I'd like to point to something more positive that might be helpful here. It might not seem very positive. I think there is something positive to be gained, although I am not digging that deep here.
The TL;DR: It is important to appreciate the ecosystem in which one chooses to operate in a niche undertaking. If one desires having a product with which users thrive, it is important to comprehend and embrace the world in which the users carry out their worthy work. - Dennis Large brain dump. Proceed at your own risk. When we see a large phenomenon that is in discord with what we believe in and what we think should be happening, it is perhaps appropriate to stand back and look at the larger phenomenon and forces that may be at work. In general, while whatever is operating need not be optimal by some measure, the fact that it is successful deserves some serious analysis in a larger context. It is self-defeating (and somewhat delusional) to alibi and dismiss whatever that success is and not use it to inform our own assessments instead. In my early career, digital computing was all about mainframes and that industry became designated as consisting of Snow White (IBM) and the seven dwarves (I can't name them all, but it included Univac, Burroughs, RCA, Philco, GE (I think), Honeywell, and one other (not DEC, which had not arrived yet, nor had anything with Unix) along with smaller companies that did not make the list). IBM did not become dominant overnight, but the System/360 initiative was in many ways the handwriting on the wall, and that was from a technological perspective as well as from the ability of IBM to address requirements of enterprise customers. In a similar sense, Windows 95 and client-server operation marked Microsoft's obvious arrival in a dominant position, along with nurturing a commodity complement in PC hardware. It was that Wintel combination and the innovation of PC platforms that withstood serious competition from alternatives, including IBM's PS/2. It is in fact the Wintel commodity hardware platform that also supported Linux being as viable and affordable as it is today as a niche operating system. While working for the first dwarf, the common litany there was that IBM succeeded because of superb marketing (sound familiar?) but others had superior hardware and smarter engineers, etc. What was amazing was that party line was sold to Unix-nursed academics who passed it on to their students, while IBM drove amazing innovation and scooped up all the marbles with hard drives and semiconductor memories in the early days before the microprocessor and commodity memory chips disrupted the phenomenal return-to-scale that was IBM's fortress. Monopolistic competitors, the kind of competitors that most firms are that produce consumer and technical products into large markets, can be dislodged in their drive to pick up all the marbles, often as much by their own mistakes and burdens as the arrival of an unsuspected alternative that topples their market advantage. Lotus 1-2-3 was the application that drove PC adoption perhaps as much as the legitimacy provided by the IBM PC. It definitely outshown Visicalc on Apple before the days of Macintosh. None of those branded products exist any longer. WordPerfect has incredible loyalty yet is not a player in anyone's rational approach to word-processing world domination. No one seems to ask for recovery of WordStar documents. (It is useful to look at the nature of that WordPerfect loyalty, though, and appraise the AOO equivalence.) Likewise, IBM failed with the OS/2 and PS/2 land grab. Those brands disappeared and it has been a long time since I heard anyone mention MCA and token ring. Likewise, brands such as Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment (and AT&T a little), which road in as part of the minicomputer and technical workstation evolution are no more, yet their contributions remain in various forms (including Java, Unix and the dominance of ASCII and now Unicode). Xerox, my last corporate employment, is simply not the company that it was once viewed to be (including the fact that it was in the computer business *twice* and never made it). Ditto for Eastman Kodak. You can name your own disappearing dominant organizations. Note that Kodak, film cameras, and even digital SLRs now, are markets that have been seriously disrupted by digital devices. (Yet DSLRs seem to be doing all right as a luxury market. That is not where something like AOO can play.) In this context, OpenOffice.org and ODF have never achieved their moment of dominance. They are certainly not being taken up as a weapon of capable monopolistic competitors. The closest approximation to such a competitor is now The Document Foundation. That is not a game for the Apache OpenOffice project partly because that is not how the Apache Software Foundation operates and the only monopolistic competitors with current visibility around AOO are bottom feeders that manage to sell re-packagings with malware/adware included. That's hardly a force for positive disruption. On the contrary. It is important to appreciate that Apache OpenOffice is being offered into an ecosystem as an alternative *non-disruptive* option. It has three appeals. It is cross-platform, it is free, and it is presented as a working alternative to the dominant presence. It works where users already work. It is offered as a works-alike substitute, not a disruptive displacement, no matter what its adherents wish for it. Except on platforms where there is almost no commercial competition, OpenOffice is about co-existence and minority presence, a new dwarf in the shadow of a dominant figure. There's not a thing wrong with that. However, it is important to appreciate that the ecosystem and how the ecosystem moves will control the acceptance of AOO over time, although it may have an indefinite life in a respectable niche. There are folks wanting and running OS/2 and Solaris versions. I know someone who keeps a Lisp Machine running too. There's nothing wrong with any of that. It is a long-tail thing. It is a wonderful aspect of the current Internet-connected reality that kindred folks can thrive in the long tail. It is important to look at what one gains by participation though. It is not likely to be a livelihood, although that is possible for a few. It is more likely not to provide some magnificent commercial success. This situation does raise limitations on the availability of developers and contributors of all kinds for AOO, however. There is an accumulation of technical debt along with fairly limited process capability that confines what AOO can accomplish with the resources that have stepped forward. And the means by which technical expertise is gained seems to be a pretty costly barrier to volunteer, unfunded contribution. Those who grew up with working on OpenOffice in its various incarnations are a dwindling army, and many have pursued their livelihoods elsewhere. Of course there are many who love having AOO available. But the community of users and the community of developers are quite different in amazing ways. It is remarkable to me that 80% of the users operate in a world that most of the AOO developers avoid and have disdain for. It's not a formula for success when an offering's greatest take-up is in an ecosystem that the technical contributors reject and explain away. Back to my main theme. Ecosystems are complex, intricate structures of moving parts. To carve a sustainable niche, it is necessary to stand back and appreciate all that is going on and what the forces and interests are. It is self-defeating to dismiss those forces and ignore what users get out of partaking of the ecosystem when ones ambition is to see easy and wide adoption. For a niche effort to thrive, it is necessary to embrace the ecosystem and the interests that users demonstrate, not what we think they should want. And if someone is determined to be a disruptor, AOO is probably not in the right place and certainly this is not the right time. -----Original Message----- From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 18:42 To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [OT] RE: [DISCUSS] Qt as a replacement for VCL So everyone hates Microsoft Office, but they use it anyhow. How about something a bit more evidence based? There are now many users who have never seen a version of Office without the ribbon. The availability of training and of lots of information on the Internet matters. It is true that Microsoft has a network effect working for it. That's a reality that is unlikely to disappear any time soon and it has to figure into whatever AOO wants to achieve in those areas that are important for take-up, especially in civil administration and other institutional areas apart from "enterprise" applications. For me, that means interoperability at the format interchange level is crucial. UI familiarity is a factor, but UI preferences are meaningless if the documents don't work and workers don't have the resources to have the documents work. And by now, the ribbon is established as part of the ready-to-hand familiarity that workers have in operating with Microsoft Office. I don't see any meaningful way for AOO to overtake that in terms of worker mind share. People didn't rush to the store to by Microsoft Word 6.0 because of the UI layout either. And I don't think anyone is rushing to use even a free Word 6.0 (or Word 2000) work-alike because of the UI either. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Fernando Cassia [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 09:24 To: [email protected]; Dennis Hamilton Subject: Re: [OT] RE: [DISCUSS] Qt as a replacement for VCL On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected] > wrote: > The sales success of Microsoft Office and Office 365 suggest that > "(almost) everyone" is inaccurate IMHO for me this is not (and has never been) an valid argument. People "Buy MS Office" because: 1. they have tons of documents written in Microsoft's file formats, 2. because only Microsoft Office guarantees file read/write compatibility with MS Office documents 3. because they were trained in MS Office and 90% of the tutorials you find on the web are about "how to do [x]" in MS Office, not LO, and not AOO 4. Because "it's the standard" and the business/organization has been buying "MS Office" since the beginning of (IT) times... So, basically, it's all about leverage and vendor lock-in. I haven't met a single MS Office user who rushed to the store to buy MS Office licenses because of the lovely Ribbon UI... Of course, my $0.02... FC -- During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act Durante épocas de Engaño Universal, decir la verdad se convierte en un Acto Revolucionario - George Orwell --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
