[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...

[velociraptor]

On 2/28/06, Doug McLaren <dougmc+sunhelp at frenzy.com> wrote:
> And you've hit upon one of the very biggest problems people have with
> Open Office and any other not-Microsoft Office tool -- `everybody else
> uses Microsoft Office, and I have to be able to share documents with
> them.'  This, more than anything else, is what keeps everybody from
> switching, and Microsoft knows it.  They talk about making Office more
> friendly to other programs, but they know it'll hurt their business
> more than it'll help it, so they're not really in any hurry ...
>
> People just can't look at OpenOffice on it's own merits -- they have
> to start with how well it deals with Microsoft Office documents.

You can keep preaching that, brother. :-)

> (Though I do have to admit ... Microsoft Office seems to be a pretty
> professional product to me.  You name it, it does it.  But OpenOffice
> isn't too far behind for most users.)

I'd disagree with this pretty strongly.  A couple of revs ago, they
completely overhauled Word's formatting system, and as far as this
old-timer is concerned, they screwed the pooch.  Keep in mind, I'm
a word processor user from waaaay back (OK, I never used the IBM
word processing terminals, but I did support the software that
replaced those danged things--on IBM DOS and PS2 machines).  I
started on WordStar, used the very first version(s) of MS Word on
Mac OS to typeset a book, and have used a wide variety of things in
between, including the likes WriteNow! (w/RAM disk on a 2 floppy
SE Mac, MacWrite, PageMaker,  Quark Express, various revs of MS
Word, etc.  I even suffered through Word Perfect (no flames,
just MHO).

The long and the short of it is pretty much all of them (including
OO) are trying too hard to be a page layout program without being
successful at it.  The bad thing about that is that they are making
their use as word processors ever so much more difficult with
this approach.

Why?  Because they have to keep doing incrementals to keep
selling software (at least the commercial versions).

What I don't understand is why OSS does that--why not clearly state
your feature set, make your software do that cleanly and quickly.
Maybe (but only maybe), as things you didn't think of pop up in your
users' minds, you add a feature or two--but you make sure that the
new things don't get away from the original purpose of the software.

> I think people overestimate the importantance/usefulness of commercial
> support in deciding if they should go with free or commercial
> software.  (And I say this even though my job is providing support for
> one of these big commercial software packages.)

Why do they buy into this?  I still don't understand it.

Me: Why are we using $commercial_web_server_software
$ork: It's covered by IT's support contract
Me: Uh, you don't *need* support with Apache....
$ork: What if there's a bug...
Me: You download the latest rev of the software and install it...

End result: I can't fix a problem right now with my web server
software because it requires a service pack...and the service
pack requires the latest and greatest OS patches...which I can't
install because our dev and staging environments diverge so
far away from production that I have no way to test this whole
rat's nest.

If it was Apache, I'd move aside my Apache binary directory
and my confs on one of the servers, install the new version in
the old place, drop my confs in there, test a little, and then pull
the trigger on the others.  If it doesn't work, move the original
directory back.

True, that's not totally safe, but at least I'm not fscking around
with the underlying system software and taking a chance on
borking the whole kit and kaboodle and having to do full-on
recovery to back out (which also assumes their backups are
good).

I gotta good mind to let the hosting company be hoist with
that petard, but if they managed to pull it off successfully, I'd
be stuck with the monkeys forever.  And if they didn't my life
would be full-on hell for several months.

Why am I in IT again?

=Nadine=