Microsoft Disses OpenOffice.org with New Video

[Guest]

In a business why not run both. Open Office is free so put it on everyones machine. Buy and install MS Office where necessary.

Businesses can not use the student/education MS Office licenses. Microsoft charges $400+ for Office Standard to commercial companies. That does not include support of any kind. You have to buy software assurance to get support. Software assurance is an additional $400 for three years. This also give you the right to upgrade to new versions, but, the new versions are released more than three years apart.

Microsoft's pricing forces any professionally run company to investigate open office.

 

[Guest]

The point here is that open source software requires some level of responsibility from the end user. If open source software breaks, rather than scrambling for the software box to find the support line number, users typically just navigate to the software's official forum, where other users post their experiences/fixes. If you're able and willing to at least look for solutions on your own, open source software is not a bad way to go, especially considering that it's free. If you're not, and you think your employees might not be either, it's probably a better idea to go with commercial software. This is something that needs to be understood about software before it's installed.

With that in mind, I can't say I took this ad very seriously. It amuses me that the ad seems to suggest that openoffice is a weaker program than MS office because it doesn't mimic MS office well enough?? Please...I used openoffice all the way through college and still use it now, and have never had an issue with formatting. What I will say is that openoffice has quite a few more supported file extensions than MS office, and perhaps that's why so many people report formatting errors. The fact of the matter is that openoffice is a very competent office suite that performs many of the functions of MS office. It may not be as streamlined or simple as MS office, but that's not to say that it's terrible, unusable software. Let's not forget the price either.

The whole deal is sort of analogous to buying a car. You could get the new model with all the bells and whistles for the 'new model price', or you could spend less and get last year's model that's not as pretty, but still functions more or less on par with the new model. Of course, this used car costs you nothing. All you have to do is get in and drive it away.

 

[Guest]

I have used both software suites and I have ad more problems with MS Office, ironically with....macros! When I worked with SME's many of them used OpenOffice because it is free. The anti open source propaganda in this video is quite blatantly false and probably is the very rare exception.

In my experience, OO is very reliable relative to MSO. MSO gives me a lot of formatting headaches with images, tables etc so I am inclined to think this video is a Microsoft response to OO because they are actually feeling threatened.

Which is a bit silly because most people outside of the tech savvy group has never even heard of OO.

I'd say for corporate use MSO is well worth the investment because most people are familiar with it. I would'nt buy it at personal expense though.
For home and personal use OO is more than enough for 90% of users.