Re: [libreoffice-users] What is an "Office" Package?

Lorenzo,

You are free to "think" however you wish, thank a veteran when you see
one.  The fact is each corporation in the Fortunate 1000 has a "standard
desktop" and while the name brand components might change, the
functional content does not.

Much much before that.  There was no email other than internal company
email.  If your company was a big mainframe user, your email system was
PROFS and your "standard desktop" included a 3270 terminal emulator.  If
your company was VMS based they used VMS mail and your desktop included
a VT-100 or other terminal emulator.  Quaker Oats, having a large number
of both platforms wrote its own email system called, wait for it,
Oatmail.  I kid you not.

Gmail and Yahoo mail are being used by INDIVIDUALS en-masse.  While
"some" corporations have migrated there, most cannot.  Neither Gmail nor
Yahoo, nor any other email hosting site offers you any security.  There
is no such thing as "internal only" email and no possibility of
arranging for an Arthur Andersen late night disk shredding party when
the government demands all of those internal emails discussing the
addictiveness of Nicotine or the fact your shiny new drug shreds a
patient's liver in less than 20 months.  

Even if you don't have nefarious intentions, from a corporate
perspective, an external email host is extremely high risk.  What
happens when your engineering team finally identifies the mix needed to
successfully cast a 4-cylinder ceramic engine block which weighs less
than 15lbs and now enables a 40MPG car to get 70MPG?  Do you really want
the documents passed among your production environment via email
(because it was fastest) sitting out there on the Web where anyone can
hack them?  They could use those documents to file for a patent now,
without building a prototype first, completely locking you out of the
market.

Be that as it may, external email services generally have a browser
interface and a browser was listed.

Bundling all this stuff in the same suite might not make sense to you,
but it is _exactly_ how MS Office displaced better products.  Without
Outlook and its calendar/contact integration, it would have never made
it on the desktop.  IBM had already bundled everything except email into
their Lotus SmartSuite and despite having a full torso better word
processor and the "industry standard at the time" spreadsheet 1-2-3, MS
Office managed to push SmartSuite out of the market.  They even pushed
WordPerfect out and that ruled the word processing market for over a
decade.

You may find this hard to swallow, but most email services and clients
block gmail and yahoo email by default.  They do this because there is
absolute zero verification going on for those accounts and more than
half of the "$25 million from long lost relative", "Nigerian government
overbillings", and "Country xxx lottery" scam emails are coming from
those addresses.

Keystrokes are not fully customizable in most packages, nor are they
common, nor do most of the keystrokes one gets used to with an
integrated package exist.  What keystroke do you hit while editing a
document to bring up your email creation client?  How about a
spreadsheet?  How about popping open the browser to look something up?
IBM is actually solving a lot of this in Symphony with plug-ins, but
they have a limited desire since they are designing Symphony to be
integration glue amongst the various portions of Lotus Notes.

On Fri, 2011-07-15 at 09:59 +0200, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:

> Roland Hughes wrote:
> > People have been poking at this from different angles based upon what
> > "they" want, and what "they think" LibreOffice is or should be.  Putting
> > it bluntly, they are all incorrect.
>
> At last! Thou is our real, awaited god of IT! Finally  show us the Way
> to the "correct" way we must "think"... - uh wtf? :-)
>
> > [...] a single definition which has existed LONG BEFORE MS OFFICE
> > EVER CAME OUT.  In that world, and "Office" package is defined as
> > follows:
> "That world" seems to date at least 20 years ago. Before things like
> gmail existed.
>
> > A standardized bundle of software, that, when installed with the base
> > operating system on a desktop allows a corporate worker to do at least
> > 90% of their job.
> This now-a-days would include all of the stuff corporations use such as
> in-house customised web-applications (e.g. for back-office etc), SAP,
> and all sorts of non standard stuff they might need.
> > [...]
> > Browser
> > email
> > word processor
> > Calendar tool
> > drawing program
> > Spreadsheet
> > database reporting tool
>
> Bundling all of this in the same 'suite' doesn't make much sense.
> > The more highly integrated these tools are, the easier it is to bring on
> > new users because the keystrokes will be the same, and, they can share a
> > common contact database with more robust features.
> This seems yet to be a very loose and blurred definition of
> 'integration'. Keystrokes are fully customisable in modern software.
> Contact databases are easily handled outside specific software (e.g.
> LDAP etc.)
> Not to mention the fact that what some products sell as "integration" is
> actually a lock-in. That is, if you can only import an excel spreadsheet
> into a Word table, the two integrate but you're locked in.
> > I am somewhat shocked they haven't pulled KMail and Kalendar into the
> > package.
>
> Not surprising really with so many people switching to gmali these days
> which, in turn, means switching away from email clients.
>
> Lorenzo.


-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
http://www.infiniteexposure.net

No U.S. troops have ever lost their lives defending our ethanol
reserves.

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