NY Times, June 20, 2002 STATE OF THE ART The Office Software That Roared By DAVID POGUE
MICROSOFT once ran a great ad for Office, its business-software cash cow. It went something like this: "Over 94 percent of the business world uses Microsoft Office. What are we doing wrong?" It was true: the programs of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook) seemed as permanent in our lives as the sun, the moon and Windows error messages. Its rivals — I.B.M.'s Lotus suite and Corel's WordPerfect suite, for example — were pretty much the same thing for pretty much the same price, and never posed much of a threat. The world waited for a contender that was so compelling, people might actually consider filing for Microsoft divorce. Now there is one. It's called OpenOffice, and it has a killer feature: it's free. Like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice — whose official name is OpenOffice.org 1.0 — comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet program and a slide-show program. It lacks an e-mail program and database, but does have a powerful graphics program and a Web-page editor. Amazingly, all this fits in a 50-megabyte download from www.openoffice.org. You have your choice of 27 languages and three operating systems: Windows, Linux or Solaris. (A Mac OS X version is in the works.) How could such a sweet suite be free? OpenOffice is what's called an open-source project: a carefully orchestrated group effort by programmers all over the world, donating their time and talent to making a dent in the Microsoft monopoly. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/technology/circuits/20STAT.html Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
