Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

I understand that the technical quality of an application is of supreme importance in judging whether or not a program is right for your needs. The Open Office suite has proven to be of very high quality, indeed. (see overviews and apps here, here, here, and here.) However, that is generally not where a user makes decisions on programs. There is a certain level of comfort which is required by a user before they accept an application as their “best of breed” choice.

I have been designing and building computer programs for over thirty years. Some were small, simple data entry programs. Some were huge, multi-million-line behemoths. In every case, however, I judged success by how well the users liked the application. If users don’t feel comfortable while using your software, you have failed. This is a difficult goal to achieve with any program. It is especially difficult when the goal of the project is to replace an existing system with which users have already become comfortable.

Open Office will be a replacement for most people. They will have been users of MS Office, MS Works, WordPerfect Office, or some other more mature system. It will therefore be a hard sell, despite being free. Change is difficult for most people, and the familiar look and feel of the word processor and spreadsheet on your desktop is very habit forming. If you try take those programs away from them, whether the replacement is technically viable or not, many users will drag their heels.

I have been trying to remember how long I have been a user of Word and Excel. I believe that the answer would be, “almost from the beginning.” Let’s call it 1985 or 1986. I therefore have about 20 years of experience with these programs. Change is not going to come easy, even though I have certainly made changes in these desktop applications before. For example, my first word processor was called Electric Pencil and my first spreadsheet was called VisiCalc. I started using both in the mid-to-late-seventies. Both ran on the Radio Shack TRS-80 microcomputer, loaded from cassette tape, and they revolutionized the way the world worked. Being part of the world, I was revolutionized as well, and happily so.

Before those programs, one routinely used separate programs to process words. There was at least one text editor per computer platform, intended mainly for programmers to write programs. They were like Notepad, only not nearly so fancy.  Most platforms had a program (usually called Runoff, or just Roff) that would respond to special commands placed in the text to format your document, similar to the way HTML works, but again, not nearly so fancy. I recall writing a version of Runoff for DEC computers that would work with Canon, HP, and Xerox laser printers because DEC had not yet provided anything with which to do that. If you wanted to work with numbers back then, you used an electronic calculator, which had replaced the slide rule, or you wrote a program in FORTRAN.

After those earliest programs, I used MultiMate, XyWrite, WordStar, WordPerfect, and a number of other programs, often proprietary to the manufacturer of the computer I was using.  For spreadsheets, I used MultiPlan, Quattro Pro, SuperCalc, Symphony, and VP Planner. The upshot is that I became used to change. Every change brought major increases in functionality, so there was reason to replace your software.

Then, for over twenty years, I used Microsoft Office. I did not even really notice that changes to the software had become mere frills and tiny incremental enhancements. Word was Word, and Excel was Excel, period. There has not been any really substantive changes in either program for a very long time, although we all kept paying for new versions. Now, it seems that every time they change something, the programs just get bulkier and harder to use. Still, breaking a twenty-year Office habit is going to be difficult.

There is good news, though. I have been using the Writer and Calc applications in Open Office for everything for everything I do with words and numbers. Both have performed admirably. They are not Word or Excel clones, not quite, so I have occasionally had to wander around looking for a feature or function. But that happens once in a while with a new release of Office, too.

And the Open Office applications have been rock solid, doing everything that I have asked of them. Although I have not gone cold turkey (close, though, very close), I have begun to think in terms of using Open Office exclusively when I get my new laptop, and leaving Office 2003 on the old one for my wife. I can see a day, not too far in the future, when there is no Microsoft Office in my life. That is a very liberating thought.

It’s like standing up in a meeting and saying, ”Hello. My name is Michael and I am a Microsoft Office user.”  ;o)