It's preposterous to think that Americans ought to be paying for Office software, and not because it doesn't take talent to develop those things. Of course it does. The people that brought us WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, the NewsRoom and all the products that descended from that legacy deserved ... deserves! substantial financial recompense and I hope they all got it. I'd clarify my earlier statement and change it to, "It's preposterous to think that Americans ought to be paying for Office software in 2007."
And you really don't have to, because there is a program called OpenOffice which was, in my experience (until yesterday) better at everything that Microsoft has tried to do since about 1997.
All this changed yesterday. It was a little thing. A small thing. But OpenOffice is going to suffer through the same mistakes that Microsoft Office did unless somebody steps in and announces the program DONE.
Let's identify the problem: Microsoft Word was completed in 1997, and you can make an argument that further integration with the web was necessary and extend that to Office 2000. Okay, fine. But that was about seven years ago and the project, the application was complete. Only Microsoft can't keep charging people for a program that is seven years old, they can't lay off the people that did a good job on Word, they can't do all the things they should have when the app was finally complete.
So as a result we have bloat. I don't mean in the sense that the programs got larger, in terms of disk space -- nobody cares about that. Hard drives are only getting bigger... this isn't an issue. But in order to justify rolling out a new version we start to see some "features" that nobody wants. The classic one is hiding the default view for the menus, and forcing you to click on some upside-down carets in order to see everything. I know that was an OS-inspired thing... but Jesus Fucking Christ! If you are scanning through those menus at fucking all it's because you're looking for something! This is the classic example. Word's laughable ability to format anything was another one... it got worse and worse over time. Breaking backwards compatibility was another good one. New people are presumably added to the project and need to justify their jobs. Great. Word became completely unusable when Office XP was rolled out.
Fine. Microsoft has an agenda, they are a corporation... fine. OpenOffice is a wonderful alternative.
However, I fear for the day that OpenOffice starts with the annoying shit, just like Word did. Here's my first taste of it. Now, keep in mind that I am a huge OO fan. I think it's a fantastic concept, idea and project. But, swear to Christ, last night I attempted to paste some text from this website into an OpenOffice doc and I was rewarded with some kind of sick amalgam of functionality: a black-as-ass table appeared instead of my text. The text was inside, and I could see it if I did some highlighting. But motherfuckers, ignoring your document's previous formatting and text tags is what Office does. And I really don't want to hear the rallying cry of Microsoft zombies everywhere: "Oh. You can turn that off." Fuckers, I don't want to have to turn it off. I'm using OpenOffice on about five different PCs. Having to manipulate each fucking version is an enormous pain in the ass and that was previously not the domain of OO.
I found out a way around the asinine pasting. You "paste special." I mapped "paste special" to Cntl-V and I am sort of there, except now every time I paste I have to choose "no formatting." So, to paste, I hit "Cntl-v" and "enter." Not just "Cntl-V." It's a little thing, but I am going to be pasting an enormous amount of shit for the doc I am working on....
OpenOffice 2.1 might be the last version for me if this shit keeps up. I'd really like to see a quote from one of the devs of OO that there is a definite "finish" date. Otherwise, I think it's time to look for the next low-maintenance writing tool and enjoy the good times until it becomes an overmanaged piece of bloatware as well.
The Possible Death of Open Office
Moderators: AArdvark, Ice Cream Jonsey
-
Ice Cream Jonsey
- Posts: 30251
- Joined: Sat Apr 27, 2002 2:44 pm
- Location: Colorado
- Contact:
The Possible Death of Open Office
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!