Another Office Alternative 214
MiTEG writes "The Washington Post has an article on a cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, ThinkFree Office. Currently selling for $50, their product also includes a one year subscription to Cyberdrive, a 20 MB web file-storage service. While it's no StarOffice, this glowing review may help people realize that Microsoft is not the only option." 'Glowing review' probably isn't the right term to use, since the reviewer found quite a few faults.
Will likely not help. (Score:1, Insightful)
These products are to cheap for their makers to be able to compete, you need lots of money to keep a big professional staff working on it and you need lots of income to finance good marketing. With $50/license and likely not to many buyers I just can't see how they are going to be able to pull it off?
I wish them luck but it will not be easy.
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:3, Insightful)
Java really needn't be slow, especially if using 1.2 or above. As for buggy, a program can have bugs whatever langauge it's written in, but the nature of Java maks them less likely than say, C.
Too bad MS Office really IS the best. (Score:3, Insightful)
I know the slashdot sentiment is to hate on all things Microsoft, but it's easy to use and does damn near everything you'd want it to. Star Office and the rest just really aren't as nice.
I guess Linux isn't as polished, either, but when I'm developing, I prefer Linux to Windows by far. But when I'm writing, I prefer Word to anything else. Oh well.
Alternatives are not necessarily options (Score:5, Insightful)
Either the max. spreadsheet is abysmally small (8k-16k rows), or there is no cross-tab reporting functionality, etc.. There is always something
I know that playing catch-up with Microsoft is a losing battle, but some features are essential. If it is available in Lotus, WordPerfect, and MS Office, you can be pretty sure there will be people who can not work without it.
I'd love to switch to a Microsoft free shop, but until I can go to management with solutions to every problem, and assurances that no functionality will be lost, I can't. Office suites are only one battle in the war, but it is one I should be able to win...
Office suites (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article, it seems that this particular one is not quite ready for prime time yet. It's ok if the feature count doesn't include the kitchen sink, but what there is has to work. Especially if anyone would consider using it for work.
I suppose there will be the open-office people coming out of woodwork again. As if $50 would be excessive cost for a word processor, spreadsheet and an app to make simple slides. It is excessive if the apps do not quite work, like it says in the article.
No Database, No 'groupware' (Score:2, Insightful)
Journalists!! (Score:4, Insightful)
I learnt many years ago that if you want a decent review of your word processor you MUST include a word count function.
Sure, the word count function is, for 99% of users, just bloat that they are never going to use, but reviewers get paid by the word for writing their reviews, and naturally try to write their reviews using the word processor under review, so if you don't include a word count function the entire review consists of a whine about the missing word count function.
(The same reviewer, oddly, seems to think that a missing spelling checker is no big deal. That's fair enough if s/he is a properly trained professional journalist and never uses words s/he can't spell and never makes typing mistakes, but for the other 99% of us
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, the question is not so much the language (Java), as it is the people writing the application. You can write dog slow applications in any language. Java can be fast, but it takes time and effort, and some good tools to help you fine bottlenecks. (Think: "OptimizeIt")
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:3, Insightful)
The trick is to keep in mind that 10% of the code is executed 90% of the time, so once you're done writing a Java app to be pretty, go back and performance tune it. Thus far, most programmers forget that step.
Re:We don't need new features (Score:0, Insightful)
Glowing review? (Score:2, Insightful)
The sad fact is that office applications are the most vital component of a business system. If someone intends to take the office application monopoly from MS, it is insufficient to be "almost as good" some of the time... there needs to be some dramatic benefit. I hope this will eventually arise in the form of a suite of productivity programs offering all the desirable features of recent MS Office suites but also offering a level of guarantee that the software will not become obsolete due to future enhancement of others' systems.
Competitors need to look at producing a reliable, functional, easy to use, feature rich alternative - as far as I'm aware that hasn't happened as yet.
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, Java earned a bad reputation from being used in Applets all over the Net, which are victims of every defect Java has (or at least used to have until very, very recently).
One of those defects is that Swing really, really sucks. Now, it's design may be great or not, and it may be full of design patterns or not, but it has been, up to 1.3, very "buggy and slow". You can cope with the buginess if you need to, but it will make it even slower.
AWT too, but at least AWT didn't claim it had fixed the problem when it did not.
Another defect, which is not exactly Java's, is that Applets on the web were mostly programming experiments by novices in both the language and programming. Java was hip, and everyone who had a webpage had to have an Applet. They were bound to be buggy. And the circumstances didn't help.
The world was exposed to millions of "Hello World" desktop applications brought online by Sun's Magnificent Hype Machine, programmed in a cranky and immature GUI library (AWT/early-Swing), with incompatible JVMs (Microsoft's), slowly downloaded to the client's machine through a 28.8K-56K modem... all increasing the amount of frustration when the "ClassNotFound" exception presents the user with a dazzling gray square.
Java is a nice language, but for desktop applications it's just not a great choice, unless 1.4 delivered the promise (I have yet to try it for desktop apps). But that promise was there with 1.3, and even with the birth of Swing.
I'm sure it is technically possible to use it for medium-big applications, there are plenty (big) IDEs written in Java that are very, very usable. I also hear very good comments about some non-Sun libraries, but I'm afraid no one really cares.
Java for the desktop is seen as the wrong solution to the problem, and will remain so for a long time even if they fix it, thanks to Sun's mistake. Java's place as the right solution seems to be on the server, where it's definitely not buggy nor terribly slow, with the desktop as a thin client (SOAP, JSP) implemented in something else.
Re:Too bad MS Office really IS the best. (Score:1, Insightful)
I use Office on a daily routine, and to admit at first I was missing some things. Then I found out that this things are not missing, but hidden. As soon you come to point where they could be used, they pop up. Much better than word or excel that throw everything in your face.
I've been using M$Office and never got use more than 15% eventhough I wanted (either thing is not working or is made too stupid to be used).
The moment I started to use OpenOffice I was using about 2-3% of functions. In just two months I've come to a phase that M$ user could only dream on. Office can be fun.
Cheap at twice the price (Score:5, Insightful)
The article lists some basic MS Office features and says: It's a waste to use $480 worth of Office suite for such simple work.
It depends on how important the work is. A PowerPoint sales presentation may be worth thousands of dollars in sales, an Excel spreadsheet could manage a large budget, a Word document could be a report on an important project or a book manuscript. Any one of these examples would be worth more than $480 by itself. In fact, the time spent creating the document would exceed $480 many times over.
If what you do with an office suite isn't worth $480, maybe you should do something else that is.
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:4, Insightful)
They obviously haven't done a good enough job for ThinkFree, since they're having to maintain separate Windows, Linux and Mac versions of the Office Suite.
john
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm underwhelmed (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, Java is suitable for large desktop applications. I write them for a living, so I am somewhat knowledgeable, but quite biased. Although, what do you mean large? jEdit? Forte?
There are lots of ways to produce Java desktop apps, but since the original subject is ThinkFree, I'm only going to address Swing based apps.
Suitable in what way? Good coding habits, a roadmap for what the app should do, a complete understanding of the Java language, and a good knowledge of whatever Java APIs you will work with, are all very helpful if you want to produce a maintainable and reliable app. If you satisfy all of these requirements, you should be able to produce a desktop app that does what you want quickly.
I firmly believe "Make it work, then make it fast". Proper use of interfaces in Java is the key to turning a working implementation into a fast implementation.
Other than a moderate start-up cost, if a Swing based application is slow, that means that fixing bugs and adding more features has been more important to the developers than making the application faster/more responsive. Swing apps are very easy to develop, so Java is very suitable in that sense.
A very usable profiling option is available under java in all recent (1.2+?) JDKs. If a Swing app isn't fast, it hasn't gone through any iterations with a developer interested in making it fast.
Swing is single-threaded, and sometimes multilple threads are essential for responsiveness. I don't know of a language with better threading support than Java, but a multi-threaded program is generally harder to write and debug than a single-threaded one.
Re:File formats are more important (Score:4, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more. I've thought this for a while and still don't understand why such an obvious thing hasn't happened.
There are lots of office suites now available, both open source and proprietry. Some are very good. But everyone bitches that they can't shift Microsoft from its monopoly position. If they all got together and agreed to use a single format (Suns XML format for StarOffice/OpenOffice is a very good start) then we would quickly have hundreds of useful tools for manipulating document formats, and rather than chasing Microsoft's tail-lights, we would be setting the agenda and Microsoft might have to start following us or start to loose serious market share.
I believe this issue is the single most important one for getting Linux onto the desktop. So, all you people who develop office suites - get together and agree on a single XML format which you'll all use! It will do you all good in the long term.
Re:Too bad MS Office really IS the best. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, this is the leading problem with Office in my opinion. It does TOO much of everything. I think it's pretty safe to say that the overwhelming (not just the average) majority of MS Office users use about 1% of the suite. And that's all they need. And that's assuming they use all the applications in the suite. The problem is that there's no way to get Office (Works is just horrible) or even Word without the other 99% of the crap that MS has thrown in to "encourage" people to upgrade. This has lead to a suite that requires hundreds of megabytes of hard drive space. Yes, I'm aware at how cheap HDs are now, but no matter how much free space I still manage to hang onto, it doesn't help with the speed of the applications and their effect on the speed and resources of the OS. Why should I have to install all of that crap just to bang out a letter or a memo? All I want in a word processor is basic page control, spell check, thesaurus (maybe), and filters for any other format of document I suppose I might encounter. Right now, I do most of my WP in AbiWord. It does everything I need from a word processor and it's not as bloated as Word. Even it's too big, though. Excellence! for the Amiga fit on one DD floppy disk and it worked great.
The other issue I have with Office (and Windows, for that matter) is that with eace new release, stuff moves. I don't have a problem with changing the location of something to enhance usability, but it seems like the only motivation tha MS has for moving menu items or acces to features is to keep people buying Office help books (you know, the books that have the information that the user manuals USED to have, not that I read User Manuals, ahem, cough, cough). It's really irritating. If you're supporting three versions of Office (97, 2000, XP) or Windows (98/Me/2000/XP), it's nearly impossible to keep track of where MS hid the access to the same features across each version. Craziness.
-Sam
Just do a compatible word processor (Score:3, Insightful)
An agreed-upon public replacement for Word files would help, too. Probably something that's zipped XML. Then push to make it a formal standard, get government agencies to mandate it, and put a display engine for it in browsers.