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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Ah, another open-office thread. I'm always amazed at the quantity of people that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project.

Granted, OpenOffice may well never surpass MS Office, but to even be playing in the same league is a victory of sorts, given the incredible disparity of resources behind both projects.

And for your average person writing a letter, trying to calculate something with a spreadsheet, or put together a simple presentation, they absolutely are in the same league.

For me, OpenOffice wins hands down, because it runs on Linux, which is the OS I choose to use, and is much more versatile and repurposable, being open source. I use bits of it for LiberWriter.

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Open Office falls short compared to Office for the average user in the same way that Linux falls short for such non-technical people - poor documentation and support. My mom can go to the public library and choose one of several books. She can even take classes on Office at the senior center.

The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person. The bookstore has shelves of books on Office. When there are three books on LibreOffice, I'll consider buying a lottery ticket.

I wish things were different. But they aren't.

There's a difference between saying that for many things, MS Office wins and some of the spittle-flecked rants about OpenOffice that one sees.

For the average person they are not in the same league due to the differences in the support ecosystems. OpenOffice and LibreOffice simply are not robust in that regard. And that's where the average person's needs are - not in a code repository.

>The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person.

Actually I've found the exact opposite. FOSS tends to have very active and very engaging communities that actually provide answers. Whereas on most win/ms software forums, there are usually a ton of people who are just parroting each other without understanding how completely far of they are from the crux of the problem. Of course this is all just a bunch of anecdotes.

Could you explain what about Open Office makes it a pretty amazing project?

The entire mission of the Open Office suite seems to be to copy Microsoft Office as much as possible. It isn't trying to change the way people think about document editing, or provide more meaningful ways to express ideas. Microsoft created Visio, so let's go make Draw. What is the point? What value does recreating successfully developed and supported applications provide?

So that you can exchange documents with people who are using MS Office without having to pay a fee to Microsoft and without being tied to Windows.

I primarily use a Linux machine to develop, so not having to dual boot or use a VM/Second computer every time someone sends me a .xls is very useful.

The interface mimics (older versions) of office precisely to make the learning curve for previous office users as shallow as possible.

Why rewrite applications that already exist?

Microsoft Office for Linux did not and does not already exist.

You make it sound like rewriting MS Office is a bad thing. At its core, MS Office is a very solid piece of software, so why spend resources and divert focus to try to improve on something Microsoft has already made near-perfect? And rewriting it under the GPL license (so it's free) adds value to the project as well. Not to mention that by rewriting it, you make it easy for people to pick up your project easily.

Microsoft hasn't made Office perfect, that is the point. Why is Open Office spending all of their considerable resources on mere copying, instead of producing something valuable all of their own?

Open Office is inferior to Microsoft Office because their mission is to be Microsoft Office, rather than to surpass it. They can never be a perfect copy.

Saying that Open Office isn't as good as MS Office because it's trying to imitate them is a very ambitious statement. Especially considering that the developer base for the two are different in many respects.

More importantly, let's say that Open Office does try to blaze a trail to an extent that you mention. I would wager that it would probably come out like Blender, where Blender tried to make the ideal 3D creation toolkit (compared to say Maya). Blender's great! It's very powerful, it can do ALL kinds of things. However, before the v2.5 UI overhaul it was incredibly goddamn hard to learn and so it was only useful to a small section of their potential interested users.

By avoiding this, Open Office tries to cater to what people are familiar with so they can use it right after installing it. They don't have to waste time trying to adapt to a new piece of software.

I see open/libreoffice as a shim product the same was as I see WINE. In an ideal world nobody would ever send me a .doc file, but they do so having a way to open it allows me to look to the future without breaking with the past.

Surpassing MS Office at it's own game would probably cost far more resources than Libreoffice could dream of having without having google or somebody throw a ton of money at it.

There are of course many projects that are disrupting office for certain use cases. Examples would be MediaWiki, Wordpress and google docs.

It's good that other car manufacturers did not throw in the towel when they saw how successful Ford was. Sadly, they mostly copied the cars and production techniques. Although some have dared to innovate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8

What is amazing is that an open source project comes anywhere close to keeping up with what is one of the flagship products of one of the largest, most profitable companies the world has ever known.

The point is to have a free alternative.

> I'm always amazed at the quantity of people that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project.

Well, I'm not here to piss all over the project (which is amazing). However. There are about four or five things I need a spreadsheet to do, which OpenOffice does not do and which MS Office does do (one example off the top of my head is generating polynomial regression lines on charts--I specifically need to generate quadratic fits). I've found that many people are in a similar situation, but the things they need are slightly different from the ones I need.

So when someone posts a story about how OpenOffice is "just as good" as MS Office--or at least strongly implies that by claiming the value of a copy of OpenOffice is the same as MS Office retail--those people (like me) tend to come out of the woodwork and tell the other people (like you) the following: Although OpenOffice is a fantastic project, it just doesn't do what I need it to do. Which means that I am going to continue to forking over $90 to MS to get a spreadsheet (and word processor and presentation software) that does what I need it to do.

I think it's more about letting people know about alternatives, which may turn out an option for their needs...

It's similar to IE era, when majority thought IE is the internet and couldn't imagine other browsers.

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