[LCA2009Thurs] Sun and innovation

Open Office is great. That said, the speaker from Sun (Louis Suarez-Potts) made an interesting comment in his talk on OOo.org today that I'd like to comment on. I don't have an exact transcript atm but he basically said that '2007 was the year where OOo stopped copying Microsoft'. Personally I think 2007 was the year when Microsoft tried to innovate - and failed.

The ribbon. It's shit, basically. It hides settings, shifts menus around, its FRICKIN HUGE. But it is definitely a different way to look at office software access.

In contrast, OOo 3 is basically a more stable version of the same standard app, with the added bonus of (dodgy) .docx support. It's like Office 2003, with read access to 2007 docs (though not write access - hardly important at this stage but still...).

So out of the 2007 Office battle, Microsoft tried to change things and failed, while OOo added incrimental features to the same standardised service with superficial format support.

It's not really that great a performance from either party, although OOo is undoubtably the better product at the end of the day.

But it brings up an interesting point...

Open Office is not the best documented product. The reason for that seems to be that it is essentially an Office clone, so people know where things should be and how to get things done - because M$ has done it that way and has documentation to that effect. M$ has done the hard work of training people and documenting how to use office software.

Now we have a situation where the products have very different UIs. Sure, you can jump into OOo 3 if you used Office 2003... but for the next generation that is starting their office experience with M$ 2007, they CANNOT just jump into OOo 3.

So what will the future bring? Will OOo follow Microsofts leadd with the new UI? Or will there be a genuine effort to document OOo in its own right? Suarez-Potts made no particular comment on this. It seems his main interest is incorporating multimedia into OOo, which seems very anti-GNU to me. Why does productivity software need a multimedia focus when there are more important productivity-related goals??

2008 will be an interesting year for the office, methinks.........