There were a lot of loud grumbles (can a grumble be loud? Anyway) when we published Andrew Brown's piece about the annoyances of OpenOffice in December.
A reminder:
So why is OpenOffice so dire? The project claims more than 50m downloads of the software, so let's assume that 50m people have tried it at least once. More than 50,000 bugs have been reported. And how many have been fixed by open source's uniquely efficient processes? According to the (public) bugs database, at last count, there were more than 6,000 unfixed bugs, and more than 5,000 feature requests. While the number of bugs discovered seems to rise with the number of users, the number of fixes doesn't, and the number of fixers certainly doesn't.
We collected some flames - though none, to be honest, that refuted the central argument of the piece. Now, here's some fuel for the fire, from a new article from WhatPC:
Meeks cited one example where a company decided to move a large Excel spreadsheet to OpenOffice. The file would perform its calculations in Excel in three hours, but it took 30 seconds in (Open Office's) Calc.
Bet you're impressed, eh? That's some speed improvement, right? Except that that's wrong. I swapped the numbers around in that last quote. In reality, it's OpenOffice that takes three hours, and Excel which is 360 times faster.
Here's the correct quote, from "OpenOffice aims to boost lagging performance" at WhatPC:
Meeks cited one example where a company decided to move a large Excel spreadsheet to OpenOffice. The file would perform its calculations in Excel in 30 seconds, but it took three hours in Calc.
The project got that down to about one hour, but Meeks said that there is still much work that needs to be done.
In a neat irony, the Google-generated ads below the story are for OpenOffice - and for Excel. Wonder which ones will get clicked?
