ian (or someone) said:
OOo's price trumps M$...And in my own experience M$ Office doesn't even have any features that would lead me to choose it over OOo, even if it cost the same1
thats the best arguement for OOo ive seen and in fact, believe its what will inevitably push it into the mainstream.
i run a team of writers.im the user that is being marketed to. im the perfect example of the end user. i was not involved in development, requirements gathering, and this forum is th first place i found to give my feedback .ill be experimenting with .odf and .rtf and in a few weeks ill begin xml studies. we have framemaker, word, (and excel which does come in handy with our use case docs), and a couple weeks ago, i started messing with OOo. some conversion glitches have been found in taking .doc stuff and using OOo to work with those manuals. but manuals built within OOo and saved as .doc seem to work with the other departments who occasionally get their hands on thses docs. our customers see a .doc format and thats all that matters to them. .pdf requires some thinking (thats what we use on our internal web), but again, the price makes it worth checking out.
also--about the 'technically better products dont necessarily succeed' supposition i made, i have not been convinced. technically inferior products with huge marketing departments generally win against companies with great products supported by inferior marketing efforts. Taylor Guitars beats Collings every year. Bose wins in the home A/V entertainment market against Vandersteen or NHT. Cannondale wins over Gary Fischer. MS wins over CPM, Mac, linux and BSD desktops. and Britanny Spears wins against Shaun Colvin.
Marketing often trumps excellence. before you cite anomalies that spoil my generalizations, i still believe OVER ALL, this is the case. and i do understand that no one wins the marketplace forever--thats why im here. some upstart comes along and beats the big dogs. MS was once one of those little dogs. as was iPod, Toyota, and Fox.
id MUCH prefer to see an open standards product win the battle. so ill do what i can to help. and that includes criticism as much as praise.
kip
