Recently Mark Gimein wrote in his blog that Microsoft Office doesn’t have any real competition because its closest competitor, OpenOffice.org (OO), is free, but mediocre. According to him, because the latter suite is mediocre, few would use it to replace the Old MS Standby, and because it is free, no one can be expected to develop and subsequently sell an alternative office suite for anything more than nothing.
He makes some excellent points. For one, I think he’s right in saying that OpenOffice.org is in many ways a clone of MS Office pre-2007. Of course, this isn’t entirely true, but it appears that the purpose of OO and its predecessor, StarOffice, was to duplicate Office functionality for a lower price. Unfortunately, while Office underwent a pretty significant and, in my opinion, positive overhaul with its 2007 version, OO seems mired in the past, particularly in terms of its interface — functionality buried behind a dizzying array of menus, submenus, dialog boxes and property sheets. Gimein believes that the OO community has settled for “good enough” software since its price tag is $0. Furthermore, we shouldn’t expect anyone else in the open source community to produce anything superior in the non-sexy realm of office productivity software. I hope, to a degree, he’s right.
I don’t think anyone should bother replacing Microsoft Office in its current form. That is, a large office software suite with a plethora of features, most of them of acceptable quality, but none of them particularly amazing. Instead, I’d rather see the free software community develop modular, more specific tools that work together happily via open standards. The idea is old. Individual software programs should fulfill a particular niche within a larger procedural pipeline, not consist of the entire pipeline in themselves. People in the Linux/Unix world seem to get this. Why use Word for everything including word processing, HTML and image editing, desktop publishing, writing theses and dissertations (with references!), creating forms for users to fill-in, and sharing documents for viewing when each of these tasks really needs its own, dedicated system to do the job well?
I’m guessing my argument is moot anyway. The future of office software is not primarily on the desktop, but likely in the cloud (a whole other topic altogether). Like Google Docs, they’re likely to be a bit more streamlined than the Office we’re used to. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and learn about more focused systems that replace bits of Office functionality — text editors (other than Notepad), image editors, desktop publishing systems (even for academic posters!), HTML editors, database systems, diagramming tools, and so on. (Take note, there are free systems [other than OO] in all of these categories.)
For my own sake, I can’t go without griping about a couple of Gimein’s assertions:
- Don’t confuse the so-called open source movement with the free software movement. Richard Stallman is more concerned with ethical issues regarding our liberty and freedom with software than about production processes and quality; those latter issues are promoted more by the Open Source Initiative, which is trying to appeal to the business world.
- OO’s benefits go beyond the free price; the author neglected to mention that it natively supports the OpenDocument format, preventing users from vendor lock-in.
Tags: free software
Your followers want to hear your thoughts on Windows 7!
—Chris
Actually, at this point I don’t have any. I’ve not been following all of the buzz. From what I understand it’s a more stable (and in places, stripped down) version of Vista. It’s what they should have released 3 years ago…apparently.
—Matt