Is there still room for another OS to hit it big?

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I find Ooo/LO perfectly adequate for general needs. Please elaborate.



I agree with this to an extent... Inadequate drivers can cause someone to give up on Linux very quickly, and the lack of PC game support is hurting in the home market... But those driver issues are slowly becoming a thing of the past, or at least relegated to brand new or obscure hardware. And more and more people are playing games on consoles rather than PC... As far as productivity apps? Everything except Flash has a viable alternative. And Flash, too, is losing its dominance.

I'm confused by people who claim OpenOffice/LibreOffice is a serious office package. It seems to be common on this forum. Have any of you actually used it for real productivity/office work, not just experimented with it briefly? It's practically useless.

Sure, some governments use it.

No time right now. I used ooo for a couple periods 2 and 5 years ago respectively and just couldn't. It was pissing me off every 60 seconds. I'll discuss later.

This is a trend with open source apps. Viable is one thing, something people want to use is another, and I think people have spoken.

I use it for the vast majority of my office and academic work. Writer, Calc and Draw have everything I need, and I much prefer the layout they use over the new MS Office layout. The only part of the package I'm not impressed with is Impress. But I usually need to share presentations with a group anyway, so that's where Google Docs come in.



People don't use it because they don't know it exists. Again... Marketing.

Which either means they're not using it for any real productivity/office work and must therefore be struggling somewhat, or you're missing something.
"It's practically useless" is pretty sweeping.

especially since their feature sets are almost identical down to the shortcuts

again there are companies worth a billion dollars that use them today, many in smaller areas but often with the intent of wider implementation once its tested.

Most times people in offices are expected to use whatever is dumped in front of them - and lo, a "standard" is born, complete with a canned history: it's what people wanted.
Microsoft is of course fully aware of this.

I only have a few seconds here, I'll go into OO later, there are a lot of documents generated by Office that aren't rendered correctly in OO and while that's due largely to MS keeping details of their supposed 'open' XML based document format under wraps, it's incumbent on OO to adequately reverse engineer it to figure it out. That's the most glaring one. I'll pick through others later. There's the side issue that it's also slow, probably due to Java.

You guys can blame marketing all you want, but these days, monopolistic practices and good marketing are NOT making and breaking products. The products are doing it themselves. It actually kind of makes me shudder that people think Linux didn't nail the mainstream desktop because of monopolistic MS practices.

Point refuted.

I think you actually just reinforced my point. Apple is riding on iOS now, and iOS gives users what they want.

I've read that multiple times and I still can't quite believe it.
Microsoft publishes a so-called "open" document format - badly, leaving out parts which are essential if others are expected to implement this "open" format - and yet it's up to other people to reverse engineer it to be able to accomplish that?
It looks more like deliberate obfuscation by Microsoft.

Linux doesn't exist in order to "nail" anything, still less to nail the desktop market. There is no "Linux Inc." with shareholders and a marketing target.

You're absolutely correct that Microsoft has failed to disclose important parts of their format, and may or may not even be obfuscating it.

It's still OpenOffice's problem to reverse engineer it to ensure their software opens those documents flawlessly. The alternative is that their software is less useful, and they fail to gain market share. That makes it their problem.

This conversation also reminds me of the reason open source often doesn't resolve issues like these. You get a bunch of aspie programmers, and there is some problem like this that certainly originated with Microsoft, and the problem really needs to get worked around or else people are going to have bad experiences using your s**t, but the programmers won't do it because they feel they have the moral high ground and are "under no obligation" to deal with it. This is all fine and good for you programmers, but if I were managing you as a team and paying you, I would ORDER your ass to resolve it because I guarantee Microsoft isn't going to do the job for you, in lieu of an apology. Failing resolution, your program loses market share. This may not matter to you if you're a programmer who really only cares about having the moral high ground, but then don't tell me how great your end product is.

Oh - you appear to have changed tack...
It's an open document format specification: the problem lies entirely with Microsoft, but everyone else gets to deal with the wreckage and pick up the pieces.

It's tempting to think - and not entirely without justification, given the mess surrounding Microsoft's introduction of another "open" format directly in competition to the pre-existing ISO-standard OpenOffice format - that the whole point of it is to introduce FUD into any decision-making involving OpenOffice.
That's what Microsoft does, and that's a big problem for everyone.
What it could have done is adopted an existing ISO standard and worked with others to improve it.

It's self-evident that undocumented, proprietary formats need to be reverse engineered and that the success of a product using those formats depends to a large extent on how well that was done - but this is not an undocumented format. Why are you so willing to grant Microsoft a free ride on this one?

Also, I think you'll find that MS Office has its own problems with compatibility but why would Microsoft care about that? Sooner or later the users will be forced to upgrade and buy it all over again.

All that said, background research for this has actually turned up an interesting fact: There *is* room for another OS to hit it big-Windows CE (currently sold as "Windows Phone" in the same way Windows NT is sold as "Windows 7") is emerging from obscurity to challenge iOS and Android in the phone market. Though called Windows, it's been it's own OS since the 90s, and it's about to get it's big chance.

Again, it's not about granting Microsoft a free ride or not granting them one, because the developers of OpenOffice are not in a position to dictate whether or not Microsoft gets a free ride. You are correct that MS has made a bit of a mess and the OO developers need to pick up the pieces. That's just the way it is. The way we want it to be is something else, and if that's what we're talking about, we're no longer talking about OO in terms of being a usable product, we're talking about it in terms of a product that has the "moral high ground". You see what I mean?