4.0.3

users
#21

Amit

Your knowledge of the document standards is limited by your reply here. This issue of the document standards and naming convention was covered by a world body of multinationals and the preservation of all things in human digital text etc. This was to allow anyone, alien or earthly, thousands of years from now, to decode and read and modify the history in the digital world of mankind. So the open document standards were born and ratified and accpeted by the majority of the world that counts. MS did not agree and tried to introduce their own so-called opens standard with the .xml base, i.e.x docx, xlsx, and so forth.

But it has not been accepted by the world bodies, even though the MS document standard does survive. As you will now notice MSO 2007 (partially), MSO 2010 and 2013 all can reads and write in the ODS standard used by OOo, AOO and LO. MS had no choice but to fit in and follow suit, so it's not the other way around that we and all other s outside of the use of MSO, must fit in. The ODS standard is here to stayt and will dominate over time, no matter what the masses say and want. It's about education that we all have choices and many efficient and useful alternatives in the digital world.

Regards

Andrew Brown

#22

I might be out-of-date of what had been decided. But what I see is this: MS
Office everywhere I worked which translates to possibly billions of
doallars in MS pcokets.

My agenda with whatever I have wrote till now is: Why should MS get
billions of dollars?

The open formats should be supported, I am not against that, I am against
the timing.

MS Office will win because 90% of computers have Windosws on them. Until
Linux desktops/laptops become popular people will not switch to open
document format.

My strategy would be similar to MS: Make users switch to LO and then give
them open dcoument format and remove MS formats. Since 90% of the
installations will have LO, no one is going to complain and they will
happily settle for open document format and MS can't do anything.

It is the strategy and timing I am talking about. Doing both together (MS
compatibility + Open document) is a strain on developers and QA.

Given that LO has very few developers and QA, then why should LO focus on
two product lines. It is not correct strategy.

Regards,
Amit

PS: I am not pushing my ideas but I do not want to pay MS. Also, I will be
using LO but if the person who is receiving my document has MS Office, then
what?

MS is a clever, arm-twisting company. You never know what they can come up
with. Bill Gates knew about monopoly and that's why all MS components are
intertwined with each other so that if you remove one component then other
component will not work properly. Bill Gates did this even before question
arose about breaking up MS, and after this happened in Europe, MS avoided
it easily by stating that if they remove IE then Windows will not work
properly and got away with not breaking up.

#23

I too am an end user and not a developer. From my perspective it is not at
all difficult to generally keep up to date with the latest software
(although the 4.1. desktop-integration thing threw me for a while). All new
releases are clearly badged: don't use on production machines. So don't
then. This is not the fault of the developers if people install software
that is not to be used on production machines on production machines. If
your sysadmin is chasing the latest releases, s/he needs to decide on
stability versus the latest gizmo that may well lead to a broader
instability elsewhere.

Nothing is anyone's fault. I am not complaining. But as some people
suggested yesterday and before, there should be a "last known stable
releases" page where all the stable releases should be mentioned so that
the user can make an informed choice.

Regards,
Amit

#24

Hi Amit

I understand where you are coming from, and the good news is, in your favour, that MS in both it's O/S and office suite are losing market share in a big way. Here's an article from Ubuntu founder and my countryman Mark Shuttelworth on his take on MS and Ubuntu. I like his statement that the no.1 bug in Linux has now been fixed/closed, in that MS no longer dominates majority market share.

As you'll notice in the supplied link article and the chart, MS has toppled since 2011 in market share, and I believe will continue to do so with Android, Firefox O/S for mobiles and shortly Ubuntu Touch for mobiles. And along with a launch shortly of their own device the Ubuntu Edge, a great looking device from the pics so far, second link.

http://memeburn.com/2013/05/microsoft-dominance-is-over-mark-shuttleworth-declares-ubuntu-bug-no-1-fixed/

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge

Anyway I am off-topic here, I see a great future even now for all opensourced Office suites, and it will grow along with the above mentioned software and hardware.

Regards
<http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge>

#25

But the numbers don't lie. I checked MS revenues and profits on
finance.yahoo.com and it doesn't look like MS is losing market share. MS
losing share might be an illusion.

#26

Period Ending Jun 30, 2012
Jun 30, 2011 Jun 30, 2010

Net Income Applicable To Common Shares $16,978,000 $23,150,000
      $18,760,000 (All numbers in thousands)

Regards,
Amit

#27

Hi Amit,

Revenues and profits (and shares for that matter), are not the same as
market share. Just because revenue is increasing, doesn't mean they
aren't losing market share. If they are losing market share, it
just means their revenue isn't increasing as much as it could be.

So I'm not sure that

I checked MS revenues and profits on finance.yahoo.com

tells us anything useful in this regard.

But the numbers don't lie.

Not always true. As they say: "Lies, damn lies, and statistics".

Regards

Paul

#28

I certainly hope the primary motive for FOSS such as LO is not a disdain for MS. I personally don't care how much money MS makes. I hope the LO developers are motivated by a desire to produce a great product that can be used worldwide. Hatred usually doesn't provide a very effective motive for productive action.

Virgil

#29

<snip>

+1 (and some more too :slight_smile: )

#30

Agreed Paul

Amit, sn increasing or high revenue stream can indicate that the prices of the saleable goods have increased (and in my country a fact, up 30% on software and hardware in the last three months), currency fluctuations and exchange rates between source manufacturing country and recipient etc. and as Paul pointed out shares are just a number of people or companies buying them against a stock market.

Market share is the amount of widgets/units you move and place and are used in that market, besides it's saleable value. Plus I would not trust much in the way of reported finances from Yahoo. Forbes would be more trustworthy and then any of the internationally recognised stock markets. Paul again covered it well, you cannot trust the majority of garbage on the internet these days.

Just know that they are taking a knock, what with Windows 8 only migrating into less than 2% of the world market of their existing XP and Windows 7 base, another failure along the same lines as Vista. And the mobile version of the Windows 8 O/S on their devices such as Surface and their mobile phone, plus others such as Nokia etc. a mere 0,02% of the mobile market share.

Regards

Andrew Brown

#31

Hi :slight_smile:
I think disdain is possibly closer than hatred.  I think bioth are quite far away from the reality though.  I think it's simply that people would rather develop tools that are more robust and less susceptible to malware and slow-downs.

I think once you start using OpenSource tools you begin to realise that MS seem to have deliberately built-in vulnerabilities and their slow-downs.  FOSS doesn't seem to suffer anything like as much, although a bit of "system rot" is inevitable in almost any system.

I'm just installing Win7 on a handfull of machines and am able to make a couple of tweaks that prevent their "Virtual Memory" from getting so heavily fragmented.  In previous versions of their OS i have found it significantly reduces the slow-downs if you can do this early on.  On Win7 it takes an extra couple of clicks but it's still really easy.  I always wonder why the default is to set it to fragment as quickly as possible.  It's only with Win7 that their de-fragger tool can defrag system files such as the Virtual Memory (err that is Swap to Gnu&Linux geeks lol).

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

________________________________
From: Virgil Arrington <cuyfalls@hotmail.com>
To: Amit Choudhary <contact.amit.choudhary.india@gmail.com>; users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Monday, 29 July 2013, 20:30
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] 4.0.3

I certainly hope the primary motive for FOSS such as LO is not a disdain for
MS. I personally don't care how much money MS makes. I hope the LO
developers are motivated by a desire to produce a great product that can be
used worldwide. Hatred usually doesn't provide a very effective motive for
productive action.

Virgil

From: Amit Choudhary
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2013 10:47 AM
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] 4.0.3

Hi Amit

I understand where you are coming from, and the good news is, in your
favour, that MS in both it's O/S and office suite are losing market share
in a big way. Here's an article from Ubuntu founder and my countryman
Mark Shuttelworth on his take on MS and Ubuntu. I like his statement that
the no.1 bug in Linux has now been

fixed/closed, in that MS no longer

#32

Hi :slight_smile:
Many projects have 2 branches so that;

1 is stable (because it has been around for longer and received more "service packs", bug-fixes, patches and all the rest).  Generally it continues to recieve more updates and people do continue to work on it because whatever issue they were working on is easier to finish without starting again from scratch or radically re-thinking it.  Hopefully after their work has been completed they and others are able to convert it to work on another branch.  It's difficult to drag people away just as it's difficult to drag a gamer away from "just completing ths 1 more level.  I'm nearly there, honest"

The other takes whatever is already done or near enough finished and then adds tons of new features without having to worry tooooo much about how usable the new branch is going to be.  It's where new devs are initially attracted to, where the greatest excitement and activity is generated.

Then once that new branch has been around a while, and the people working on the newer features have fixed any problems they hadn't anticipated or solved completely unrelated breakages, then that starts to become "the stable branch".  That usually seems to happen around x.x.3.  The x.x.4 is usually fairly rock-solid.  Big cheers all round.

So there are 2 very different types of devs at any 1 time and if we don't supply the type of activity they get a real buzz from then many may well just wander off to some other project that does.  It's not really the case that taking people off one thing means they will focus on what you want them to do.  It's better to just have them all and make the most of what they do 'enjoy'.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#33

"Andrew Brown":

So the open document standards were
born and ratified and accpeted by the majority of the world that counts.

Microsoft is using an open standard format called OpenXML. Stop pushing your vendor-locked ODF crap here please.

#34

"Virgil Arrington":

I hope the LO developers are motivated by a desire to produce a great product that can be
used worldwide.

No, they are motivated by an attempt to commodize office software market for promoting 3rd party software and hardware. Another major reason are huge bribes given to government officials to deploy {Libre|Open}Office solutions in budget-funding institutions worldwide.

User interests are not involved into development of this software in any way, shape or form.

#35

Just know that they are taking a knock, what with Windows 8 only
migrating into less than 2% of the world market of their existing XP and
Windows 7 base

Windows 8 already has a market share of Windows XP and Vista combined on newer hardware (It's about 9 times of Linux marketshare, btw.).

#36

Not Quite to my understanding.
Office 2013 has the option to use the strict standard, but it's not the default as any older office versions couldn't open the documents.
The format in use prior to and by default in office 2013 is a transitional format.

Steve

#37

Hi Tom

Interesting post. Agree, sometimes these software wars becomes irksome, as my late mother and father used to say and raised us with this motto "how do you know you don't like it if you have not tried it". This was from our young years with foodstuffs that traditionally many young children don't / have never tried, up to the real things in life. But I am in a similiar vein in what MS charge for their O/S and Office suites when they are riddled with known and unknown bugs.

At least I have always tried to keep an open mind, and thankfully was raised on other O/S's (not necessarily desktop/workstation friendly) and systems pre-dating MS. I cut my teeth on IBM VAX, Pick, LISP, FORTRAN, COBOL, AT&T and SCO Unix, CP/M, BASIC and Xerox GEM, before the adventure into IBM and MS systems with the very first and crude DOS, and then Apple O/S starting some 36 years ago.

I can with experience say I have tried them all, and why my entire business and home office is OSS and FOSS, even to desktop. I give my staff the choice of MS or FOSS, thankfully they all eventually migrate to FOSS, which allows me to plow the monies recovered from ongoing and unnecessary licensing fees into better, faster and more up to date hardware. Even to the level of my servers.

To end off, the major difference I have between MS software and FOSS, and you covered briefly in your reply, is that when one discovers a bug, or has a problem, one can get a solution or have it fixed promptly without waiting for a major release or service pack, unlike proprietory and closed code. This is the same for malware, it takes so long for the commercial software to produce a fix and prevention compared to it almost being a non-entity in FOSS.

I would be intrigued and grateful, if you could email me privately, your tweaks you do for the virtual memory slowdown of it's fragmentation (by the way MS refers to it as the pagefile). And that's another feather in FOSS's cap, one never has fragmentation or needs to defragment it, unlike MS. I might know or remember them, but it's not coming to memory as I type this.

Regards

#38

Urmas

Of which it has never been fully ratified and accepted as an open document standard, the argument still proceeds today over the MS open standards.

#39

Again, you troll with no supply of facts. My response was out by 2% WOW!!!!!!! but this article includes tablets and Windows RT

http://www.winbeta.org/news/windows-8-and-windows-rt-account-45-global-tablet-market-share-q2-2013

Andrew Brown

#40

And some more info and statics with charts, to refudiate your claims of Windows XP and Vista (the latter also a disaster for MS) of combined market share.

http://www.statista.com/topics/823/microsoft/chart/799/market-share-of-selected-windows-operating-systems/

And it shows what you know of Linux. FACT, it along with various flavours of Unix, power the known global Internet servers, Observatories, MET/weather offices, Space exploration, the Mars machines, the majority of military machines/equipment, medical equipment, and lo and behold a good number of desktop, laptops around the world, and the no.1 O/S for mobile - Android, followed shortly by Firefox O/S and Ubuntu Touch.

You like many, incorrectly and simply refer to the desktop/laptop use of an O/S, yes where MS currently dominates, but not for long.

Good Day

Andrew Brown