OpenOffice is pretty bad, but the god damned bastards haven't ported MS Office to Linux yet. So I use LaTeX
I'll say one thing. OO is better on Linux than MS Office does. Why? Because Micro$oft has never and seemingly will never natively support Linux. I should and will try Latex but for being able to open and product basic MS Office docs, OO does the job. Outside of Windows, Mac and mobile platforms, Micro$oft hasn't shown any intere$t in porting M$ Office to other platforms for around 15 years back when they shipped MS Office for DEC Alpha around the same time Windows NT ran on MIPS. But that was all stopped and Microsoft seemingly never looked back. Linux users wanting to run MS Office can run the Windows version using CrossOver or Wine, or use
Office Web Apps.
Microsoft goes for the high volume, high profit markets with now well documented anticompetitive tactics. Good if you own Microsoft stock, not as good if you want the reap the benefits of competition in the market. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wordperfect was the de facto standard word processor. Wordperfect supported virtually every platform out there and had a number of advantages such as: Rich macro set but not embedded in documents resulting in reduced vulnerability, and powerful scripting language, the ability to use key combinations rather than multiple GUI layers to format documents, and the file formats have changed little as opposed to Micro$oft frequent updates to incompatible new formats. But Wordperfect for Windows was not as GUI friendly as Word and was late to market giving MS Office over a year to entrench and release multiple versions. Microsoft, of course, launched an overwhelming glitzy marketing campaign. As a result, Wordperfect lost a great deal of the mass consumer market. Corel apparently still enjoys success with law firms and academics where its strengths are appreciated.
This follows the typical Microsoft strategy - Identify an existing successful market, such as Lotus 123, Netscape, Wordperfect. Bring out a version 1.0 competing product, a basically non-competitive pale imitation of the market leader. But Microsoft can afford to wait for success. By version 2, the process of adding the most important mass market features and fixing problems is well underway but the market leader is still dominant. By version 3, the product is competitive in the mass market and the marketing machine kicks in. And at least in the past, Microsoft would fully leverage Windows, both in terms of development and bundling strategies, while making the same difficult for competing products. Sales goes up and eventually the former market leader is crushed and Microsoft now dominates the market. Over time Microsoft does improve the product, through innovation, acquisitions and reverse engineering of features from the crushed competitors.
Geez, did I just write all that? Guess I couldn't control myself, hah, :wink:
