Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Fwd: Libre Office's future strategy - suggestions from a Computer Weekly article that may be of use to the Foundation

Hi Jonathon, :-)

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 23:39, jonathon <bible.study.software@gmail.com> wrote:
> > There's a lot of work that is better done on a conventionally-sized keyboard and display (I'm 
> > sure enterprise users would agree).
>
> Most _real_  work in the enterprise is either looking up data, or
> entering data.  Creating pretty pictures, and writing pretty pictures is
> not real work.

Hmmmm... tell that to the graphic designers, advertising people and
anyone in the various professions in which you work on developing
documentation? (Just a few examples...)

> For data entry, a seven inch screen with a keypad is adequate.
> For data lookup, a seven inch screen is also adequate.
> Granted, i am assuming that the database, and UI is designed logically
> with both i18n and a11y in mind. (Something that most software manages
> to fail at.)

Well, I think there are lots of kinds of work that people usually like
to have a large display for, or even a dual-headed system... I'd go
nuts trying to do mine on a 7-inch display... :-D

> > As for the idea of going cloud-based?
>
> Do I really need to explain why being able to setup and run your local
> FLOSS cloud is a required next step?

Erm.... Yes.... next step to what? ;-) Maybe I'm missing something?
Are you perhaps thinking just of enterprise usage?

> > Huge development effort: the resemblances in the code base between a
> > desktop-based application and a server-based app must be very limited.
> > Only the user interface might look visually similar.
>
> The code difference isn't that much bigger than between two platforms
> that have different chip architectures and different bit sizes. Intell
> 486 v PowerPC chip, for example.

Well, AFAIK, increasingly, multi-platform apps are written using
platform-independent languages like Java, that considerably decrease
the platform-dependent porting... But, personally, I suspect that a
team developing a cloud app that functioned comparably to LibO might
well decide to start coding from scratch rather than trying to port
the existing code base...

> > Nor can one ignore that  Google, Zoho and Microsoft have a big headstart.
>
> Unless I've missed something, their offerings are closed source products
> that can not be locally installed.

Closed source, certainly, but that wouldn't make them any less
competitors in terms of the offering to the end user... Actually,
IIRC, when it launched Google Apps, wasn't Google offering its
products to enterprises for private clouds? (Or was it MS?) In any
case, Ubuntu certainly does market private clouds [1].

In any case, I recently installed the Zoho Webservice products on my
Ubuntu system, to check them out, and the time taken to open a doc was
vastly longer than with LibO.... I actually thought that Zoho had
failed to launch, so I fired up LibO and opened the doc... and then
about 3 minutes later a browser window opened with Zoho Webservice
Word Processor and the said doc... So slow... IMHO, for many needs,
Web apps are still hype... Maybe if I was in South Korea with a 4G
connection...

> > I'm not at the mercy of network factors or the whims of *any* organization.
>
> > However, there's obviously a big potential to use Web-based community dictionaries, translation 
> > engines, templates, bibliographical
> >  services, online storage services, and other stuff we haven't even thought of yet...
>
> There is a slight contradiction between those two statements.

No, not really. In the first statement I was saying that, personally,
I like to have a system that is totally autonomous and still provides
all its functionality even if I have no internet connectivity.

In the second statement, I was thinking about "add-on" services that
give me added value but that do not constitute the core functionality
of my software.

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private

David Nelson

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