He's right.
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tracyanne Sep 22, 2007 1:23 AM EDT |
The thing that makes Microsoft products like Office so desirable isn't the fact that people are locked in - after all every now and again Microsoft unlocks it's customers, by creating a new lock out for all the other Office suites that have managed to make themselves compatible with Office document formats. The thing that makes Office so desirable are the ease of use, not just of each application in the suite, the other Office products do that. It's the ease of integration, any application in the MS Office suite can easily integrate with each other, and with other applications outside of the suite. You see, what Microsoft have done, and this is their real act of innovation, is they have created an application stack that comprises of almost any arbitrary Microsoft application, and a great many 3rd party applications, that depends on Windows as their base. This is what other vendors and the Free Software community simply fails to grock. It's not Office, it's not Visual Studio, it's not Exchange server, it's not their proprietary document formats, it's not even their proprietary communications protocols - although each may in some way cause issues for other vendors and the Free Software community - it's all of them, it's the integrated whole. |
| Abe Sep 22, 2007 5:55 AM EDT |
Quoting:It's the ease of integration, any application in the MS Office suite can easily integrate with each other, and with other applications outside of the suite. You bring up a very good point Tracyanne. On the other hand, that integration and bundling could also be the weakness of MS products because of the complication it creates. |
| phsolide Sep 22, 2007 7:05 AM EDT |
I would have to disagree at least slightly about integration outside the boundaries of Office. If you don't like the editors that come with Visual Studio .Net, it's pretty darn hard to get Office to cooperate in using a different one. The tight integration also causes a somewhat different problem. Abstraction induced complexity (see http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/keppel93managing.html) rears its ugly head every time you want to use Office to do something that its designers did not anticipate An example: at my place of work, we had to count lines of code in our projects. The Windows Codemonkeys, accustomed to having a pull-down or a pop-up for everything, were reduced to estimating by eye, opening each file and seeing what "Word" or "Notepad" or whatever said, writing the numbers on a scrap of paper and totalling it all up. Luckily, I had Cygwin installed on my XP "workstation" so a quick bash script even allowed me to accurately count up lines of comments as well as lines of code. The abstractions that Office designers put in place to ease use by pointy-haired bosses writing 3 page memos got in the way of a new task. This has consequences beyond what you might expect, and if I can get Chomskyite on you for a moment, I'd have to say that the abstractions of Office make people not think of alternatives. Office "idioms" guide its user's thoughts down certain paths, and practically eliminates thinking of any alternate solutions. It makes people into sheeple. |
| gus3 Sep 22, 2007 7:57 AM EDT |
And macro viruses. Why attack just Word, when integration lets you attack Studio and Outlook as well? Windows vulnerabilities are the reason I left it for good nine years ago. |
| tracyanne Sep 22, 2007 12:55 PM EDT |
In answer to each of the above. You can come up with edge examples until the cows come home and so can I, as I come across them from time to time, but you miss the point. The tight integration and ease of use across the entire stack is what makes Microsoft products desirable to so many, problems at the edge are mosquito bites, when compared to the fact that no one else offers anything near the same level of integration and ease of use across an entire application stack. Instead of concentrating on the edge cases, where Free Software already does better, Free Software should be finding ways to remedy the areas where Free software needs to do better in order to actually be a viable replacement for the Microsoft application stack. |
| rijelkentaurus Sep 22, 2007 1:59 PM EDT |
Quoting: The tight integration and ease of use across the entire stack is what makes Microsoft products desirable to so many You have a good point, but the fact is that most of the people who are using Office do not use its features to any real degree, and most users would be as well off with WordPad as with Word. Where the integration features are used, it is a real problem to get away from it (I wouldn't argue that for a second), but it's not the whole story behind the ubiquity of Office. That ubiquity has a lot to do with the money involved, IMO, because I know for a fact that my employer has no intention of suggesting OpenOffice or Lotus Symphony to any clients because he can't charge any money for it. Office might cost $400, but when we sell it we get $100 of that. That's a lot of money for the middle man to toss out, and it's a very big reason why many companies won't move away from it. They are kept from the truth by the people they depend on for consultation, but those consultants have interest only in making money and not in furthering things like justice, or honesty, or even good sense, all of which are detrimental to the bottom line. That's why Office is everywhere...just plain old greed. |
| tracyanne Sep 22, 2007 2:40 PM EDT |
Quoting:but the fact is that most of the people who are using Office do not use its features to any real degree, and most users would be as well off with WordPad as with Word. This is true, but there is the notion of usefulness. Also, because Office is used in every office, and is offered in every retail outlet, there is the notion that it IS the only office package - If I got paid for the number of times people have said to me "but nobody ever told us that." when I explain OO.o or indeed any other Free software application that is just as useful (perhaps even more so when you look at how they use the software) to the majority of computer users, I'd be very wealthy indeed. Quoting:Where the integration features are used, it is a real problem to get away from it (I wouldn't argue that for a second), but it's not the whole story behind the ubiquity of Office. That ubiquity has a lot to do with the money involved, IMO, because I know for a fact that my employer has no intention of suggesting OpenOffice or Lotus Symphony to any clients because he can't charge any money for it. Office might cost $400, but when we sell it we get $100 of that. In fact this is not true. You can sell Open Office.org, you could charge $100 for it and keep that $100, ot better still sell it for $150 and give $50 to the OpenOffice.org developers. Free as in freedom, not as in cost. Quoting:That's a lot of money for the middle man to toss out, and it's a very big reason why many companies won't move away from it. The notion that you can't make money off of Free software is certainly pervaisive Quoting:They are kept from the truth by the people they depend on for consultation, but those consultants have interest only in making money and not in furthering things like justice, or honesty, or even good sense, all of which are detrimental to the bottom line.[ You can't eat Justice, honesty or good sense. Quoting: That's why Office is everywhere...just plain old greed. Greed true, but mosty because it's part of the application stack that has windows as it's base. Microsoft Windows is but one part of a complete applications stack. |
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