Does OpenOffice's speed even matter?

OpenOffice.org Ninja has posted an interesting analysis for anyone who has found themselves complaining that OpenOffice is slower than frozen honey on a frozen three-toed sloth's frozen right nostril.

The spoiler? It's getting slower all the time.

OpenOffice.org is generally getting slower with each release. However, some parts of OpenOffice.org are getting faster, the performance losses are relatively small, advances in new computer hardware are more than making up the losses, and OpenOffice.org continues to mature with new features.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to count as advocacy for the open-source productivity suite, but it hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement. Of course, there's more to this report than immediately meets the eye.

The author tries to downplay OpenOffice's alleged sluggishness by saying, "It's unrealistic for software to be faster over time: newer software does more work. When a newer version performs more quickly, it generally means the previous version was inefficient."

All true. But perhaps we should be expecting OpenOffice's inefficiencies to be rectified and improved over time.

I find the latest version of NeoOffice (which trails OpenOffice in popularity by a bit) to be at least as fast (or "as sluggish," if you prefer) as Microsoft Office, and I strongly prefer its presentation functionality over Microsoft PowerPoint.

It may not matter, however. OpenOffice is a noble effort, but with Google Docs, Zoho, and other Web-based Microsoft Office alternatives providing just enough functionality, OpenOffice may end up winning the "best desktop alternative to Microsoft" battle while completely losing the larger war, which is not about developing the best desktop productivity suite at all. Rather, it is about productivity applications developed for the desktop versus those built for the Web.

Given how much of my life is spent in e-mail and browsers now, I think the war is already over, and Microsoft has lost. "Losing" this war, however, will continue to bring in billions of dollars of profits to Microsoft for many years to come, so it can be excused for not breaking out the eulogies quite yet.

As for OpenOffice, it's too big and too slow, but the comparison is no longer vis-a-vis Microsoft. It's against Google and the new crop of Web-based office suites. In that war, it's not even a private.

[seo2seo]

Regardless of Google et al, the sluggishness of OpenOffice DOES matter; one of the great claims of open source was the escape from the entropy that was M$; yes, specifically, OS was better, quicker, lighter, smaller, etc., etc., and ALL by comparison with M$.

Just because entropy has hit Open Source does not invalidate the comparison - except that now the difference is smaller. And it's not just OpenOffice; FireFox is slower with every benefit-free upgrade, too, and leaks memory even more than IE.

Rather than trying to brush the sad news under the carpet, YOU, of all people, should be reminding OS teams of the one specific item that attracted Average Joe to there wares.

And tell them to sort out the problem, not pretend it isn't a problem any more, because everyone is slower and sadder.

It would indeed be ironic if M$ won just one software round, not because they got better - but because the Open Source opposition was too fat and too slow to get into the ring before the bell rang.

[AppleSuxLeo]

Open-Crappo ! LOL Yup...must "be good" if it`s Open-source ! LOL

[The_Decider]

In an application like open office, speed does not matter. As long as it can keep up with the user, nothing else really matters. People overstate the value of speed in applications, especially desktop applications. It doesn't load any slower then Office, there is no noticeable lag when doing work in OO, so what does it matter? Spending a month or two making a piece of software execute slightly faster is a waste of time. People are buying quad cores to do standard desktop work and somehow are surprised that performance often degrades with these architectures. These sorts of complaints are a byproduct of computer illiteracy, not a problem with these applications.

[johnwest72]

Ah, but you have to remember that Matt isn't here to be objective. He's here to bash Microsoft wherever possible. This is just another lame opportunity for him to prophetize that Microsoft has already lost, and just doesn't know it. I wish news.com would drop him, but since they don't, we'll just have to continue to watch his biased, pompous posts and deal with it.

[jharrop2]

It may be the rise of Google Docs, Zoho et al, rather than OpenOffice in government, which convinced Microsoft to submit its XML document formats to ECMA and ISO. In doing so, Microsoft's intent would have included making WordprocessingML more palatable to those players, helping in its quest to ensure that in due course a majority of text documents (web pages aside) are in that format. The risk in making the formats freely available is that the promise of 100% fidelity finally exposes the core Office franchise to the ravages of open source and saas. The reward is somewhere between continued relevance and the long held ambition "that Microsoft could make its Word document format displace the HTML format as the standard for web-based publishing": http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_articles/Reviews/ferguson.html .. Jason http://dev.plutext.org/

[drjoewebb]

I re-read the blog posting cited and much of the slowness is in an early beta of 3.0 which will be released in September. While some barbs are made in the comments about open source, etc., note that the comment was about OOo on a Linux system that was three years old. I am running on a rather high powered system of about that time frame, having switched from Windows, and don't have to deal with various other non-application problems such as lock-ups and crashes in Linux like I did in Windows. I do run Office 2000 in WINE in Linux and it is definitely faster than OOo 2.4. In some cases I have always considered Office 2000 to be one of the best releases in the MS Office series for its stability and lower level of invasiveness compared to the versions that followed. But I have used OOo for five years now, the last year plus, 95% of the time in Linux.

I also use Google documents, Thinkfree, and Zoho. Though limited in features, they sure do come in handy when you are traveling or want to post a document quickly online.

Overall I have been pleased with OOo, and look forward to the 3.0 version. Though it may be slow on some tasks, the last few releases have been quite solid and dependable. Since I've been burned so many other times in the past by Windows or MS Office XP or 2003, I find the reliability to be far more important than an extra second here or there that it takes to open or close a file.