Ellison's Oracle washes hands of OpenOffice

users
#41

It has turned out to be very interesting discussion. And surprise surprise that MS is dying a slow death. There have been comments on the early age of computing (when I wasn't even born) and worked on Intel branded crap hardware.

Nevertheless, this is the time to focus on the User Interface. The "ribbon interface" is not the "de-facto" standard but it becomes a frustrating exercise to get people to shift to a new software if they are used to seeing the familiar controls. I have faced this issue many times while trying to convince different users to shift to FOSS and this obviously is a big issue. I had raised the issue in local mailing lists (for Linux) and like bunch of retards professed their helplessness.

Hence, this is the time to seize the moment and bring out the dazzle. The latest version of Libre Office is brilliant (I am using Linux Mint 10) and has done a great amount of work as far as the stability is concerned. There are excellent suggestions for working on the user interface and then it would squarely kick MS's ass (and groins) where it hurts them at the most.

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

#42

Possibly an alternate UI for LO could be a Right Click anywhere on the
Window, Enlightenment and XFCE use this to bring up the Main Menu in
addition to having a drop down menu.

Wayne

#43

@Wayne

I think that the BEST option would be to have 3 options available: 1)
Classic menu 2) Ribbon and 3) the Future :wink:

(By the Future I'm referring to this topic
http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Impressive-mockups-td2389105.html)

The UI could be selected on first use (or later in some configuration
option) by presenting the user with a screenshot of each of the
possibilities :wink:

Returning to the topic, I think that if there isn't a paid version with
professional support, the future looks dark for OOo/LO.
So, Oracle dropping support for OOo is extremely bad for LO as well.