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Challenge? Not really.

I read the Challenging Microsoft Office piece with the usual curiosity I have about what people think about MS Office alternatives. Anyway, the thing that jumped out at me about this story was a huge weakness/drawback that the author hinted at but didn’t explicitly mention: lack of integration. Other than OpenOffice, all of the applications considered are task specific applications, not really Office suites. Try doing a mail merge in Writely with contacts stored in Thunderbird. Not gonna’ happen. The applications mentioned may be useful to consumers with occasional needs, but for the typical corporate user it's not in the cards.

Posted: Wednesday, December 21, 2005 7:32 AM by hansen

Comments

Anonymous said:

I agree. I think it is the lack of spit-and-polish in open source apps that is one of the main things against them in most environments. That lack is reflected in lack of integration, as well as in the installation glitches referred to in the Challenging Microsoft Office article. These things matter. I think many people that report on how good open source apps are gloss over these things partly because they really want open source to win and Microsoft to lose.

Paul
# December 21, 2005 12:40 PM

Steve Hansen said:

Not like anyone didn't see this coming, but now Google has officially entered the Office market and is

# February 22, 2007 12:55 PM
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