Hi Italo, Good Estern to you too. I was not talking about features. Somewhere in the menus they are all there. I was refering to reasons not to adopt and reasons to dump LibO. Those are not necessarily missing features.
I think those complaints are important because "behind every complainer or quitter there are 10 people not contented either". Some facts from my own experience: - Three times I tried to introduce OOo in organisations I that hired me. Three times I failed. Reason number one: OOo/LibO lacks "normal view" and/or "hide white space". Many people within the companies found scrolling through upper and lower margins so annoying they did not want to use OOo. Maybe that is just a minor feature in your eyes, but it stoppend OOo at the gate, three times out of three. Matthias Bauer is working on that now. God bless him. - Calc was not adopted because some things work differently from MSO. A litte "switcher's guide" could have prevented the rejection. That is: if you care enough about your potential customers to find out what bothers them and accept that maybe - just maybe - you don't know everything that matters. (Sure, trainers could have done wonders. But home users don't want to be trained. They just want it to work the way they expect.) - Students dropped OOo for another reason. Documents they composed in OOo and saved as doc-files at home, were not printed in the proper layout using the university Windows/MSO computers. Maybe their settings were wrong, maybe they made stupid mistakes, but they had a very quick solution: they dropped OOo and were very vocal about it. I think little things like these are extremely important. As architect Mies van der Rohe put it: "God is in the details". Some time ago, Ubuntu/Canonical ran a "100 paper cuts" campaign. Users could report little things that annoyed them and could be fixed easily. I think LibO should follow that example (apart from the former users survey). But you know best, so I guess it is not going to happen. Bye, Riemer 2011/4/24 Italo Vignoli <italo.vign...@gmail.com> > On 4/24/11 2:31 AM, Riemer Thalen wrote: > > To achieve this, the developers and policy makers need to look outside the >> community. Test users and focus groups of dedicated users can name new >> functions that are "nice to have". IMHO, now it is more important to give >> priority to the missing features that average non-committed users "need to >> have". To identify those features, you'll need to ask former users. That >> was >> the initianal point I tried to make. It turns out the opinion leaders in >> the >> community do not agree with me. So be it. >> > > Former users, or people who decide to switch back from OOo/LO to MS Office, > are a very small group, and each one of them has a different reason. Office > suites share over 90% of their features, and so it is very difficult to > identify "missing" ones. > > Most people use not more than 5% of features, and power users get to 20%. A > tiny minority goes beyond this threshold. Deciding on features because we > assume that people base their decision on features is wrong or misleading. > > Switching from MS Office to OOo/LO usually happens because of the price. In > the majority of cases, users continue to use both suites for quite a long > time, until they decide for one. Many people continue to use both forever, > maybe one in the office and the other at home. > > Companies switch from MS Office to OOo/LO because of the better TCO, and > the very few that switch back (their names are on MS web site, and MS has > even made a YouTube video out of them) decide to do so because they made a > wrong assumption and prolly overlooked factors like the internal workflow. > > Even the Microsoft video does not use features as the main reason to switch > back to MS Office, just because the main reasons is not based on features. > > Software adoption is based on features for programs focused on a specific > task, and even in this case there are exceptions: FreeHand (Macromedia) and > Illustrator (Adobe) have fighted for years in several markets in order to > overtake each other, but for weird reasons (as they have both made extensive > research to discover that often the choice was because: "I like it more") > they have never been able to achieve their objective. > > Italy was a FreeHand market, and adding FreeHand features to Illustrator > never worked. France was an Illustrator market, and adding Illustrator > features to FreeHand never worked. Graphic designers were just sticking with > their original choice. > > Anyway, today office suites share 95% of the same feature set. The > situation was different in the past, and at that time Sun did several > efforts to know the missing features (this led to OOo 2.0, which was a > feature release). It was back in 2004, but since 2007 OOo has steadily > increased its market share exactly because the feature problem was solved. > > Just a few points to end the message: > > 1. MS has a yearly global turnover of 60 billion dollars. The Office > Products Division has a yearly global turnover of 25 billion dollars (not > quarterly) which is flat or slightly decreasing (if I remember well, it used > to be 28 or 30 in the recent past). > > 2. Inside a community, no one is an opinion leader. Each one makes his > contribution based on his competences, and this makes some people more > visible than others, but this is just a matter of life. A community is based > on teamwork, and each tiny bit of work is very important. > > 3. "The journey is the reward" (Steve Jobs, in a completely different > environment, but for a similar objective). Communities move slowly, and > results come in slowly. Our community is very mature, because over the past > 10 years we have seen happening all it could happen. We are here for the > long run (the marathon) and not the fiscal quarter. > > Best regards, and happy Easter break, Italo > > > -- > Italo Vignoli > italo.vign...@gmail.com > mobile +39.348.5653829 > VoIP +39.02.320621813 > skype italovignoli > > -- > Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+h...@libreoffice.org > Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette > List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/marketing/ > All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be > deleted > > -- Muntinglaan 11, 9751 PT Haren T 050 5348669, M 0651357148 LinkedIn.com/in/riemerthalen Dit bericht is verzonden vanaf een Linux-PC. Windows-virussen kunnen dus alleen voorkomen in doorgestuurde bijlagen. Als dit bericht niet voor u bestemd is, wilt u het dan terug- sturen en de ontvangen kopie ongelezen vernietigen? Dank u. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to marketing+h...@libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
