What is Digg?Sponsored by Threadless
$9 t-shirts today only view!
threadless.com - Today's the day to snag a deal on t-shirts! Threadless.com. $9. Every. Single. Tee.
102 Comments
- wallclimber, on 10/10/2007, -17/+63Open Office is great and I'm VERY happy to see it get more attention...but WalMart? I like to support companies that make the effort to support FOSS, but supporting WalMart...I don't know if I could bring myself to do it. I hate for people to equate FOSS with cut-rate products.
On the other hand, at least WalMart can't bully the OpenOffice organization into cutting their prices :o)
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -7/+40There is no productivity reason to spend hundreds on Microsoft Office. They proved that point in 1990 when they bundled Windows Word with new computers, which defeated most people's will to pay $500 for superior word processor WordPerfect.
No matter how many features you add, and Word has thousands, most people just about 20 to 40 features and that's it. - DiggTheWii, on 10/10/2007, -3/+36To the first commenter: Wal Mart might not SEEM like an ideal place to launch open source, but there's one really good reason why it is:
The mass number of people that shop there.
If you want Open Source to go to the masses, you take it to the masses. What better place than Wal Mart? - posure, on 10/10/2007, -6/+26You open source nuts are too picky. Why don't you take what you can get? OO.org has now officially extended their userbase beyond Microsoft haters.
- kbro, on 10/10/2007, -0/+18Just so other people don't get confused by Garfunkel, OpenOffice has nothing particular to do with Linux. I use OpenOffice on my Windows and Mac machines.
- Garfunkel, on 10/10/2007, -17/+33This is what our world needs. Success stories of Linux in the enterprise and consumer space. Good for them.
- blackb0x, on 10/10/2007, -4/+19don't like WalMart? Feel free to shop at other local stores and support their 50% extra markup.
- weeble, on 10/10/2007, -2/+17When was the last time you used it? OOo 2.3 was just recently released,a nd it is plenty fast. Want it faster still? Disable Java (the wizards won't work then, but most home users never use the wizards anyway) and decrease the number of undo steps to 20 or so.
- esotericguy, on 10/10/2007, -3/+17see what i just did here?
i hit the reply button to reply right to you, ***** NIFTY AINT IT!?!?! - Monarch818, on 10/10/2007, -3/+17"If you want to pay extra for your PC vendor to install a costly commercial alternative - with your consent - then that's fine. But installing commercial software without offering a free alternative means someone is depriving you of choice, and is profiteering at your expense."
Maybe the PC Manufacturer and Wal-Mart ought to look at the OS also, as that $300 comp that OpenOffice is on, is running Vista with 512k RAM - Smuuv, on 10/10/2007, -4/+16Open Office may be slow and ugly but it's my office package of choice. It simply does what I need it to do. I love to see companies offer alternatives.
Monarch818 makes a good point. You don't get much slower than Vista running on 512MBs of RAM. - AndrewWiggin, on 10/10/2007, -4/+15What article did you read? Success stories of linux?
- john2kx, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11who's denying it? Most people just lament it.
- Gavagai80, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12OOo starts quickly on my 2 year old $400 computer. A year or so ago it was slow, but this isn't a year or so ago. Unless the Windows version is slower. ('Course it's still not as speedy as KOffice, and KOffice meets my needs so I stick with it most of the time.)
- OnlyShawn, on 10/10/2007, -4/+15yes, because lower prices are horrible.
- Darcy, on 10/10/2007, -2/+12What's does Linux have to do with this story?
- Phocion55, on 10/10/2007, -1/+11I'm assuming 512k of RAM means he is NOT running Aero. But even that's quite a stretch.....
- UtahApocalyse, on 10/10/2007, -3/+12The best thing about OO is it is not microsoft.
- R2Bacca, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9I think puelocesar was making a bad attempt at sarcasm...
He was trying to say OOo is horrible for end users because most end users are used to garbage software that is bloated and slow, not that he thinks OOo is slow... - Nossie, on 10/10/2007, -2/+11512k ? no offence, but it sounds like you are just as confused as Wal-Mart
If any Microsoft product after 1990 could run on 512k of ram I would be very impressed.. add Vista to that thought and I just laugh my ass off :)
/hides - gpfischer, on 10/10/2007, -2/+11I hope Everex donates to OOo to help support the project. I found no mention of that on their website.
- drag, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9What is your people's problems?
Were does OpenOffice.org or anybody in that article claim that OpenOffice.org was the reason the PCs sold so well?
What they _did_ say is that the PCs got good reviews and Wallmart is specificly requesting that future PCs include OO.org.
As far as OO.org vs MS Office vs StarOffice vs ... The thing is made to make spreadsheets and word proccessing. It's borning as ***** and OO.org does the job well enough that it's a fine replacement for MS Office.
100 bucks for software sounds cheap... but that's enough to feed a family for a week, easy. That's 50 meals for me, personally. It's the cost of a new harddrive or some more ram. You know, food and disk space are things that are much more interesting then silly Office suites.
Plus the 100 dollar version of MS Office is a crippled version. Not only is there a whole host of extra EULA restrictions, but it's missing lots of features that the expensive versions have.
Plus with OO.org you can give a copy to a friend, your mom, your sister, your grandma, every single man, woman, and child you come in contact with. In fact they encourage it and you have full access to the source code to do with whatever you want. You can share it over usenet or bittorrent or emule or whatever other P2P software you use. It's Free, it's Open, and you can share it.
If you try to do the same thing with Microsoft Office they will fine you and/or throw you in jail if you get caught.
Soo... Boring old Office suites...
With MS Office I pay 100-500 dollars and get a ***** of restrictions on what I can and cannot do with it.
With OO.org I pay 0 and have all the freedoms I could ever want.
Ya, That MS student edition is quite a bargin there.*
*sarcasm - ArchangelZLT, on 10/10/2007, -2/+10Go on, MS guy. You'll make the next Ballmer. I'll support you!
- pnmoore, on 10/10/2007, -2/+10Is Wal-Mart unfair to its vendors? Yes. Has that proven to be a great thing for consumers? Yes.
I am far from a Wal-Mart fan, but they sell iPods, Wii's, Xbox 360's, Canon/Olympus/Sony/etc. camera's (digital and film), and the list goes on...I would not say that what they sell is "cut-rate", unless you are only talking price...I think you may be thinking of K-Mart where they sell things from companies nobody has ever even heard of. - EXreaction, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9Oh really, 512k of Ram?
- klpowell, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7You are an Idiot.
- AndrewWiggin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5First of all, I read your comment. Second of all, if you understand page load times and user interfaces, you'd understand that people would abuse the system and that it would get bogged down from all of the comments loading at once.
- superkendall, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6Vendors do not have to sell to Wal-Mart if they feel the pressure is too high. They do so because of the enormous reach it's possible to gain... some have backed out when they found they couldn't scale. But to not support one end of the retail spectrum because it is too efficient?
- ArchangelZLT, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5omg Walmart is selling LOTS OF STUFFS! They are all somebody else's hard work. How's that fair?
- pnmoore, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Ummm...Wal-Mart is selling the Everex product that has OO on it so Wal-Mart is doing the same thing it does with every other product it sells that "it didn't create , and is making money off of somebody else's hard work " just like every other retail outlet in the WORLD.
I think your anger, in this case, is better directed at Everex, which is who bundled OO on the PC being sold, not Wal-Mart. - mitrovarr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Most users won't ever see or use most of the extra features and such that Office 2007 has. The truth is, word processors have been essentially perfect for most people's use for over a decade - there's been no real improvement in how they work for non-professionals. There's not really much you can do for normal users past a certain point - basically, they just need a WYSIWYG editor with good spellchecking and that's essentially it.
- Gavagai80, on 10/10/2007, -4/+7I count 6 seconds on my sempron 3200+ (and that's without the quickstarter). I doubt MS Word would be any quicker, I remember trying it many years back and hating how slow MS Word was to start.
- renegadeafk, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Indeed good sir
- schoate09, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3kthxbai
- MikeWanDo, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4The windows version is slower.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -3/+6Or better than either of those two, you could download OpenOffice, which takes a couple of seconds to load.
- renegadeafk, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I read far enough to digg you down, just think how much you could have been dugg down otherwise!
- 1611av, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5I would guess that, after putting all the OSS fanboys to bed for the night, the reason the computer sold well was the PRICE and not Open Office. Let's think logically about that for a minute. Wally world shoppers look at one thing: price. Why else would walmart be as huge as it is?
- msgyrd, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Name some ways Office 2007 is better than OO.org that actually matter to the home user. GUI? Who cares, both are usable and reasonably efficient. Spell check? Equal. Formatting? Equal for most tasks (MS does do it slightly better).
It's not that MS Office isn't a superior product (it is, and I use it all the time at work for unusual tasks, like dynamic name badge printing for events, integrating a database from another program), but I don't need it at home. The extra features that MS Office offers simply do not justify the price for me on a personal computer.
OO.org is what I recommend to home users, and I've never had a complaint. Businesses should probably stick with MS Office. - superkendall, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5Diggs commenting system, by default hiding subrepies ensures a complete lack of motivation for using replies as you would have it done - you might well be the only person that ever reads this comment (though it's more likley the total will be none). They should set it to automatically show subreplies ranked at least one or above.
- GMorgan, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3640k should be enough for anyone though.
- AndrewWiggin, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3I was hoping for some stats about how well they sold, but good story nonetheless.
- riverstyx, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2All i use is OOo, dont give a damn about ms office anymore.
- ArchangelZLT, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4I'd rather report you for pirating MS software. You may report me for using OOo without paying, but I doubt they'll respond to you.
- ArthurSucks, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3How the hell can it be a ripoff? It's ***** free!
- PatrickBrown, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3You should watch the PBS Frontline on Walmart. They provide a better view (from all parties) rather than a one-sided rant.
- SsbFalcon, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Speed's always better when you use an OS that actually uses the memory for you know... your programs...
- bvdeenen, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2What's so good about Word !? It typically will corrupt large documents; I don't know about small ones, but its price seems quite excessive for small documents.
I've used OpenOffice extensively for large (200+ pages) highly structured documents with 10's of megabytes of embedded pictures, and many crossrefs. OOo did not perform flawlessly, but it got the job done, and document navigation is far better in OOo, plus it's unlikely that your document will get corrupted, which with Word is quite likely. The only serious problem I had with OOo was with a default style outline numbering error, which can be corrected by changing some dependencies in the Heading# styles. - geogray, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes, I know where it originated, but I did, in fact, get it from Google. Go look for yourself. It is part of the Google desktop.
- doolittle, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I think you missed the point, it was preinstalled as not to inconvenience the user with such trivial things as downloading and installing it themselves and it was found to be desirable from both walmart feedback and the media rave reviews you just mentioned. Well not sure if the media rave reviewed a version w/o any type of office suite at all, something tells me (google) it is the one w/ openoffice installed. The #1 hit:
-----
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070718-298- ...
Including OO.org instead of Microsoft Office or even Microsoft Works allowed the PC manufacturer to shave a few additional dollars off of the PC's price...
"In creating the eco-friendly GC3602, our main focus was to build a no-compromise, back-to-school PC with all the software applications a typical student would require, without resorting to bundling frivolous trial versions or increasing prices 30 percent," said Everex product manager Eugene Chang.
-----
It is apparently all about price/performance and not any MS hating going on here that you were originally inferring. -
Show 51 - 100 of 102 discussions
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is