The end of M$ Office' hegemony?

rokcet scientistrokcet scientist
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
It's frequent that we hear of a country or city or company switching from Windows to Linux but it's rare that we hear of one third of a million employees being told to use Lotus Symphony (IBM's OO.o variant) over MS Office and also to use the Open Document Format when saving files. The change has been mandated to take place in the next 10 days.

Of course IBM is doing this to illustrate that they actually offer a full fledged alternative to Microsoft. With i4i stirring stuff up against MS Office and absolving OO.o from litigation, are we on the verge of a potential break from Microsoft's dominant document suite? Hopefully IBM supports OO.o past Sun's acquisition by Oracle instead of concentrating on Lotus Symphony.



http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online...crosoft-Office



http://www.pcworld.com/businesscente...y_options.html



Of course neither M$ Office, nor OpenOffice, nor Symphony can hold a candle to OSX' combo of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and iChat.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    rokcet scientistrokcet scientist Posts: 962member
    You sound like you would like that.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,333moderator
    I removed the spam post you responded to and the response as it looked odd on its own.



    Symphony looks ok but it won't unseat Office, especially if it can't seamlessly open older .doc files (it can't). As soon as there's a compatibility issue, people will go back to Office.



    I do wish that companies were more strict like this with their software though and for example mandate that Internet Explorer and proprietary Office formats should not be used under any circumstances.



    The suite seems pretty fast to launch and is a bit more responsive than Open Office or NeoOffice. It had some visual glitches when typing though and the interface flickers. It looks like it's taking time anti-aliasing the text or something. Until these apps offer a Mac experience, they will just seem like a cheap alternative rather than competition.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    dr millmossdr millmoss Posts: 5,403member
    Compatibility issues are a fact of life -- they even exist between versions of Microsoft Office. So really, this is a phantom issue, which seem to be larger in the mind than in reality. If you want to use something other than Office, the best advice I know to give is to expect some compatibility issues and learn to deal with them. Otherwise you'd better love Office because you'll be using it for the rest of your life.
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