[Salo]

Interesting article about the potential breaking of the MS Office lock-in.

[Salo]

Pings.

[Tanniker Smith]

I have used Google docs once or twice, mostly in a learning environment. No reason not to use them, i think, but I haven’t really exploited them as much as I would need to for work.

[RayChuang88]

However, the OpenOffice substitute is not really that great--I've tried OpenOffice and its interface feels clunky compared to the interface of Office 2003 and 2007.

[TLI]

That's why Microsoft has been so keen to keep the inner workings of its file formats secret, so that upstarts like Corel (Nasdaq: CREL) WordPerfect or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Office would never get the details quite right.,/i.

That's why Microsoft has been so keen to keep the inner workings of its file formats secret, so that upstarts like Corel WordPerfect or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Office would never get the details quite right.

Upstarts? WordPerfect? Is this guy just out of high school?

[ShadowAce]

[papasmurf]

Office 2000 marked the highlight of MS Office, IMO. After that, all MS office products became “cartoonish”, slow and bloatware.

The only Office product since that time that is worth it’s salt, and can stand on it’s own merit, is OneNote.

I don’t mind paying for a product that represents a value to me, but I do demand service for it. Going online and spending my time seeking how to do something that was trivial in 2000, is not my idea of service or support.

[Tribune7]

so that upstarts like Corel (Nasdaq: CREL) WordPerfect or IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus Office

I get what he's saying but that phrasing still strikes me as funny.

[Golden Eagle]

Office isn’t going anywhere, it’s still the #1 selling piece of software for Macs and you’d love to have it on Linux.

[antiRepublicrat]

That's why Microsoft has been so keen to keep the inner workings of its file formats secret, so that upstarts like Corel (Nasdaq: CREL) WordPerfect

IIRC, Microsoft learned the closed file format game from WordPerfect when Word was the upstart.

[jmc813]

This is outstanding news. I have spent the last two hours cleaning up HTML produced by someone using Word. MS Office is the biggest piece of $hit software ever produced. Ever. If Bill Gates was standing in front of me this morning, I would have put him in the hospital. I f#%&ing hate Microsoft. Nuke Redmond.

[ModelBreaker]

Interesting article about the potential breaking of the MS Office lock-in.

Maybe as a long term trend. But the Open Office word processor has a LONG way to go before it comes close to matching Word for preparation of complex business documents. If I need more power than Word (and it tends to choke with long documents with lots of graphics), I use Framemaker.

My biggest beef with Open Office is that it has twice destroyed the very careful formatting of Word Documents that I tried to import into and edit in Open Office. I mean destroyed as in start the document over because it cannot be fixed.

So Open Office is still a toy I use on my portable for the bits of word processing I encounter on the road. I guess that is even a little victory of Open Office as that is one license MS did not sell.