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think all the development teams are busy playing on their Xbox 360’s or Wii’s or PS3’s. The “vision” they once had, has been replaced by MBA visionaries with fancy checkbooks.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.

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.

Back in 1994 when I first started cranking out HTML using vi on a Unix box, it was all HTML. Then came javascript and DHTML. Then came server-side scripting. The first language I learned was the infamous Cold Fusion. Touted for having the lowest learning ramp, it was an ideal tool for learning to generate automated content and interact with databases. All joking aside, CF did what it was supposed to: make it easy to get started with scripted content, and taking it to a higher level. This is where CF fell apart in my opinion. It was when people started saying “hey, this coldfusion stuff is cool, let’s see if we can build eBay with it!” That’s sort of like saying “hey, my lawnmower cuts great. Let’s see if we can haul tree trunks up a mountain with it!”

Sure, CF *can* address clustering, load balancing, etc. But it’s nowhere near as robust as things that came after it: ASP, JSP and PHP. I’m still thankful for CF and Homesite, because they taught me to work with tags and code first, appearance later. Not that appearance doesn’t matter as much, but it helped me stay grounded when I moved on to other tools. I was actually a registered Allaire beta tester, and worked on 4.0 and 4.5 releases. Ahhh, the good ole days.

So, I moved over to Microsoft’s ASP. At first I was a Visual InterDev guy, until I realized just how hosed up InterDev was. Sort of like a Lego kit with only a very specific collection of bricks to use. Trying to get clever with it, resulted in pain. I chose the more open ASP path using a GUI tool like FrontPage and a code editor to do the actual scripting with. FrontPage turned into another sand trap, but I’ve learned how to tame it into something that doesn’t break code or standards (CSS, etc.) I use TextPad for my coding work, and FP for the graphical layout adjustments. That process has worked well for about 80 percent of my needs. I have made a living from ASP for almost 10 years now. In various forms and environments, it has paid off well. I took some classes on JSP, but I was disappointed in the performance hit it incurred. I’m still unhappy with JSP performance. Apparently, I’m not alone. The relative dearth of JSP sites is clear testament to it’s lack of enthusiasm.

I started to go down the .NET road as well. But timing didn’t work in my favor. I took classes and got all the books and tools and started working with it, but like many other things: timing was everything. Everytime I would think of moving into .NET full time, I’d be pulled back to maintain or extend some ASP apps. It’s hard to argue with a paycheck. For those of you that might say “you should have convinced them that migrating to .NET would pay off later”, well, these folks don’t like “later”. They want “NOW!” They’re not unreasonable, and they’re not cheap either. So NOW! works for me. It just meant .NET would have to wait.

So after a few more years, I’m finally getting time to work on something different. This time, the demand is for Apache, mySQL, running on Linux of course, and obviously the tool is PHP. Yes, I’m aware of Ruby, but I’m fine with PHP for now. The experience I’ve had with ASP has helped me springboard into PHP much quicker than if I had never done any previous web development. PHP is simply fantastic. While it lacks some of the sophisticated GUI tools (for freeware anyway), it more than makes up with flexibility, options, simplicity and my favorite: FREE.

Yes. ASP.NET can be “free”, but only “sort of”. You still have to host it on a Windows server, which is anything BUT free. You can crank out .NET code in a free editor, but let’s face it: they suck, compared with Visual Studio. PHP on the other hand is entirely free, and runs on a free platform. It’s robust, well documented, and there’s a shitload of free code out on the web to help do almost anything you need it to. I have to say I’m getting excited about programming again. I have nothing against ASP or VBscript, not even PowerShell, which I’m still hoping to play with more (I immersed myself in Monad/MSH while it was still in beta, but they’ve made changes since RTM as “PowerShell”). PHP, and even mySQL are giving me something new to play with and it’s fun. I wish it was easier to build Views and Stored Procs in mySQL with the provided PHPmyAdmin, but I can get by for now.

I started my web development life with ColdFusion and CFML, then moved to ASP. I tried ASP.NET but one thing after another seemed to prevent me from jumping with both feet. Timing mostly. I had all the tools and a decent amount of training to make the jump, but the timing was always horrible. I still work with ASP daily, in between scripting and kissing massive amounts of ass to stay employed. However, a new project on my (personal) plate is giving me a great opportunity to revisit something I only briefly touched on back in college: PHP. Boy, has it progressed since then. This project is also combining mySQL into the mix. I’ve not only been totally immersed in ASP, but MS-SQL as well. So this is really making my brain sweat. PHP is nice. Sort of like a mix of CFML and ASP. The syntax (to me) looks like javascript, still, but the libraries and function collections have grown immensely. After learning the translation of < % %> to < ? ?> and how form posts work, then I figured out session and server variables, and then all the issues with using preg_quote() to wrap sql content calls. I’m still poking around, but it’s really cool to be learning something new again. Especially at age 43, when IT considers me a dinosaur.