[wplug] OpenOffice, StarOffice

[Robert Supansic]

I have followed the discussion of OpenOffice/StarOffice with great interest.  As a consultant 
desperate to get his clients out from under Microsoft, I have been looking for a replacement 
for Microsoft Office.  I beleive that replacing MS Office is the single greatest strategtic 
restraint on the adoption of the Linux desktop and open source software.

I truly wish I could tell people that OpenOffice is "ready for prime time", but it is not.  I too have 
found it to be slow and unstable.  It has features whose use is undocumented/poorly 
documented and/or of dubious value.  And aspects of its design left me mystified: why on 
earth should closing the last word processor document throw me out of the word processor 
completely?  

OpenOffice/StarOffice actually replicates the worst features of the MS user interfaces.  I have 
seen this again and again in open source software (cf Mozilla aping the Netscape interface).   
Who ever said that Microsoft (or Netscape) knew how to design a user interface?  Surely, we 
haven't fallen for the Bill Gates line, "It's what the market place has chosen!"  The 
commerical UIs are driven by their owner's relentless need to publish more and more 
"features" and revisions to maintain their revenue streams.  Why is the open source/free 
software movement replicating that?

After twenty years of working with computers, I have come to the conclusion that the two 
basic groups of computer users are: those who like to play around with computers and 
those who don't.  Everybody on this mailing list is in the first group.  But I work with people 
who aren't sure what a shift key does and with managers who don't know what databases 
do.  If you think that they are a disappearing breed, think again: millions more are born every 
year and will continue to be.

For them, Microsoft Word and Excel represent the worst that computers have to offer.  And 
they are absolutely right.  Oh, they have to use a word processor and/or a spreadsheet, all 
right.  But there is no word processor that they can get the basics of in 30 minutes -- as you 
could with the old DOS program WordPerfect 4.2 (or with the old Borland QuattroPro 
spreadsheets.)

That's all the features a lot of people ever want. And that's all the features that first-time users 
need.  We are mesmerized by the "popularity" of Word and Excel.  We haven't figured out 
that every day, Microsoft dragoons more people into using Word for the first time, turning 
them into Word supporters because these users don't want to go through that learning 
experience again.  (How many people tell you they love windows but have never seen 
anything else?)  That's the reality behind Microsoft's "market accepted look and feel" which 
so many open source/free software developers seem to want to emulate.

What we need is OpenOffice Lite, a stripped-down word processor, spreadsheet, etc for 
first-time and/or non-power users that can be readily adopted in offices and schools.  
OpenOffice Regular should also be ruthlessly redesigned to allow modules to be added to 
the Lite version as needed.  (A side benefit of simpler software, of course, is almost always 
increased stability and response time.)

Personally, I would love to work on that.  Alas, I went to the OpenOffice web site and found it 
to be so badly designed as to shake my confidence in the future of the project..  I looked 
high and low for help for a mere user and could find none.  I tried to find some source code to 
browse -- to no avail.  I wanted a list that described the function of each of the files in 
OpenOffice -- again, to no avail.

Make no mistake: Microsoft is a remarkably effective marketing organization.  It knows what 
it is doing: get the first time users and don't let them see anything else.   We cannot let 
ourselves fall into the trap of believing that Word or Excel are "market-tested" models for 
anything.  Give the millions of new first-time users that appear every year an alternative, one 
that can grow with their needs.  Figuring that you will capture existing Word and Excel users 
just because you have a look-alike is plain silly.  Give them something better, too.  The 
open source/free software movement has proven again and again it can do that.    But first, 
as Abraham Lincoln said, "...we must disenthrall ourselves"