16 Comments

1. Ajay Juneja Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 12:11 am

   this does not surprise me at all from my experiences playing with open office!

   This is (one of) the reasons it was uninstalled from my system!

   The other one being crashing when loading certain powerpoint and excel files.

2. Stefan Constantinescu Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 1:05 am

   Office 12 should raise the bar alot…

   I can’t wait until the beta.

3. Ablewasi Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 1:19 am

   Very interesting. Thanks for providing the link. Too bad this message has never been communicated by anyone in MSFT marketing. Instead of attacking open source as an evil business model, it’d be better to talk about the value MSFT products provide versus the competition.

4. J. Random Poster Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 1:39 am

   Performance? How about fixing basic editing behavior? MS Word has botched that since 1.0.

5. Damon Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 2:11 am

   Wow, random pointless invective in a drive-by posting from Mr. Random Poster. I’d ask if you troll here much, but I already see that you do.

6. Orbit Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 3:09 am

   but you forget you pay 400 for a office suite…

7. Stefan Constantinescu Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 3:35 am

   i think next to windows, office is the second most pirated app

8. Christopher Coulter Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 4:15 am

   Open Source, a billion eyes, and a billion bugs, with no incentive to fix. Microsoft, a billion users, with a billion bugs and no incentive to fix, as they own the marketshare (worst competitor being themself).

9. anon Says:
   October 27th, 2005 at 6:17 am

   Hey Scoble, have you read that article?

   The guy made a benchmark based on a 200MB file. Because, as everybody knows, everyone’s using such beast all day long.

   Come on, this benchmark is biased to say the least. This is a very bad post of yours.

10. Daniel Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 7:10 am

    Much more interesting than your last reference to “big bad” OpenOffice.org. (Winers ignorant rant on Open Document)

    Even though I think previous comment has some sense, benchmarking on a file like that won’t tell much about user experience, this is a valid point. I have not had problem with this myself, but I’ve never used OOo2 for any major work. Writer in OOo1 on the other hand have been a great tool and I’ve never had to complain about speed.

    Besides the choice of benchmark method I think the author of the review makes his biggest mistake in rejecting “cross platform” as a non issue for people on Windows. What if they are on Windows only because some apps like MS Office are not platform independent (nor have had any means of exporting your data (all of it, not just text and some formatting) to a software/platform independent format? Those 90% of users are exactly the ones that might still suffer from data lock in, and for whom OOo gives an opportunity to break free.

11. Keith Patrick Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 10:35 am

    I haven’t run into a single person who has actually paid $400 for Office. There is usually a version of some office suite preloaded on most machines and/or said person has used Office for the last 5-10 years, so the upgrade is the cheaper option. And you can go even further if you a) qualify for the academic version or b) just grab the academic version off the shelf, which usually sits next to regular upgrade, which runs about $150.

12. Roger Jennings Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 2:48 pm

    eWeek’s October 21, 2005 “OpenOffice Packs a Powerful New Database Punch” article by Lisa Vaas opens with the following lead: “OpenOffice.org’s latest update includes a database that matches Microsoft’s popular and competing Access database, experts say.”

    I’ve been comparing OOo 2.0 Base with the embedded HSQLDB database and Access 2003. OOo Base has some serious data import/export restrictions/limitations. My initial tests (see http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com) indicate that OOo 2.0 Base is slower to open databases and to execute SELECT and INSERT queries than Access 2003 with Jet 4.0 .mdb files. Larger files and more complex DDL batches are required to confirm this anecdotal evidence.

13. John Fiala Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 3:36 pm

    I’ll admit that in my own use of OpenOffice, I’ve found that it does take a while to start up. It’s a bit of a shame, but on the other hand I don’t have to worry about having security vulnerabilities on my machine anymore because I can’t find the installation disc that the Windows Update requires.

    But for my day-to-day personal use, Open Office has been fine.

14. Ian Betteridge Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 4:07 pm

    “The guy made a benchmark based on a 200MB file.”

    Hey anon, have YOU read that article? To quote from it: “Here is a comparison of memory and CPU usage between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org office applications. This is with just the bare application and blank data file loaded.”

    With a blank document, OpenOffice takes up 10x as much CPU time and 3-6x as much memory. That’s shockingly poor coding for something that’s supposed to be an efficient alternative to MS Office.

15. Jake of 8bitjoystick.com Says:
    October 27th, 2005 at 5:44 pm

    Meh. I am still keeping using OpenOffice or NeoOffice on my iBook. I have a better way to spend three hundred bucks.

16. Willam "Bill" Gates Says:
    February 2nd, 2006 at 4:18 am

    After all has been said it’s dowm to choice and i choose to use Open Office.

    As a CS student myself I appreciate not having to pay silly amount of money of something that shoule be affordable and worthwhile: MS Office failed those. I’m prepared to stick with Open Office to learn, support the developers, and enjoy the advantages of its x-platform and compatibility with more document types.

    Microsoft has spent over 12yrs+ to get MS Office to where it’s today albeit being from commercial pressure. Open office has been around for half that long and it’s free.It offers me benefits i don’t get having MS Office.

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