Update on what is in this: http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/openofficeorg-30-new-features.html
To me it looks like features Office has had for years.....
This isn't really a response to either Graham or Ian directly, but something to consider. I'm going to borrow a quote from Joel Spolsky, though I'm sure the idea predates him: | "There's a famous fallacy that people learn in business school called | the 80/20 rule. It's false, but it seduces a lot of dumb software | startups. It seems to make sense. 80% of the people use 20% of the | features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% | of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies. The trouble | here, of course, is that it's _never the same 20%_. Everybody uses a | different set of features. When you start marketing your "lite" product, | and you tell people, "hey, it's lite, only 1MB," they tend to be very | happy, then they ask you if it has word counts, or spell checking, or | little rubber feet, or whatever obscure thing they can't live without, | and it doesn't, so they don't buy your product." When making any comparison to a Microsoft Office product, you have to consider this 80/20 fallacy. For some people, the new features added to this might be the final tipping point that they need for their enterprise to change. OO.o is sometimes seen by the open source community as a mixed blessing - the donation of code all but stopped development of GNOME Office, for example, because it didn't really seem worth the effort any more. It's definitely criticized for being legacy code - but wisdom says you should never throw legacy code away. The people that want agile innovation will keep doing it, in different ways. Since the advent of the wiki, I tend to keep information in those that would previously have been in word processing documents. Office suites are not "sexy" and it will probably continue to fall to the corporates to fund their development: I remember seeing a graph once that suggested commercial contributions to OO.o made up 95%+ of even new code. I guess all they can do is be as open as possible about accepting the contributions that outsiders do want to make. Craig