Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 27, 2005 07:14 AM
This is a good article. They seem to have followed an intelligent approach, and have achieved a well-deserved success.
I was amused by one point, however, that showed just how subtly Microsoft has been able to create biases in people's thinking. It appears in this quote:
> The functional requirements for an office suite were straightforward: The suite had to include full-featured word processing, spreadsheets with graphs and charts, and presentations.
It is funny how an Office Suite has come to mean exactly what Microsoft provides -- no more, and no less.
Personally, I would have said that a drawing tool is an indespensible part of an Office Suite. How else are managers going to produce org-charts, or students going to make diagrams of their lab experiments? Gem had a drawing tool; Geoworks had one; And OpenOffice has one.
I would have also considered a basic database tool to be part of an Office Suite. It's what you should be using, instead of spreadsheets, to generate form letters, or keep your CD inventory. MS Works had a database, Lotus SmartSuite had one, and the next version of OpenOffice will have one.
There are lots of other functions that one could argue to be part of an Office Suite, such as Internet browsing, e-mail, chat, a calendar, a personal planner, desktop publishing, and so on. Some Office Suites have come with some of these capabilities, though they are usually associated with other applications.
But I'm not here to give the "correct" definition of an Office Suite. As I said, I'm just amused that, for the author of this article, the "correct" definition was "what comes with MS Office."
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Good Article, with one Amused Quibble
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 27, 2005 07:14 AMI was amused by one point, however, that showed just how subtly Microsoft has been able to create biases in people's thinking. It appears in this quote:
> The functional requirements for an office suite were straightforward: The suite had to include full-featured word processing, spreadsheets with graphs and charts, and presentations.
It is funny how an Office Suite has come to mean exactly what Microsoft provides -- no more, and no less.
Personally, I would have said that a drawing tool is an indespensible part of an Office Suite. How else are managers going to produce org-charts, or students going to make diagrams of their lab experiments? Gem had a drawing tool; Geoworks had one; And OpenOffice has one.
I would have also considered a basic database tool to be part of an Office Suite. It's what you should be using, instead of spreadsheets, to generate form letters, or keep your CD inventory. MS Works had a database, Lotus SmartSuite had one, and the next version of OpenOffice will have one.
There are lots of other functions that one could argue to be part of an Office Suite, such as Internet browsing, e-mail, chat, a calendar, a personal planner, desktop publishing, and so on. Some Office Suites have come with some of these capabilities, though they are usually associated with other applications.
But I'm not here to give the "correct" definition of an Office Suite. As I said, I'm just amused that, for the author of this article, the "correct" definition was "what comes with MS Office."
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