About twice a year I take a poke at both of the office product suites to see how they’re progressing. This past month I installed the latest OpenOffice 2.x flavor on both Ubuntu 7.04 and on Windows Vista, as well as Microsoft Office 2007 (on Vista only of course).

The shake-down result?

Well, it depends. If you have basic needs, OO will suffice. If you have specific needs, you will need to take a careful look to know if OO will suffice. I have to say however, that while I applaud OO’s efforts, they have been left in the dust by Microsoft. Office 2007 is simply amazing. I don’t like the price tag at all, but the features are simply better. The products, each of them, are all much improved and amazingly stable. Not that OO isn’t stable, but MS-Office has a reputation for being anything but. Aside from the arguable “ribbon bar” change in MSO, the individual features, options and tools are what make it shine overall. They are most noticable in PowerPoint and Visio, but even Word, Excel and Access have some nice goodies to discover. I have to say that discovering them has been *almost* fun. Software? Fun? Again?!!

I haven’t found software fun to learn since the 1990’s. I don’t know what’s happened, but innovation has turned into refinement. Boring. BO-RING. Even Google has become another corporate sloth. Yeah, sure, they’re still more “hip” than Microsoft, but so is my dog. So is my neighbor. Well, maybe not him. Ok, but my kids are surely more hip than MS. So where does that leave RedHat, Novell, Yahoo!, etc.? In the snoozer bed with a blanket. Nothing new to write home about. I think all the development teams are busy playing on their Xbox 360’s or Wii’s or PS3’s. The “vision” they once had, has been replaced by MBA visionaries with fancy checkbooks. Repeat the last success because it’s less risky (even though it always turns out to be the most risky). WTF? What happened to us?

So, putting all this into larger context, the stuff that amazes me about MSO 2007 isn’t that it’s intrinsicly “amazing”, it’s that they actually made the effort. OO on the other hand seems to be playing catch-up. Let’s face, THERE IS NOTHING INNOVATIVELY “NEW” in OpenOffice. There’s nothing it has or does that wasn’t already done in WordPerfect/PerfectOffice or MSO. Don’t get me started on little, mamby-pamby buried features. I’m talking about the big ticket features, like syntax/grammar checking, auto-completion, auto formatting, mail merging (that over-stated feature), and the retreaded tires of import/export lists. It’s all been done. T-shirts sold out long ago. The same appears to be true for Linux. Yes it’s cool. Yes, it rocks. Yes, it does the job. But what does it “do” that CANNOT be done on Windows or OSX or whatever? Not much. It’s free, so that means it rocks. I’m not bashing it, but I would really like to see it taken to the next step BEFORE the competition goes there first.

I’m not impressed. I’m waiting to be impressed by software again. Maybe this should be a challenge to the new crop of techie kids? Take the challenge. Do something amazing and make it fun to use a computer or mobile device for a change. The iPhone, like it or not, is proof that there’s still room for innovation and taking risks to do something different… and better. Then again, until the techies toss the MBA’s out of the meeting rooms and get back to driving the business, it might not ever happen.

So, again, ultimately, MSO 2007 isn’t really that “amazing” but it’s amazing in the current limited context. Sort of like how Superman doesn’t impress anyone on Krypton, but drops jaws on Earth. Same basic principle. Maybe that’s it? The new generation isn’t aware of what happened 10-20 years ago. It’s all lip-service, reminiscing by balding techies. They don’t care. A remake of a remake is still new to them. Uh oh, that means DOS might make a comeback?

I finally added blog-posting (sort of) on VBHistory.com. It wasn’t nearly as cumbersome as I’d expected. Not nearly as slow in displaying records either. I was prepared for horrors. I should have known better. And now I do.

Yes, I know. I have ranted and yakked on and on ad nauseum about Linux. Blabbering is one of my strong points. Ok, so while I pulled the virtual plug on my own Linux efforts (for now, not forever), I decided to victimize my helpless kids once again with techie experimentation. In this lab experiment, I place the kids at one end of the maze and put a game at the other. In between, Ubuntu. As you can see, the kids rapidly hit a few walls trying to figure out why it doesn’t smell like Windows anymore. “Where is AIM?!” I show them GAIM. “Where is PAINT?!” I show them Gimp (ok, it took a little longer than just showing it was there). “This is weird” I replied: “You’re weird. A perfect match” They figure out Runescape, Club Penguin, Google, our family web portal, and all is good… except for…

Skkreeettch!!!! Breaks lock up.

Daughter says “what’s this gtkPod crap?!” “What’s this Floola stuff?” “Where the (#*&@#) is iTunes?!” So I show them how to synch their iPod with gtkPod and Floola. I thought all was good.

Wrong.

“I want to shop for songs to download, you can’t do that with this trash!” They’re right. There so far is nothing to replace iTunes for shopping the iTunes store on Linux. Doh!!!!

Well, at least my 8 and 11 year olds are fine, for now. Once they start hitting their iPod Nano’s I’m doomed.

Then second-eldest daughter chimes in from across the house: “The photo upload and editing features suck. I want Vista back!”

I’m not giving in yet. Ubuntu 7.04 is still in their face for now. If they keep up the whining I’ll cave in. If they quiet down, I’ll leave it. Check back in a few weeks.

Blah blah blah blah Linux, blah blah blah Windows. Blah blah blah OSX blah Java blah AJAX blah blah blah blah. Blah blah .NET blah blah Web Services blah blah iPhone, iPod, blah blah Apple TV, blah blah TiVo, blah blah Sony, blah blah HP, blah Dell, Symantec, blah blah blah.

That pretty much sums up 99 percent of the tech magazines and web sites these days.

My first major PHP/mySQL project is finally walking. http://www.vblife.net

It’s intended for collecting everything I can think of about Virginia Beach into one place. I don’t have everything working yet, but most of it is. I could have held off longer but I felt it was close enough to unwrap it. I still need to work on the photo library, which is pathetic at this point, but it works. The registration process is working, and most of the other features are working. The discussion forums are 101 level, even for my past efforts in ASP, but they “work”. Anyhow, i have more work to do yet. Gives me something to look forward to.