[ILUG] openoffice.org

[Matthew French]

Nick asked:
> If Microsoft were, by fluke or accident, to develop something genuinely
> useful, would we, dismayed by years of crap, be too blind to see it?

A good question. It might sound otherwise, but I have no real dislike for
Microsoft. I am wary of them because they are in a position of power where
it would be foolish to trust any of their motives. And they have
demonstrated their willingness time and again to ruthlessly crush any
competition without questioning the morality of whatever method they use.

I think Visual C++ was a good development environment, and the compiler was
not bad after the initial bugs were ironed out. (The fact that they stole
most of Borland's compiler team is irrelevant to this debate.) I believe SQL
Server was a huge improvement on Sybase, and Access was IMHO a truly
revolutionary way to approach database development at the time. (I still
remember how the mainframe developers at the demonstration of Access 1.0 sat
up and were suddenly interested in a Microsoft product for the first time
ever.)

And whether we like it or not, Internet Explorer is still a good web
browser. Its mail client may be have been designed for virus authors, but
the browser still does its job very capably.

But notice how a lot of my comments are in the past tense. The problem is
that Microsoft have pursued, over the past few years, a policy of
integrating any new feature they can think of, whether we need it or not,
starting with That Damn Paperclip(tm). Now most of their products truly earn
their description as bloatware. I spend more time trying to diagnose which
feature is conflicting with which other new feature than actually doing
productive work.

Which is why, when I can, I use Dia instead of Visio, TeX or HTML instead of
Word, and of course Microsoft have no answer to the Gimp.  :)

- Matthew



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