Rumors were runing rampant this afternoon about Android coming to AT&T, but in all actuallaty is they are looking at it…
Meanwhile one of those scary things happened today, I actually have the somewhat same opinion about Android and the G1 as Steve Ballmer, and considering that I may have to reconsider my opinion towards the whole Android. Well even a broken clock is right twice a day…
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think all the development teams are busy playing on their Xbox 360’s or Wii’s or PS3’s. The “vision” they once had, has been replaced by MBA visionaries with fancy checkbooks.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?
So, this article on MSNBC purports to say the DOJ sided with Microsoft by rejecting a complaint filed by Google against Windows Vista. The article follows the same rhetorical shlock I’ve heard so often that I’m ready to puke when I heard it again: which says that Vista is built from the ground up to make it difficult to use Google apps. Bullshit! Complete, 100%, total, absolute, male cow manure.
Not only does IE7 work just fine with Google plug-ins, it even upgrades from XP with Google search defaults in tact. It does. It has every time I’ve done that. I’ve yet to find one single product or service of Google that works on XP but not on Vista. Not one. In fact, the only web-based app I’ve had a bad time with is posting to my blog (WordPress) from Vista/IE7. I have to use Firefox (on Vista), to post. I’m glad the DOJ could see through their own misgivings about Microsoft to make a logical decision. There’s hope for continued “justice” and “fairness”. I’m not saying it’s already here. Just that it’s still possible.
So, after a reader suggested this article by Clive Cooper “How I made the transition from Windows to Ubuntu“, I have to say that the obvious response to that is that the “results” of such a transition are almost entirely subjective. Not entirely, but almost. The emphasis of any perception of a “good experience” is going to depend upon the nature of use. Transitioning for a clerk, or secretary worker, is not going to be the same as that of a game developer, a CAD engineer, a musician or a media designer.
I’m not by any means trying to convey or imply any significance to those specific “roles”, just giving them as examples. I would say that many “casual” computer users would be 100% fine with Ubuntu. I dare say many would hardly notice. I’m talking about the kind of people that are awe struck at AOL. Not that this bodes ill for Linux by any means. In fact, it’s very good. The major appeal of Windows for AOL-types is ease of setup and use. Ubuntu is damn good at supplanting those attributes. Maybe not the initial setup, but then again, most of those types of users buy a computer already setup. Let’s keep this Apples-to-Apples.
For many users however, life on a computer is entirely dependent on a select group of applications software. Some of these work on Linux, some work poorly, some not at all. I do not ever consider Wine or VMware a real “solution” because it’s a bandaid on a bigger problem: a dearth of equivalent native applications. Argue all you want, but that’s what it is. Running MS-Office in a Wine session, is still MS-Office. That’s not a “clean” solution in my book. OpenOffice is (or can be, sometimes). This brings into question another argument: Should Linux have to mimick every aspect of Windows to be considered “successful”?
No. Not really. But…
It all depends on what you define as “successful” for the Linux market. Is sales and marketshare the measure? Is it vendor support and product availability? Is it magazine articles praising it’s virtues? I’ve yet to get two Linux evangelists to agree on this subject. On one hand, many will blurt out boldly that Linux can easily displace Windows on the desktop of most users. Then they hem and haw on the particulars of exactly how that could or might happen. The problem is that Windows didn’t win by technical superiority, it won by clever marketing and lucky timing. There is no “clever marketing” that I’ve seen for Linux, because there isn’t enough money behind it yet. Luck hasn’t been too kind to it either. Sure, things are improving, but very slowly based upon the numbers. Linux needs a real ass-kicking, ball-busting sponsor to take the reigns and drive the herd to the creek (in one direction). Otherwise, it’s going to remain the sideshow freak for technoweenies to gawk over. (for the record, I’m writing this on my Ubuntu desktop)
Windows isn’t a technical total failure either. It has it’s share of merits. As Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical Ltd recently said, Microsoft did contribute heavily towards the trend of cheaper priced software. It’s funny how quickly we forget that and start beating them up for escalating prices. (In case you didn’t know, Mark is the founder of Ubuntu) Remember how much a UNIX workstation cost back in 1985? I do. We bought plenty of them and I was around the Navy when they were shelling out $30,000+ for each one, and getting truckloads at a time. A typical Dell Dimension E521 today will blow one of those away in performance and capability. Part of that was the dramatic drop in operating system and basic app prices. UNIX and the proprietary apps that we bought were outrageously priced, even then.
However, what bothers me about Microsoft today, is that they’ve given up on core innovation. They still innovate in very focused areas, and certain products. But as a whole, they’ve become a follower. Chasing AOL, Netscape, Real, and now Google and Adobe (with Silverlight). Everything they’re hyping with maps, web-apps, is all catch-up. Even the newer “server core” Longhorn is a catch-up to UNIX and Linux. Pure and simple. And the more recent legal attack againt FOSS is just too much. It smacks of desperation and angst. Meanwhile, their products are becoming infused and obsessed with “rights management” at the expense of complexity, licensing terms, increased restrictions and increased prices.
I had to give Linux another chance.
I’ve been a casual user since college (late 1990’s) with Slackware, then early RedHat, then SuSe, and Mandrake, then on to Fedora and now Ubuntu. Of course, I’m basing a lot of what I’m saying on the Gnome desktop moreso than the KDE desktop. For the record, I still think KDE is too much and Gnome too little. I wish someone would crank out a happy medium.
So, what am I trying to say? Good question. The answer is this: Whether you will “like” what you get when “transitioning” from one operating system to another is going to depend on multiple factors. One of the most significant of these is the types of applications you prefer and rely upon. If suitable replacements exist for the new operating system, you may be perfectly happy. Maybe ecstatic. Maybe not. Then there’s the tedious hunt for replacements when there really aren’t many around. Do I need to list specifics? No. That would simply be picking another argument to waste more time.
I can list quite a few apps on several platforms that are difficult, if not impossible, to replace on another platform. It’s all market-driven. That’s why the CAD/CAM world is still stuck with too many products and file formats. It’s why AutoCAD doesn’t run for shit on Linux or OSX. It’s why you can’t run OSX inside VMware on a Windows host. It’s why Microsoft is still building translators and converters for MS Office 2007 to XPS, ODF and OpenXML formats to make the EU and China happy. It’s why there isn’t a native iTunes client for Linux. Homogeneity is not only boring, but profit-challenged. Water, temperature and electricity flow best when two points in the circuit are not equal. Same with markets. As long as each platform has differences, there will be products and services sold to bridge those gaps.
Going back, sort of, to Clive’s article, he provides a very insightful list of Windows-to-Linux application comparisons. It’s missing quite a few that I happen to really need (on the Windows side), but even a few which are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to many Windows users besides myself. Examples?
Clive also says “Nero” equates to “K3B”, but “Nero” is only one name for a SUITE of apps which are bundled together. NeroWave, and NeroVision don’t have counterparts in K3B that I’ve ever seen. Burning CD/DVD disks is mindless drivel. Building DVD player menus, covers, and transcoding on the fly are a bit different. I’m still hunting for the ??? items above. (feel free to drop comments with suggestions if you’d like)
I’m digressing again.
