IBM 'advises' staff to opt for a Microsoft Office-free world

Somewhere over the rainbow???

A better title would be:

What a wonderful world

Standards

Standards are worthless if nobody uses them, I hate doing it but everytime I send a document I convert it from ODF to a MS Format because the fact is most end users wouldn't even know what to do with the ODF... They'd probably ignore it like my HR Department.

The fact is that the Microsoft Office formats are what everybody uses. Which is a shame.

Paris, because she is about as intelligent as my MS Office using HR Department.

IBM save $ through Symphony

Im one of these 20000 techies, and as IBM had a bumper year (Best since circa 2000) we are getting double digit pay rises, so I wil gladly swap Microsoft if it saves the company money and puts more dosh in my pocket.

Pity the other companies dont see it that way eh ;)

(Posted anonymously as perhaps some of the above has been 'marketing')

Another "anonymous IBM coward"

@Stu Reeves & @Steve: We use what our customers demand when we do work with/for them. Open Office is good at reading/writing to MS proprietary formats, but it's not perfect. If the customer wants to work in proprietary Office formats then that's what we do.

Personally, I've been happily running Linux with OpenOffice on my Thinkpad for quite some time now. I've needed Windows once (for an external web-conferencing system) in the last year or so. Life is good.

As someone on the inside...

... It's news to me!

proprietary

Say what you want about MS, but at the end of the day if I am having problems with a bit of their software I can always call them up, and the do make an effort to get it fixed, and I have yet to be charged for it (even though their website says I may be).

With an open format, if I have a problem, I can post something on a forum and hope someone gets back to me maybe.

Economics 101 teaches you about something called opportunity cost. You get what you pay for. TANSTAAFL

Who uses VBA scripting?

Is a good question. Anyone who has ever tried doing a legal contract with automatic numbering - and with all the insanities that lawyers put into contracts - will appreciate why most decent-sized law firms have a suite of VBA code that manages Word's paragraph numbering for you.

OpenOffice's numbering is nothing like powerful enough. I can't comment on Symphony, but SmartSuite wasn't up to the mark either last time I looked; WordPerfect is, which is why so many lawyers still use it.

@ Standards

All too true.

All the clients of the consultancy I do work for use Office, so it's all gotta be that way. The only time it ain't, is if something gets changed into a locked-down pdf so's it can't get altered.

It's THIS 'monopoly' that's MS's biggest 'asset' now.

The 'windows' can be broken (frequently are anyway!), but the 'office' stays safe, for now anyway.

Erm, what memo?

As another one of the 20000, I haven't received the memo either and as for the anonymous coward above touting double digit pay rises, he's obviously privy to more information than the rest of us (but I do hope he's right).

Use of standards

I often see the argument along the lines of.

"We hate Microsoft and Open Office has the best market share. We should stick it to them by only sending our documents out in ODF. Then when people get it they have to download OO to read it. Muhahahaha!"

This argument is wrong because MS users will just delete your document. Firstly because they don't want to download it and even if they did they probably don't have install rights from IT. Secondly, on principle because your a dick.

However, why not just use PDF instead (although not open, it is an ISO standard and most if not all office users can open it on their PC).

Not in the UK

I've in the UK and have not received any memo from IBM advising me to use anything else but Office.

As an exercise I just uploaded a 201 page contract I'm working on into Open Office and had a look at it. Mmm....looks nothing like the Word document I'm working on. The equivalent Track Changes in Open Office doesn't seem to work as well (not that Track Changes in Office is anything to write home about), table layout is a mess as well as how landscape/portrait handling is displayed. I've no doubt that Open Office would be able to do what we wanted if we had started using it from the outset, but it's not up to importing complex word docs and thats the problem. Whilst most of the world + dog have docs stored in whatever proprietry Office doc they use, they still need Office or some version of it.

One day we might be able to dump that bloated hog that is office, but not yet.

Paris as she's as much idea about formatting Office as OpenOffice has

OO Bloatware

I've used a bunch of different word processors all the way back to pre-SGML.

Word is, sadly, superior to OO, and uses much less resource on a Windows machine (and OO is still bloaty on Linux, where I use OO mostly since it is free, and certainly good enough). OO is way to much of a memory hog on Windows, as bad as the bloatware SameTime Connect 7.x.

Lotass? Word processor? You have got to be kidding. A surprising number of people still stagger around using Lotus Word Pro (long dead) though-- never heard of these other Lotass products, "Lotus" and "works correctly" do not fit in the same sentence. After 15 years of (now mostly Indians) working on Gerstner's Folly, Lotass email almost works most of the time if you ignore stupid design decisions made by Ozzie (now destroying MicroSoft after bombing with Groove. Somehow Ozzie will come out richer, but everyone near him will be poorer-- a financial Fatal Attractor, good work if you can get it though). Lotass email might actually enhance productivity once the last of the old Lotus emps die/retire/quit/getlayedoff and the mind numbingly bad design decisions can be reversed.

Easy solution

Who can't read an HTML file :)

20000 techies

Its not the UK/Europe or US then, India perhaps? And then probably for internal comms only.

We have a free web enabled processor anyway Writeley by google, look how that set the world on fire.

As for the formats not doing what M$ does, legal?

History

I was in IBM 12 years ago, and at that time, it was OS/2 and Lotus SmartSuite that came loaded automatically on any Wintel system. If you wanted Windows and Office, you had to have a really good business case, and Office on OS/2 was not really well supported (probably due to Microsoft using secret API calls when running on Windows).

When OS/2 fell out of grace at IBM, there was a time when SmartSuite on Windows was tried, but as most of IBM's customers were Office users, document exchange became a problem (there were SmartSuite filters to open and write Office formats, but they were not included by default, and were not 100% effective). There became a straight choice for users between SmartSuite and Office, and Office won, like in the rest of the world.

IBM then tried to make SmartSuite (and Lotus Notes client, the Email part of Notes) more popular with a giveaway program on magazine cover disks, but that did not work either, so the package died, albeit a slow, lingering death.

So for about 10 years, IBM has been using exclusively Office, buying corporate licenses at whatever cost Microsoft felt like charging them.

If IBM can make even some of their own users give up Office, so that a smaller license fee needs paying, then they can only gain. And with ODF being a hot topic at the moment, it gives the possibility of some free news space. Not sure how the targeted users will react, however.

I avoided Office, using SmartSuite after I left IBM, and switched to StarOffice and then OpenOffice when I decided to use Linux as my primary OS (I'm a Unix consultant). And now, when I have to use Office as part of my work on client provided systems, you cannot imagine how annoying and difficult I find it. The lack of any common sense in things like font handling, and styles when cutting and pasting between documents, everything moving around when new releases come out, and some very strange behavior when trying to adjust complex numbered lists just astound me. I could list at least 50 things that I cannot stand. Quite how the software passes ergonomic testing escapes me.

So I think that IBMers should embrace a move from Office. Let's break Microsoft's monopoly. Of course, I would actually like to move back to Memorandum Macros and Troff, or possibly LaTeX for documents, and who needs spreadsheets anyway!

only problem with OO

Is that the newer MS shite make sure to create a file format OO won't read. Curse those non-standard MS formats.

PDF's are editable you idiots

there are many tools that make a PDF into and editable format

Works for IBM?

> Im one of these 20000 techies, and as IBM had a bumper year (Best since circa 2000) we are getting double digit pay rises

You don't work for IBM then....oh, and IBM has 380,000 staff and around 60-70% are techies at last count.

News to me!

I am a "techie" IBMer in the UK, and this is news to me. I must have also missed the press release about sacking 350,000 employees because last time I bothered looking I think there were about 370,000 of us, not 20,000!

The issue we are facing is the problem of format compatibility. You can certainly open and read .doc files fine, but if you want to send a polished and professional document to a client, no way in hell would you use open office to generate it! I noted that someone mentioned using PDF files above and this is a good alternative but can sometimes backfire slightly depending on the client relationship. If you send a client a read-only document (yes I know it can be edited if you really want), you run the risk of coming across as if somehow they cannot be trusted to have a mighty IBM-generated document which they might have the temerity to edit etc etc. Extreme example I know, but Office is so ingrained people start asking questions when you don't use it...

Maybe in a few more years we'll have a nice ODF compatibility on everything and we can finally put this to bed.

@Mark Rendell

It's funny, all the collaborative things you mention were pretty much invented by IBM. The document sharing, mail, and shared calender features were first seen in the PROFS, or NOSS internal office system that IBM used. At the time, it was all done on mainframes and 3270 terminals, but it eventually was ported to OS/2. I'm talking about a product (the mainframe version) that existed BEFORE PCs were actually made.

It's funny that it took a long time for some of the features to appear in Lotus Notes, which was supposed to replace PROFS. But I think that most things now appear in Domino, when used with an up-to-date Notes client. The problem is that most people see Notes as just a quirky mail client, rather than the revolutionary collaborative tool and application platform that it actually was and is. But I will admit that Notes used to wind me up when the replication I asked for didn't happen, leaving all my outgoing mail stuck on my Thinkpad.

Anonymous non-spokesperson

I don't feel like a coward--but I am certainly not authorized to speak on behalf of the company... My concern is that I have to be very careful not to say anything that is not public knowledge, and in being "very careful" it's hard to say much.

Anyway, the key points to me are freedom and competition. The freedom means that we have real choice, and the competition means that we will have real improvements. Microsoft's version of freedom is that they are willing to offer a couple of versions, but they want all of those versions to be Microsoft products. Microsoft wants to control document standards to make it impossible for other companies to offer alternative implementations. In contrast, ODF is about real freedom with a structured framework for data compatibility.

I admit that I don't much like the current version of Symphony, but it is substantially different from Open Office, and I have a real choice there. The users are going to decide which products they like best, and I think that's fundamentally a good thing. Within ODF, your data is not the hostage.

The Penguin is because I mostly use Symphony within Linux, but I'm not going to reveal how many distros we support internally... I'd like to say how much of my own work I do on Linux platforms, but that's another one I better let pass... Please contact a local sales representative.

The key word is OPEN

Of course, if Microsof implemented the existing ODF open standard in Office then there would be no issue opening an ODF document in Word, or a document written using Word and saved in ODF format in OpenOffice or any other Office suite supporting ODF.

Bottom line, it is NOT in Microsoft's interest to implement an ODF interface, adaptor, call it whatever you will, because it simply allows people to opt to not buy Office.

Alternatively they could at least finish their own 'open' standard so that it was at least complete - currently there are holes - so that the open source community can then implement document readers/writers/converters. But again, this only promotes choice to the user - not good for M$

Best thing people (and big business) can do is to tell Microsoft they will only purchase or upgrade once a truly open format is supported.

@Rob Willett

" .. its not up to importing complex word documents ... "

But niether is Word 2007!

As well as hiding obsucre little used functions like "save" and "insert" in an unfathomable new menu system, they have broken "cut" and "paste" if you cut form a "2003" doc into a "2007" doc the formatting goes crazy.

More bizzarly cutting from a spreadsheet into a word document which worked perfectly in "2003" loses half your text in "2007".

Sod downgrading Vista to XP -- how can I get a copy of Office 2003 on to my Vista box?

@Gulfie

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21ExpandedFormatsPR.mspx