position that Access fills in MS office) uses Java, I believe. I also believe there are plans to fix that someday.
But what proportion of office software users use databases? 2%? 0.2%? Not a majority, anyway.