Who give Office opportunity
With a products that makes so much money, Microsoft needs to find a reason for people to upgrade.
看MS Office 2007的发行是否给Openoffice.org 带来了新的机遇！
藉升级的理由，发现M.S.每次都在抢大家的钱。
The reason that most personal computers are bought for business is to run Microsoft Office. Windows is commonly cited as the monopoly software, but, in reality, it is Office that comes the closest to meeting that description. Microsoft Office is frequently installed by default on business computers. For example, I am a programmer so you would expect my work machine to have compilers and programming tools, but every machine in every job I have ever had has also included copy of Microsoft office. If you want a smooth experience doing the essentials of business - writing letters and crunching numbers - Office is the standard. Microsoft Office is an enormous cash cow for Microsoft, generating billions of dollars in revenue, and most copies cost more than the operating system, even allowing for the various discounts available. If the Microsoft Office division were to be floated off as a separate company, it would be one of the most important global corporations. But Microsoft has a problem with Office: the version most people use does far more than they require.
It is as if you lived in a luxurious chateau with a great view and an estate that produces all the food and wine you want. Why move house? But with a product that makes so much money, Microsoft needs to find a reason for people to trade up. Microsoft has recently released a new version called Office 2007 that represents the biggest upgrade in a long time, with a significantly changed interface and new file formats. What have it done to persuade people to upgrade? And what about the free alternatives?
THE ALTERNATIVES
The standard Linux alternative to Microsoft Office is OpenOffice.org (the .org suffix is due to a trademark dispute). The KOffice suite has its virtues but is not in the same league as OpenOffice.org as a contender for widespread use. The GNOME Office suite offers the Abiword word processor and the Gnumeric spreadsheet. These are very good tools but they do not meet most people's expectations of an office suite. Most of the backing for OpenOffice.org is provided by Sun Microsystems. Sun also offers a shrink-wrapped version called StarOffice which gives organisations access to commercial support. Functionally, there is very, very little difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is under active development and is starting to be adopted widely, particularly in poorer countries where the thought of spending large sums of money to the USA for something as nebulous as software licences seems incredibly wasteful. The openness and simplicity of the default file format of OpenOffice.org make it attractive to organisations concerned with archiving, and that means governments. Consider the potential market size of government employees in countries like India and China, and you are counting in hundreds of millions. What is the chance that they are willing to pay for a MicrosoftOffice licence for every machine? Fairly slim I would suggest.
FILE COMPATIBILITY
To be accepted as a viable deskto alternative, Linux needs an office su that is free, has good Microsoft Office file compatibility and will run on Windows. Without such a product, widespread adoption of Linux on th desktop is a non starter. Some peop frown on the idea of supporting the Windows platform. It is seen as sleeping with the enemy. I believe it is just dealing with the world as it is rather than how it ought to be. Most of the world's desktop computers run Windows and that's a fact. If you want software to be both free and useful, it needs to run under Windows. Making free software available under Windows lays the groundwork for Linux on the desktop. If people are comfortable with OpenOfflce.org under Windows, the Linux desktop will seem normal to them. OpenOffice.org runs very well indeed under Windows, with the feel of a native application.
OpenOffice.org does not have perfect compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, but it is probably the best there is that doesn't come out of Microsoft. For standard text processing, it can manipulate Microsoft Word documents seamlessly. I used OpenOffice.org to co-author a textbook in Word format while my US-based partner used Microsoft Word. He never knew I was not using the Microsoft tool, and I never told him. However, if you get into the area of quasi-desktop publishing with complex tables, OpenOffice.org can mess things up. So if the Writer component of OpenOffice.org is so good, and the main feature most people need is a word processor, why aren't more people using it?
DON'T MAKE ME THINK
Every time I have set up a home machine for a friend, I face the dilemma of what to do about a word processor and spreadsheet. Do I give them OpenOffice.org and face the blank looks of people reluctant to learn new software, or do I tell them they have to spend some more money? The key issue is not spending money - it is the learning curve. If you are a geek like me (and if you are reading this magazine then you probably are), it might seem like a trivial learning curve. You and I actually like learning new software. After all, the interface of OpenOffice.org was designed to closely mimic that of Microsoft Office, so how hard can it be? But many people use software with very little understanding of what they are doing. They only understand "the view menu is next to the edit menu". If you run Microsoft Office 2007, the view menu is the furthest to the right where you might expect the help menu to be. It might not seem to be much of a task to simply look along the menu names but for many people a 'missing' menu can leave them utterly mystified.
There is a saying in website design: "Don't make me think!" The logic behind this is that thinking is work, people can only do so much work and so help them avoid unnecessary thinking. Bill Gates of Microsoft uses the term 'bandwidth' to refer to the amount of thinking a person can do, with the idea that, like your Internet connection, you can only put so much information down your mental bandwidth. If you want to get on with your work, whether that is writing a letter to your aunt or creating a corporate report document, you want to be able to direct as much mental bandwidth at the solution and as little as possible at learning to tool to achieve that goal.
With the release of Microsoft Office 2007, the balance of learning required between OpenOffice.org and the Microsoft product is about to change. The new version of Office has a radically changed interface using a new component called 'the ribbon'. Microsoft has spent large sums of money on human computer interface design to improve the interface and make it easier to achieve common tasks. The ribbon attempts to anticipate the functions you will need according to what it looks like you are currently doing. This attempt to track your actions reminds me of when personalised menus were introduced to Office. The idea was, instead of cluttering the interface with every menu option, it would only show the options you had actually used. This could be a benefit but it could also be deeply confusing if you selected a menu and the expected option was missing. I have no doubt that in the long run the new interface in Office 2007 is a significant improvement in usability. In the short term, though, the best interface is the one you are
familiar with.
The standard QWERTY keyboard is probably the least efficient layout imaginable for typing, but you would probably not be very pleased if you were told to use a machine with an alternative "more efficient" layout of the keys. The odd thing about the new interface is that there is no going back to the 'classic' interface. You use Office 2007 with a mouse, you have to use the ribbon.
THE SUITE SPOT
Although the OpenOffice.org interface is not identical to that of Microsoft Office 2003, it is much more similar than Microsoft Office 2007. In the near future users will be faced with either paying for a product with an unfamiliar interface and new learning, or getting a free product with a familiar interface. The next few years will offer a sweet spot for convincing people that OpenOffice.org is a viable and sensible alternative to Office 2007.
During this period the new file format of Office 2007 will be a drawback as people receive files they cannot open and the new interface erects a barrier to learning. To close that learning gap organisation many organisations will have to pay for training. Why not pay just once for training on OpenOffice.org rather than twice with training for Microsoft Office 2007 plus the licence cost? This transition period provides a prime opportunity to convert users to the cause of free software on the desktop. OpenOffice.org under Linux is almost identical to OpenOffice.org under Windows. If users will use OpenOffice.org under Windows, the task of transitioning to Linux will be far, far easier.
作者: Marcus Green
2007-03-06, 10:36 PM
看MS Office 2007的发行是否给Openoffice.org 带来了新的机遇！
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