The failing of OpenOffice

OpenOffice is a pretty good product (in spite of the fact that comes with a spreadsheet). But there are some issues with how it's designed.

These can be summed up in one sentence: “OpenOffice is trying to be just like Microsoft Office.”

It may not be immediately obvious why this is a bad thing. Lucky for you, I'm willing to explain it.

See, people take things literally. Frequently, too literally. You'd think after a jillion television commercials, people would learn that they're being lied to on a daily basis, but they don't, and they still get upset when they discover a particular lie that they've fallen victim to.

So, when you tell someone that OpenOffice is just like Microsoft Office, you're setting things up to fail.

Now, you many not think you're telling people this. I don't know if the project itself is aware that they're saying this, but you've got to remember the whole “read between the lines” thing. Many people are more willing to read between the lines than they are to read the lines themselves. I think it has to do with the hope that whatever you're looking at is what you want that keeps people from actually paying attention to what that thing really is.

People want a copy of Microsoft Office without all the Microsoft stuck to it. So, if there's any possible way that “OpenOffice is a direct replacement for Microsoft Office” can fit between the lines, people will cram it in there.

But OpenOffice is not a direct replacement for Microsoft Office. Sure, it's a great substitute – I haven't use MS Office in a long time (I've been using OpenOffice since it was Star Office). But try to save a “text document” as MS Word and take a moment to read through the warning message you get. Even the OpenOffice developers aren't willing to claim full compatibility.

This leads to problems when people find out after the fact. I've noticed that people are willing to do a lot of work, but only if they agree to it beforehand. The ordinary person gets pretty upset if they suddenly realize, halfway through something, that it's going to be more work than they expected.

This is where I've hit major problems working with OpenOffice. Let's break them down into some classifications:

• MS Office Power user can't figure out how to replicate advanced features in OpenOffice – as a result, OOo is NOT the same as MS Office to this person.
• Employee who's not terribly comfortable with computers to begin with is now having a world of trouble with OOo, because things are just a little different.
• High-powered executive-type (who has better things to do than understand software) finds that the document he received from a potential client doesn't display quite right. Embarrassment follows.

In each case, these problems would have been acceptable if the person having them had agreed to them in advance.

If you're a boss, and dictate policy to your employees, you don't care about this so much. But if your a software project trying to convince people to switch to your product, this doesn't make you any friends.

Now, I'm not all doom and gloom. Here's what I think OOo can do to put themselves back on the path to righteous software:

• Stop trying to be like MS Office. Those days are past, people know you exist, it's time to establish yourself as bigger and better. No, built-in PDF exporting isn't enough.
• Trying going back to some features that really worked, like WordPerfect's “show codes”.
• Unjumble all the programs from each other so it doesn't take forever to start my word processor.
• Figure out a menu system. OOo's current menu system is confusing, overloaded, and pops menus up in front of me while I'm trying to work. It's obtrusive, to be honest. It amazes me that nobody has figured out that this toolbar system is crap.
• Who decided to almost be smart? Why do I have to save a zipped version of my document? Why doesn't it allow me to save in the OpenDocument format without the compression? Sure would make it nice to use existing XML and other text parsing tools. It's odd that OpenOffice supports Microsoft's XML file format, but not their own.

Open source has never been particularly good at being one of the crowd. It does do well when it excels, however. OpenOffice needs to step up to the plate and start exceeding expectations. I think it's already on that road. Perhaps what it really needs to do is realize that it's time to be its own program, and stop feeling as if it has to mimic other software.

I don't mean this as an insult to the OOo developers. They're doing a great job. I just think they need to adjust the focus a little.

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