29 August 2005
The passion of the office
Over at /. they're tearing up on OpenOffice. At first I felt bad for the little office that could: raked over the coals in the one place it could find fellow travellers. Then I was happy that it didn't get a free pass--too much praise of anything at /. usually makes me suspicious. The problems:
- Slow load time,
- Too many crashes,
- Featues not equal to MS Office yet (the main article is an MS/Open office comparison),
- File formats not interchangeable with MS Office
Others pointed out the incredible savings from using OpenOffice if you can. All agree that it's a best fit only for single-office/home-office (SOHO). I've been using OpenOffice for a while and have generally been happy with my low-impact use. It fits my simple word processing and graphics needs as it would for any home user. I'm not the activist type, but I'm really close to removing MS Office from all of the machines on the home network just as a symbolic purgation. Still, as with browsers, there are some situations that you need that other product because of some proprietary design or somesuchthing.
Side note: What I appreciated the most from the /. thread was the no one brought up the spurious argument that you can't/shouldn't criticize something that's free. Whether it's open-source, Google, blog articles, or art, too many people think the object is somehow above examination. Most on the OpenOffice thread correctly argued the intent and whether and how much that intent was acheived.
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I too am glad to see what I consider to be a reasonable point of discussion to bring up with any software title...whether it be free or not. Things like usability, performance and bugs.
It never made sense to me that I should be happy with buggy software. Arguments like, "Well, this kid only works on this in his spare time and he doesn't get paid for it so get over yourself!" or "If you don't like it...don't download it."
True...the author of such titles who would defend their work in this way has no obligation to meet my or anyone's needs. But why publish your work? Once you throw it out into that realm, I think the author should expect feedback...whether it be heaps of praises, constructive criticism or downright ridicule. It all comes with the territory.
Posted by: Mason at August 29, 2005 10:00 PMThe flip side of such freeform criticism is that some people will abandon OpenOffice just because it doesn't work in the exact same manner as MS Office. They just kick around and don't understand exactly what they're doing, so their complaints are more noise than signal. The original article is a mess that would probably turn people off of OO out of confusion. The resulting conversation on /. was much more informative. Many of the /. posters had taken the time to considerately compare features and not just respond reactively ("I don't immediately understand how this works ... it must be broken!").
It's nice that sometimes order can come out of that chaos.
Posted by: sstrader at August 29, 2005 10:21 PM