I’m an administrator of a company. I found the best balance in my network is to have a linux backbone and Windows Workstations. I don’t agree with the server licencing policies of Microsoft. Having the stability of Linux servers and the ease of use of Windows workstations have reduced my time spent on dealing with user issues.

One thing that I have noticed. Users attitudes towards office software is the main problem. I forced the users to switch to OpenOfffice i’ve never had so many problems. Most problems from users who can’t or don’t want to remember what formats to send documents on. That resulted in our clients not being able to open mail. After repeated attempts to teach the users how to send and save in other formats, it only lasts for about a week.

From a administration point of view, it was worth the money for the company to switch to microsoft due to the complexity and confusion of the formats the keeps changing on OpenOffice. The sad fact still stands that Microsoft formats are the standard in the world. I heard Microsoft agreeing that the world needs a standard format. I hope that becomes a reality so that people can enjoy true flexiblity in the choice of office suits.

One thing I must mention is that the computers in my network running office tends to prove very reliable if you just keep the software updated. While users have complained about Open Office taking too long esp if you work with big spreadsheets and someone is waiting on the phone for you to open a document that is quite big. I can say that I have seen it in a real working world. You can do all the lab test you want. Speed is something they have to improve.

Open Office is quite good with docoment recovery. Files that are corrupt in Office can be easily repaired and saved so I keep a copy of Open Office installed on my pc to help users when they receive corrupt files.

Both suits has got benefits, it’s just up the environment and users if it’s going to work.

Also, I would like to point out that OOo is making real life differences to really poor and unfortunate people as well, specifically those who can’t afford $240 worth of [unreliable] software to manage their information and perform simple business math.

Also, I think it will suffice to argue that your your time could be better spent being active in a community of producers rather than buying into the FUD, jumping on the proverbial band wagon, and handing your money over to someone who has adopted deception as a business strategy and delivers an unreliable product.

-Princess Mike

P.S. Be a consumer whore or I’ll trow a chair at you! I’ll fxcking bury you! *snickers*

Who cares if OO uses more memory? RAM is cheap. I have tons of it, and so do most people these days.

OO is fantastic, secure software that does everything I need and more—and it’s free. Download OO, or put $200 more in Bill Gates’s obscenely-swollen pockets? Next question?

Hans

There’s some difference, of course, but for reading my current inbox email, they both get the exact same job done.

win32 outlook 2003
private bytes 40mb
peak private 40mb
working set 64mb
peaking working set 64mb
peak cpu usage 85%
load time 8seconds

iexplore exchange 2003 web access
private bytes 16mb
peak private 16mb
working set 27mb
peak working 27mb
peak cpu usage 37%
web page load time (auto login), 4seconds.

So based on this contrived example, we should immediately stop buying PC installable application and switch to web based GUI applications. That’s not the point however.

Both applications get the job (reading email) done, both are responsive enough that they don’t feel sluggish (the resource hog is noticibly faster loading new emails), and even though the benchmarks identify one to be clearly faster load time and less of a resource hog, IT DOESN’T MATTER TO THE END USER.

End user perception of performance counts far more than emperical data. If it looks fast, seems fast, then it IS fast. No, this isn’t scientific to base a benchmark on perception, but it’s how people in the real world will judge the software.

Since I don’t have MS here at home I’ll substitute Corel WordPerfect 10 for Office 2000 [used at the office].

I’ll also benchmark a POT editor.
POT is a telephone term for *plain ol’ telephone*, so here it is Plain Old Text.
I used PSPad [www.pspad.com] which is only one of several I use depending on what I am doing as it opens files faster than others, but not if I open 100+ emails files at the same time which a different editor will do faster [that sounds a lot like this discussion-not just here but all over].

My timer is setting my watch on the desk and pushing the tiny-weenie button to start and stop the timer using the left thumb nail while the other fingers secure the watch to the desk top.

The time started while simulaneously clicking [After R-clicking the filename and using *open with* application] the mouse on the file while selecting it with Exploder [hate My’puter] and the watch button.
The time stopped when the program had the file open and was ready to use.

Each test was run about 3 times with a marginal, say +/- 10%, deviation.

Test File: 23,715,840 bytes
167,129 records [lines] of 512 character fixed length [name, address, phone…..] fields.
This is the 911 phone records we work with everyday.

System:
Built: Feb 2005
MB: ChainTech VN4F
CPU: AMD64 3500+
Mem: 1gig Rosewill Dual-Channel PC3200
Vid: Radeon X400 PCIe
HD[2]: Maxtor 200gig SATA150 [16meg cache]
OS: ‘doze 2k SP4 [full patch]

PSPad—————————
Open: 1.6 seconds [smooth scrolling all the way to the bottom]
just a plain text editor [www.pspad.com] version 4.3.3
memory used 38,568K CPU 0% with 1sec time and never got above 5% while scrolling the file

WP 10———————–
Open: 6.5 seconds [scrolling sucks, jumps, hangs, etc for several seconds trying to get to bottom page 14857 pages]
memory used 263,700K CPU idled at 0% after 11sec time

OO2————————–
Open: 18.1 seconds [smooth scrolling 3095 pages]
memory used 124,124 after 1:00 cpu time cpu went to 99% and stalled meaning a “hard kill” from the taskbar button resulting in a “recover document” on restarting OO2

The page counts are from the default margin and fonts from the initial install, I did not try to make them the same.

After thoroughly reviewing all the test results my affirmed conclusion:

scrap all the bloated, crash prone, crap-in-its-diaper, cuties-wootsy eye candy and just stay with a POT application.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it…………..

PS: I ablsolutely despise HTML email, I’m getting ocular diabeties from all the eye candy.

Your tests quite validly show that for normal usage, it really doesn’t matter. Only folks hanlding very large or very complex documents should pay attention to the differences between the two suites.

In on of George’s blogs, he says why worry about the other 10% of users who don’t use .doc format? Well, I could easily turn that question around here. Why should the rest of us care about the 1 or 2% of the users who need to handle very large office files?

The fact is, paying attention to such minutiae (sp?) means you’re paying attention to the computer equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. So many other points are more important than these ones. Plus, what good is fast document handling if you lose all that saved time with your system being down and fixed by the company computer tech.

Where I work we have IBM Thinkpad 42s. The ones running linux just work. period. They go in for work when the hardware goes bad, like a battery or hard drive failure. The ones running XP get to visit the help desk about once every three months for OS / Software failure. And about half the time the fix is to wipe and reinstall.

So, I could argue that those people should all be running linux. But the XP users use software that’s not available on linux, or the linux running counterparts are not mature and don’t provide the function they need, so they run XP.

If we were choosing simply on office suites, they’d probably be happy with Linux and OOo. The differences sited in George’s article would be considered “noise” in that environment.

And George, questioning the science, when you trusted Microsoft to tell you the truth? Come on, they could easily have a have in their own OS that hides the memory usage or loads libs into “system” memory thus making the application look smaller.

The only “scientific” way to know is to use a debugger (not the one that comes with VCC, it should be considered tainted) and SEE WHAT HAPPENS when you load and run the program. That would be sicentific. Trusting Microsoft is about as far from scientific as you can get…

Interestingly enough, I also did my real world tests : and here are my results (and some may then debate where the “real” bloat lies) :

On my brand-spanking-new powerhouse : a shiny IBM 300GL (PII-333Mhz, 256Mb of ram, and 2 x 5400rpm disks (hda=4gb, hdb=2gb), I installed OpenOffice 1.1.4.
I loaded a file, unusual by daily business operations (read I needed the biggest file sent my way in the last months, granted I am a UNIX Sys Admin, and don’t receive that much fluff mail), thus I got this server_room_temp.doc file created by a supplier with MS-Office/Word XP.
The native file was a 128 page document (basically a table) and weighed in at 2976 Kb (almost 3 Mb).

Here we go. On this vastly underpowered (by today’s power glutton standards)
1) OpenOffice_Writer launched in 31 seconds
2) it took 1m50s to load the initial file.
3) another 1m03s to convert it to *.sxw
-> which made it deflate to 35 kb. (85 times smaller !!!)
4) reloading this new file (still all 128 pages of it) took yet another 1m30s.

Handling more “common” documents, and since I live in a non-friendly M$-eclusive environment, I tend to open, edit, save all documents in *.doc format - which OpenOffice conveniently lets me set as a default. (I know, shame on me, but the client insists). Even so, and dealing my with app’s non-native format, I have yet to :
1) hit a compatibility glitch
2) have had to wait forever to load a file
3) have a receiver, reply that my file was un-readable

I have however, “fixed” files on more that 1 occaison, where my colleague opened a *.doc - that trashed his system (a PIV/1Gb ram). I simply opened it, saved-as (added “2″ at the end) and returned it. Voilà, fixed !

So bloat for bloat, and cost for cost, I will definately stick with my old iron, and slow/bloated OpenOffice.

For those who says costs doesn’t matter, if it didn’t and performances was all that mattered, we would all drive Mercedes and Porsches … ahem !

LB.
_________________________________________________
PS: Space on disk also counts : Office 2003 (approx 261MB) OpenOffice1.1.4 (approx 217MB).