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Can OpenOffice do what mozilla firefox did?

A

ajayjuneja

Golden Member
well, can it grab marketshare the way firefox did? There aren't so many problems in MS office, I am not 100% sure about this...
 
well, it won't exactly do what firefox did.. it's not any better than MS office in anyways in terms of features. office has still set the golden standard.

but yeah it's free...
 
no, in order to pass MS office, it would have to offer something better, and that it doesnt, MS Office may cost, but it has better ease of use, and is overall a better product.

MIKE
 
Maybe if they clean it up a bit... a lot of the really commonly used stuff has really weird shortcuts in oo, while microsoft has a semi-logical shortcut setup. Using office everyday for like 5 years, and then desperately trying to switch to oo just makes you see why it's not quite polished yet.

And don't get me wrong, I hate M$ Office. It's unfortunately better, though. Mozilla still rawks.
 
It will take a while to catch up. MS Office is a very good package. MS has effectively set the standard. A competitor have to have full Office compatibility to make an impact.
 
OpenOffice has its own issues to sort out. MS Office is a bit of a mess too in terms of bloat, but OO certainly won't be taking over anytime soon.

 
nope, MS Office is taught too much in schools and little notice is given to competition when home users seek a package to perform office tasks
 
Only when MS can stop people from stealing office. If people actually had to pay for MS office, and they knew about OpenOffice, you would definentely see some market changes. Most people who use office at home got it from a friend and have no clue it actually costs $300+.
 
Firefox is used primarily by people open to technology changes and learning new things.

Businesses are not open to change and training on new applications. Once a business invests in a Office wide application, chances are that they will never switch. Unless it has a major flaw, which MS Office does not.
 
hopefully. word processors and such don't really advance much. i'm sure getting to the point where normal people will be totally satisfied by the function of opensource office products isn't far off.
 
I think an important issue here is that Microsoft has a lot more invested in Office than in IE. Not that they don't mind losing browser market share, but it doesn't make them money like Office does. If they perceive a risk they're gonna fight back a hell of a lot harder than they are against firefox. And their battle would be easier. All they would really have to do is strictly limit who they allow to use their document formats, obviously not allowing open source implementations, and oo would be forced out simply because of compatability issues. As much as they'd like to think so Microsoft doesn't have that kind of power over web content.
 
If Sun can get contracts with schools to install open office / star office, then maybe they have a chance. Also, Openoffice will need an integrated email/calendar program like outlook, in order to be competitive.
 
Well Firefox was able to grab the IE share because of the constant security and spyware problems that IE was facing. Secondary reasons are the lack of extra features that were there even in the latest version of IE - such as tabbed browsing, download manager (FF doesn't have a great one either), may be some RSS support etc. But the primary reason was security.
It would be interesting to see how IE 7 (whose beta is due in mid 2005) shapes up. As BillG has said in the recent RSA conference - the main reason of the new reason of IE before Longhorn is because of security reasons.
 
Originally posted by: nourdmrolNMT1
no, in order to pass MS office, it would have to offer something better, and that it doesnt, MS Office may cost, but it has better ease of use, and is overall a better product.

MIKE
Click to expand...

At the very least it would have to be 99.9% compatible with ms word documents, and any docs it generates have to open in ms word without a problem as well. I don't think ms word has best ease of use, it's just that everyone is so use to doing it "that way".
 
No.

Alternative browsers can succeed because the internet is the internet, regardless of which browser you use. They are essentially perfect substitutes. Firefox is also a compelling alternative because users are fed up with the security problems and exploits in IE.

Office productivity software is different. MS Office is the format standard, and even though OO offers 90-something percent compatibility, unless it's 100 percent compatible it won't be viable. Not to mention that users are already well-versed and trained in Word and Excel. It's not worth the expense to have users learn a different program. Cost is the only thing that OO has going for it, but in the corporate world, the costs of incompatibility and retraining nullify the lower licensing fees.
 
I don't know if you remember WordPerfect set the standard first and own biggest market leader until Office came out and killed WordPerfect. WordPerfect went through 2 or 3 different companies now Corel is the rightful owner of WordPerfect.
 
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