OpenOffice's apparent mission creep
Apparently, OpenOffice 3.0 is intent on picking a fight with Microsoft Outlook. Bonne chance, mes amis. I don't mean to imply that it can't be done, but am rather suggesting that this is not the right way to go about it. Zimbra, sure. Or Mozilla's Thunderbird (standalone), sure. But bundled into OpenOffice? I'm not seeing it.
This arises from a presentation delivered earlier this year at the OpenOffice conference:
One thing that really caught my attention was (a) reference to including a Personal Information Manager (PIM) (in OpenOffice). More specifically the presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an "Outlook replacement."
Bundling a runner-up PIM/e-mail suite with a runner-up Office replacement? Not likely. Disruption is the way to go, and the combination is not disruptive.
Zimbra changes the game sufficiently, and is innovative in its own right, such that I can see people being patient with it to overlook some of its weaknesses relative to Outlook to give it a shot. (My own company is currently looking to do just that, and not even remotely out of religious open-source reasons.)
Thunderbird is the same, if it can generate enough of a community around it. If Mozilla can achieve the same plug-in community around Thunderbird that it has around Firefox, then it would be a winner, even if corporate IT took eons to adopt it (which it will).
But marrying Thunderbird to OpenOffice is a losing strategy, because OpenOffice has yet to prove that it knows how to grow a viable community around it. OpenOffice would need to be substantially rewritten and have its community procedures significantly overhauled before it could be a strong Trojan Horse for other open-source projects to flourish. Today, OpenOffice is quite good and something I actually recommend to neighbors and family members. It works.
But not because of any vibrant community around it, and that is the major thing holding it back. Until it groks community, OpenOffice is a losing competitor to Microsoft Office, and burdening itself with yet another Microsoft turf war would only exacerbate the problem, not ameliorate it.
So, cute idea. But I'd rather fix OpenOffice first before anyone kicks mission creep into overdrive with it.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
1. Wizards don't work very well. They have too few options and rarely yield results even close to the desired document. (Just try getting any decent results with the OpenOffice Base Report Wizard).
2. Bugs. The software is riddled with bugs. Not the Access Violation kind, but the logical error kind. (Try selecting a large number of data fields in a tabular data merge to OpenOffice Calc)
3. Visual functionality gets neglected. Often dialogs are poorly translated, fields are off forms. There are even dialogs where useless restrictions are preventing taking the actions needed (ridiculous limit on the number of fields in a datamerge to Calc)
4. Help is just plain awful. It often just states the laughable obvious. This is probably the most embarrasing part of the software
I work for a small software company and I know what 2 or 3 good programmers can do. Why is OpenOffice still so junky? I don't get it. A few good permanent dedicated programmers is all it needs
In addition to the existing developers, IBM just hired 35 to work on it. I hope they can do things right and make it an AWESOME office tool. Only time will tell.
Tristan
- It is the most often called for feature
- by Conficio October 18, 2007 12:28 PM PDT
- Matt,
- Reply to this comment
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(3 Comments)I think you are right on many points but miss two essential ones.
A. OpenOffice.org has a significant community and a very large user base, just not in the US. Have a look at the dedicated community of people that translate and internationalize the product into over 170 languages of the world. Some of these even have the backing and financing of their local government. Not withstanding, there are some voices that this community could be improved further and that its governance could be improved as well.
B. An E-Mail/Calendar integration is the number one asked for feature enhancement. The user community does clearly want it and I guess if done right, it will clearly help the numbers that use OpenOffice.org. With "done right" I mean not just a bundling, but a real adaptation/integration, with unified user interface etc. Why in the world would that not fly?