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Hi Italo,

Good Estern to you too. I was not talking about features. Somewhere in the
menus they are all there. I was refering to reasons not to adopt and reasons
to dump LibO. Those are not necessarily missing features.

I think those complaints are important because "behind every complainer or
quitter there are 10 people not contented either".

Some facts from my own experience:

- Three times I tried to introduce OOo in organisations I that hired me.
Three times I failed. Reason number one: OOo/LibO lacks "normal view" and/or
"hide white space". Many people within  the companies found scrolling
through upper and lower margins so annoying they did not want to use OOo.
Maybe that is just a minor feature in your eyes, but it stoppend OOo at the
gate, three times out of three. Matthias Bauer is working on that now. God
bless him.

- Calc was not adopted because some things work differently from MSO. A
litte "switcher's guide" could have prevented the rejection. That is: if you
care enough about your potential customers to find out what bothers them and
accept that maybe - just maybe - you don't know everything that matters.
(Sure, trainers could have done wonders. But home users don't want to be
trained. They just want it to work the way they expect.)

- Students dropped OOo for another reason. Documents they composed in OOo
and saved as doc-files at home, were not printed in the proper layout
using the university Windows/MSO computers. Maybe their settings were wrong,
maybe they made stupid mistakes, but they had a very quick solution: they
dropped OOo and were very vocal about it.

I think little things like these are extremely important. As architect Mies
van der Rohe put it: "God is in the details".

Some time ago, Ubuntu/Canonical ran a "100 paper cuts" campaign. Users could
report little things that annoyed them and could be fixed easily. I think
LibO should follow that example (apart from the former users survey).

But you know best, so I guess it is not going to happen.

Bye,
Riemer


2011/4/24 Italo Vignoli <italo.vignoli@gmail.com>

On 4/24/11 2:31 AM, Riemer Thalen wrote:

 To achieve this, the developers and policy makers need to look outside the
community. Test users and focus groups of dedicated users can name new
functions that are "nice to have". IMHO, now it is more important to give
priority to the missing features that average non-committed users "need to
have". To identify those features, you'll need to ask former users. That
was
the initianal point I tried to make. It turns out the opinion leaders in
the
community do not agree with me. So be it.


Former users, or people who decide to switch back from OOo/LO to MS Office,
are a very small group, and each one of them has a different reason. Office
suites share over 90% of their features, and so it is very difficult to
identify "missing" ones.

Most people use not more than 5% of features, and power users get to 20%. A
tiny minority goes beyond this threshold. Deciding on features because we
assume that people base their decision on features is wrong or misleading.

Switching from MS Office to OOo/LO usually happens because of the price. In
the majority of cases, users continue to use both suites for quite a long
time, until they decide for one. Many people continue to use both forever,
maybe one in the office and the other at home.

Companies switch from MS Office to OOo/LO because of the better TCO, and
the very few that switch back (their names are on MS web site, and MS has
even made a YouTube video out of them) decide to do so because they made a
wrong assumption and prolly overlooked factors like the internal workflow.

Even the Microsoft video does not use features as the main reason to switch
back to MS Office, just because the main reasons is not based on features.

Software adoption is based on features for programs focused on a specific
task, and even in this case there are exceptions: FreeHand (Macromedia) and
Illustrator (Adobe) have fighted for years in several markets in order to
overtake each other, but for weird reasons (as they have both made extensive
research to discover that often the choice was because: "I like it more")
they have never been able to achieve their objective.

Italy was a FreeHand market, and adding FreeHand features to Illustrator
never worked. France was an Illustrator market, and adding Illustrator
features to FreeHand never worked. Graphic designers were just sticking with
their original choice.

Anyway, today office suites share 95% of the same feature set. The
situation was different in the past, and at that time Sun did several
efforts to know the missing features (this led to OOo 2.0, which was a
feature release). It was back in 2004, but since 2007 OOo has steadily
increased its market share exactly because the feature problem was solved.

Just a few points to end the message:

1. MS has a yearly global turnover of 60 billion dollars. The Office
Products Division has a yearly global turnover of 25 billion dollars (not
quarterly) which is flat or slightly decreasing (if I remember well, it used
to be 28 or 30 in the recent past).

2. Inside a community, no one is an opinion leader. Each one makes his
contribution based on his competences, and this makes some people more
visible than others, but this is just a matter of life. A community is based
on teamwork, and each tiny bit of work is very important.

3. "The journey is the reward" (Steve Jobs, in a completely different
environment, but for a similar objective). Communities move slowly, and
results come in slowly. Our community is very mature, because over the past
10 years we have seen happening all it could happen. We are here for the
long run (the marathon) and not the fiscal quarter.

Best regards, and happy Easter break, Italo


--
Italo Vignoli
italo.vignoli@gmail.com
mobile +39.348.5653829
VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli

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