Le 14/01/2017 à 11:58, mabdul a écrit :
Believe me: MS doesn't follow Apache OpenOffice any longer as they know
that in the next ~10 years OpenOffice cannot hurt MS. Moreover they have
switched to a subscription based model (Office365) latetly to secure
their userbase and even increase the earned money by monthly/yearly
subscription fees. ("mobile first, cloud first" is their main model now!)
+1.
I think that the situation was different at the beginning (2001-2010). OOo
moved the lines by supporting ODF. It offered users an alternative to vendor
lock-in policy. MS Office was also more expansive in those days I think.
Now it's rather different. MS Office (not 365) is not that expansive. The price
of a low cost smartphone. And let's face it, the MS Office features are way
ahead of AOO. I use both at work but AOO for a limited part of my work. Calc is
definitively not viable for work in my case, charting in Excel is really good.
Even the Calc user interface is not... user friendly.
So basically, what is the user base? Who should AOO focus on? For a company I
doubt the price of MS Office is really a problem (they negotiate fees for
sure). Since documents are mostly shared in .docx/.xlsx formats, why bother
with applications like AOO/LO that are not fully compatible? Is there any big
player willing to invest in something to compete with MS Office to avoid buying
it? Doesn't seem very likely.
So AOO is left with households, perhaps very very small companies and education
sector. I think that AOO should be the simple choice for schools. It should
offer the peace of mind with no license issue, no need of a package full of
features not really needed but sold efficiently by MS. No need of permanent
internet access, just install it locally.
It should say: here is a rock solid application that can prepare pupils/student
to office software. It is not MS Office but there are enough similarities to
make it a good tool to learn. Like your driving license: you learn on a car but
you can buy something (very) different. You just have to adapt.
If there is something to make clear, it is the effort needed to adapt from AOO
to MS Office. I'm not saying it should be a clone but just make the transition
as smooth as possible, user point of view.
As long as there is no consensus on the user base or on the purpose of AOO, it
will be difficult to set priorities.
I think that LO success is due to the new features because it's a developer
oriented project: it's fun, like a big sandbox. But for users, it may be
different (for example, we see in the forum a high number of topics about the
SAXParse error due to bad .docx export in LO).
Note: even if it takes time to get the direction, any effort to eliminate the
major bugs will improve AOO reputation (for example: spell check problem with
the user profile and the file content replaced with ####). It should remain the
default target of developers.
Another idea: since users like to customize the appearance of their
applications, providing a way to easily edit/change the user interface
(buttons) could bring back some interest. Like themes in FF/TB.
Hagar
PS: can't bear teachers asking my kids to provide homeworks in .docx/.xlsx.
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