5 ms·

Intel heavy support to LibreOffice. Is Microsoft threatened?

44 points by scriptproof 15y ago

scriptproof 15y ago
1) Add LibreOffice to its AppUp store. 2) Contributes to the code. 3) Financial support to The Document Foundation.
nknight 15y ago
I'm a little confused as to the exact involvement of SUSE. Is SUSE just acting as some sort of official steward for LibreOffice-in-AppUp? Is there any particular reason TDF couldn't take on that role?
- scriptproof 15y ago
  SUSE has made optimizations in the compilation, it is why their version was chosen for AppUp.
  - nknight 15y ago
    That may sort-of answer my question, but it presents another obvious one: Why haven't SUSE's optimizations been merged into mainline LibreOffice?
raphinou 15y ago
After 10+ years of seeing such headlines, I'm growing tired of "Microsoft threatened" kind of stuff. It's not Intel's AppUp store including LibreOffice that will bring MS in the problems....
bwarp 15y ago
Yes they are. But only from new businesses looking to cut costs. In older businesses, Office is entrenched and there's no getting away from it.
- bmj 15y ago
  This. It's not even older businesses--Office is THE standard in so many offices around the U.S. Talk to the IT department in a company that has more than 50 employees (and where processes can be document-heavy)--asking employees to switch to a new platform would be a massive undertaking. Folks that barely understand how to surf the web can compose documents in Word or fiddle with numbers in Excel.
pwaring 15y ago
I suspect by the time LibreOffice threatens Microsoft, everyone will have moved to Google Docs, or a similar service provided by other companies. I still don't know anyone who uses LibreOffice who isn't a geek.
- ht_th 15y ago
  I do. There are a lot of computer users out there that need to create an occasional spreadsheet or more complex text document. For these users, buying a product like MS Office is overkill, both in features and in price. And as a bonus, LibreOffice has a ``collage'' program in the form of LibreOffice Draw, the vector drawing program. Microsoft Office doesn't have that.
  - mayanksinghal 15y ago
    I actually worked with a firm that developed content - that was their core competency. Google docs worked really well for them - MS Office was definitely an overkill. Unfortunately, other firms that they were working with required them to send content in .doc format even when the final destination of the shared content was a blog - hence a majorly useless transformation that really pissed me and the writers off. There were of course cases when more complex text documents were required, I had suggested Latex but others were not familiar with it and didn't want to spend as much time on formatting as is necessary for using Latex. They chose Adobe bundle. My central point is, as collaboration tools become more and more advanced, the need for packages like Libre/Open/MS Office will die down and web based tools and much more advanced packages like Adobe's will replace them. Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab.
    - JadeNB 15y ago
      > Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab. Boy, would I love to see that. Wasn't their a program out there a while back that, in somewhat that spirit, aimed to provide a Python backend to spreadsheet calculations? (Imagine if you used that Python backing to interface with SAGE ….)
zrgiu_ 15y ago
Nah, Microsoft shouldn't feel threatened. It's not like a hardware company (like IBM) is building an IDE (like Eclipse). Oh wait...
nailer 15y ago
Is LibreOffice still desktop based? Edit: looks like there's a web version coming out, based on the web version of GTK: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-the-web-android-and-ios/ http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-the...
- hollerith 15y ago
  So is its competitor. Do you know of any plans by the maintainers to do away with the desktop version of either one?
dcminter 15y ago
In the short term, until enhancements like 38262 Outline view (née 3959 under OO) are taken seriously I very much doubt that office's core market of document creators will be threatened by LibreOffice. For casual/light consumers of office documents, however, I think that Libre/Open office has very much arrived. I'm starting to see it in the default-install on my customers' machines. In the longer term perhaps that will prove to be the thin end of the wedge.
rimantas 15y ago
As with almost all headlines with a question mark the answer is "No." I've tried to get used to Open/LibreOffice but it was unbearable every time. I no longer try. Luckily I don't need to deal with office documents much, so iWorks/Google docs is enough for me.
angelortega 15y ago
As for all news title containing a question, the answer is "no".
davidcollantes 15y ago
The keyword (for some users and the enterprise) is Outlook (part of MS Office). I don't think LibreOffice will be a threat to Microsoft, but sure is nice to have alternatives.
ruediger 15y ago
Microsoft is threatened. Selling Office (and Windows) licenses is the backbone of Microsoft and that's what's financing all the other adventures. Large companies have to buy Office licenses for every workstation. Even with large customer discount they still pay millions on license fees. With LibreOffice now being independent of a large company it becomes a viable alternative for those large corporations. It's much cheaper to hire a LibreOffice developer or get a company like SuSE for contract work on it to do all the required customizations than buying MSOffice licenses. People complain a lot about the GUI of LibreOffice. But in fact it can be an advantage because it is much closer to Office 2003 than the new Office versions. And it seems that Office 2003 is still the de-facto standard in a lot of corporations. So moving to LibreOffice might in fact require less training than new versions of Microsoft Office. There are other alternatives like Google Docs etc. Therefore it is a threat to Microsoft. Will LibreOffice/Google Docs etc. kill MSOffice in the next Years/Month/Hours? Of course not. But it will have an impact on Office sales and MS would be stupid not to consider it a threat. And of course there are still some technical issues. E.g. a missing alternative to MS Exchange. I know that there are some commercial open source alternatives. But there is not the one true alternative on the horizon. Another problem of course is backward compatibility, SharePoint, etc. But all of that can be fixed in the long run and will be with more support from companies like Intel.
- drzaiusapelord 15y ago
  Its not just things like the GUI, its interoperability between MS formats, common "advanced" features like track changes, the lack of enterprise support, and of course the political will for organizations to switch away from the de facto standard to something a little hairier for the sake of saving $300 per employee, which is peanuts in all the places I've worked at. When people discuss Windows or Office, we often dismiss the natural monopoly aspect of these products. There's a real level of momentum here because people don't want to bothered with things rendering funny or not having the same feature-set as their colleagues and clients. Every IT guy knows this because half the helpdesk tickets are "How can I open this .pages thing?" "They sent us the powerpoints but all the audio files are missing exentions!" etc thats common with basic OSX to Windows office issues, let alone a entirely different office suite. Sure hackers and computer nerds can do this stuff with ease, but remember, offices are all about the lowest common denominator. OO and LO are nice for basic tasks and when interoperability isn't very important. Once you enter the realm of business, suddenly track changes needs to work and images not being aligned properly is suddenly a big deal. LO and OO are almost identical products. OO has been at the stage its at now for 5 years. If it hasn't hurt Office by now it probably never will. I suspect OO is yet another "year of the linux desktop" that always 2 or 3 years away. /ITguy

44 points by scriptproof 15y ago

1) Add LibreOffice to its AppUp store. 2) Contributes to the code. 3) Financial support to The Document Foundation.

I'm a little confused as to the exact involvement of SUSE. Is SUSE just acting as some sort of official steward for LibreOffice-in-AppUp? Is there any particular reason TDF couldn't take on that role?

scriptproof 15y ago
SUSE has made optimizations in the compilation, it is why their version was chosen for AppUp.
- nknight 15y ago
  That may sort-of answer my question, but it presents another obvious one: Why haven't SUSE's optimizations been merged into mainline LibreOffice?

raphinou 15y ago

After 10+ years of seeing such headlines, I'm growing tired of "Microsoft threatened" kind of stuff. It's not Intel's AppUp store including LibreOffice that will bring MS in the problems....

bwarp 15y ago

Yes they are. But only from new businesses looking to cut costs. In older businesses, Office is entrenched and there's no getting away from it.

bmj 15y ago
This. It's not even older businesses--Office is THE standard in so many offices around the U.S. Talk to the IT department in a company that has more than 50 employees (and where processes can be document-heavy)--asking employees to switch to a new platform would be a massive undertaking. Folks that barely understand how to surf the web can compose documents in Word or fiddle with numbers in Excel.

pwaring 15y ago

I suspect by the time LibreOffice threatens Microsoft, everyone will have moved to Google Docs, or a similar service provided by other companies. I still don't know anyone who uses LibreOffice who isn't a geek.

ht_th 15y ago
I do. There are a lot of computer users out there that need to create an occasional spreadsheet or more complex text document. For these users, buying a product like MS Office is overkill, both in features and in price. And as a bonus, LibreOffice has a ``collage'' program in the form of LibreOffice Draw, the vector drawing program. Microsoft Office doesn't have that.
- mayanksinghal 15y ago
  I actually worked with a firm that developed content - that was their core competency. Google docs worked really well for them - MS Office was definitely an overkill. Unfortunately, other firms that they were working with required them to send content in .doc format even when the final destination of the shared content was a blog - hence a majorly useless transformation that really pissed me and the writers off. There were of course cases when more complex text documents were required, I had suggested Latex but others were not familiar with it and didn't want to spend as much time on formatting as is necessary for using Latex. They chose Adobe bundle. My central point is, as collaboration tools become more and more advanced, the need for packages like Libre/Open/MS Office will die down and web based tools and much more advanced packages like Adobe's will replace them. Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab.
  - JadeNB 15y ago
    > Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab. Boy, would I love to see that. Wasn't their a program out there a while back that, in somewhat that spirit, aimed to provide a Python backend to spreadsheet calculations? (Imagine if you used that Python backing to interface with SAGE ….)

zrgiu_ 15y ago

Nah, Microsoft shouldn't feel threatened. It's not like a hardware company (like IBM) is building an IDE (like Eclipse). Oh wait...

nailer 15y ago

Is LibreOffice still desktop based? Edit: looks like there's a web version coming out, based on the web version of GTK: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-the-web-android-and-ios/ http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-the...

hollerith 15y ago
So is its competitor. Do you know of any plans by the maintainers to do away with the desktop version of either one?

dcminter 15y ago

In the short term, until enhancements like 38262 Outline view (née 3959 under OO) are taken seriously I very much doubt that office's core market of document creators will be threatened by LibreOffice. For casual/light consumers of office documents, however, I think that Libre/Open office has very much arrived. I'm starting to see it in the default-install on my customers' machines. In the longer term perhaps that will prove to be the thin end of the wedge.

rimantas 15y ago

As with almost all headlines with a question mark the answer is "No." I've tried to get used to Open/LibreOffice but it was unbearable every time. I no longer try. Luckily I don't need to deal with office documents much, so iWorks/Google docs is enough for me.

angelortega 15y ago

As for all news title containing a question, the answer is "no".

davidcollantes 15y ago

The keyword (for some users and the enterprise) is Outlook (part of MS Office). I don't think LibreOffice will be a threat to Microsoft, but sure is nice to have alternatives.

ruediger 15y ago

Microsoft is threatened. Selling Office (and Windows) licenses is the backbone of Microsoft and that's what's financing all the other adventures. Large companies have to buy Office licenses for every workstation. Even with large customer discount they still pay millions on license fees. With LibreOffice now being independent of a large company it becomes a viable alternative for those large corporations. It's much cheaper to hire a LibreOffice developer or get a company like SuSE for contract work on it to do all the required customizations than buying MSOffice licenses. People complain a lot about the GUI of LibreOffice. But in fact it can be an advantage because it is much closer to Office 2003 than the new Office versions. And it seems that Office 2003 is still the de-facto standard in a lot of corporations. So moving to LibreOffice might in fact require less training than new versions of Microsoft Office. There are other alternatives like Google Docs etc. Therefore it is a threat to Microsoft. Will LibreOffice/Google Docs etc. kill MSOffice in the next Years/Month/Hours? Of course not. But it will have an impact on Office sales and MS would be stupid not to consider it a threat. And of course there are still some technical issues. E.g. a missing alternative to MS Exchange. I know that there are some commercial open source alternatives. But there is not the one true alternative on the horizon. Another problem of course is backward compatibility, SharePoint, etc. But all of that can be fixed in the long run and will be with more support from companies like Intel.

drzaiusapelord 15y ago
Its not just things like the GUI, its interoperability between MS formats, common "advanced" features like track changes, the lack of enterprise support, and of course the political will for organizations to switch away from the de facto standard to something a little hairier for the sake of saving $300 per employee, which is peanuts in all the places I've worked at. When people discuss Windows or Office, we often dismiss the natural monopoly aspect of these products. There's a real level of momentum here because people don't want to bothered with things rendering funny or not having the same feature-set as their colleagues and clients. Every IT guy knows this because half the helpdesk tickets are "How can I open this .pages thing?" "They sent us the powerpoints but all the audio files are missing exentions!" etc thats common with basic OSX to Windows office issues, let alone a entirely different office suite. Sure hackers and computer nerds can do this stuff with ease, but remember, offices are all about the lowest common denominator. OO and LO are nice for basic tasks and when interoperability isn't very important. Once you enter the realm of business, suddenly track changes needs to work and images not being aligned properly is suddenly a big deal. LO and OO are almost identical products. OO has been at the stage its at now for 5 years. If it hasn't hurt Office by now it probably never will. I suspect OO is yet another "year of the linux desktop" that always 2 or 3 years away. /ITguy