From: Jan Lolling on
Hello,

I agree with both arguments. When nothing happens to OpenOffice then the user acceptance will melt like snow in the summer time.
There are 2 major points:
1. The terrible user interface with to large number of dialogs and very old fashion controls (my favorite is the color chooser - it is a bit of software from the early 80')
2. The lack of nice looking features (Impress has no usable animations if you prefer to avoid showing embarrassing presentations)
3. The lack of usable programming interfaces. 3 years ago I took a look into the UNO interface and belief me, I would nobody recommend using that terrible impossible maintainable piece of software - especially the Java wrapper.

OpenOffice is in fact the only office solution for open source desktops and I couldn't understand why there are though many things unsolved.

It is not the lack of man power, IBM has enough to work on it. It is more the lack of ideas and the motivation to develop Open Office in a new way, far from that what we experience now - more in a way Apple prefers to use.

And yes, I guess that a huge piece of software must rewritten.

If you have the chance to work with iWorks from Apple then you would have an idea what it means to do things easy and nice.

Best regards

Jan

On 24.03.2010, at 17:33, Maximilian Odendahl wrote:

>
>> I really think a code rewrite inevitable if we want to keep OOo competitive.
>
> are you actually being serious? Certain parts definitely, but certainly not everything.
>
> As a rough estimate, see this from ohloh:
>
>
> This calculator estimates how much it would cost to hire a team to write this project from scratch:
>
> Codebase 23,800,077
> Effort (est.) 7676 Person Years
> Avg. Salary $ 55.000 year
>
> $ 422,159,217
>
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