Google to Hire Programmers to Improve Open Office
Posted by stncttr908 on 31 October 2005 - 16:25 · 53 comments & 7546 views
About the Author
Full name: Unknown
Forum name:
stncttr908
Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Full name: Unknown
Forum name:
stncttr908Contact: via forum PM
Submissions: Normal · Headline
Slashdot It!
Submit to reddit
Submit to blinklist
Bookmark on del.icio.us
Add to furl
Share on Facebook
Add to Windows Live
Add to Google- Advertisement
-
-
(3 replies)
#1 Posted by Computer Guru on 31 Oct 2005 - 16:23
- Google taking over again.
-
#1.3 Posted by mswarts on 02 Nov 2005 - 19:10
- Sometimes, I wonder if I'm the only person who notices what Google is doing. Office Suites have nothing to do with search. Why would Google pay top programmers to improve an Office Suite which they can't advertise within and can't sell? Google's mission in life is to cut sources of revenue from Microsoft. They compete with Microsoft on some level on almost every front. Search, webmail, portal, instant messaging, and now office, among other things. Without these major sources of revenue, Microsoft cannot disrupt the domination of Google. It seems petty that Google is focusing almost exclusively on Microsoft. In any case, Google fights to win, and I'm sure that will happen here.
-
#2 Posted by ObCeeDee on 31 Oct 2005 - 16:34
- What can you say .. Go Go Google?
-
#3 Posted by denzilla on 31 Oct 2005 - 16:48
- Good news!
-
(1 reply)
#4 Posted by Zerosignull on 31 Oct 2005 - 16:53
- they make 80mb sound so big! The size of teh distribution isnt the probelm only the memory footprint and load times for some machines. Persinally I think OOo is great but having more programmers actually hired to help sounds good to me.
-
#4.1 Posted by shao on 01 Nov 2005 - 01:42
- if they want to really hit microsoft hard, and i'm sure that's what they want to do, they need to look at getting OO / StarOffice into the corporate space. deployment methods, group policy managment, terminal server compliance, vba support, a decent outlook replacement which works with exchange, owa.. there are reasons why corps still use ms office, and currently OO simply does not address them.
some actual innovation wouldn't go amiss either. stop copying microsoft and do something original for once with the product.
-
(7 replies)
#5 Posted by Shadrack on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:00
- hmm..where do I apply? I'd love to work with Google on OOo.
-
#5.1 Posted by markjensen on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:26
- You can contribute to OO.o here: http://contributing.openoffice.org/index.html
The only difference is that you won't be on Google's payroll... -
#5.2 Posted by Shadrack on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:33
- Thanks mark. That looks like a good place to start. I might make a name for myself.
-
#5.3 Posted by Airlink on 31 Oct 2005 - 18:47
- Memory footprint? With systems having a minimum of 512MB of RAM these days, do you really think that a large memory footprint is much of an issue? I've got 2GB RAM on my personal system, and I could throw in another 2GB if I really wanted to.
Besides, the memory usage will vary depending on the size of the document(s) you have open. 400 page essays tend to take up a bit of space, no matter how you slice it. I'd rather have the office software make use of my RAM than constantly swapaing out to the hard drive unnesisarily.
Go OO.o -
#5.4 Posted by VikingStorm on 31 Oct 2005 - 19:25
- I think people are mistaking memory footprint for overall slowness. Because frankly anyway you cut it OO.o is a whole heck of a lot slower than it should be unfortunately.
I'm hoping 3.0 is going to improve on that. -
#5.5 Posted by tiagosilva29 on 31 Oct 2005 - 20:18
QUOTE Memory footprint? With systems having a minimum of 512MB of RAM these days, do you really think that a large memory footprint is much of an issue? I've got 2GB RAM on my personal system, and I could throw in another 2GB if I really wanted to.
Well, good for you.
You're clearly not seeing that a lot of people are not as lucky as you.
Some have to stick up with a 9/10 yo computer and can't afford to buy new parts.-
#5.6 Posted by Tom Servo on 31 Oct 2005 - 20:51
- Lets just introduce sloppy coding and memory management because every machine has a gazillion jiggawatts of memory, amrite?
-
#5.7 Posted by Shadrack on 31 Oct 2005 - 21:31
QUOTE Memory footprint? With systems having a minimum of 512MB of RAM these days, do you really think that a large memory footprint is much of an issue? I've got 2GB RAM on my personal system, and I could throw in another 2GB if I really wanted to.
Besides, the memory usage will vary depending on the size of the document(s) you have open. 400 page essays tend to take up a bit of space, no matter how you slice it. I'd rather have the office software make use of my RAM than constantly swapping out to the hard drive unnesisarily.
Go OO.op
You replied to the wrong comment. You should work on those mouse skills.
Anyway, I never thought that memory was that big of an issue in OOo. Having a smaller memory footprint should be a goal of all developers. Who cares that you seem to have an infinite amount of memory available. If all programs have a smaller memory footprint, then you can run more things simultaneously with less of a hassle.
-
#6 Posted by Cyranthus on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:11
- very good news, im anxious to see the new changes.
-
(1 reply)
#7 Posted by sunbiz_3000 on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:12
- I really think OOo is one of the best open-source software (other than Linu
, out there... Its been on my desktop since the very first version and I still use it a lot.... and until now, compatibility issues kept me going back to MS-Office, but now with that solved...I rarely look at MS-Office....
With the new XML standard docs to be used by all, I think MS is going to have a big competitor in OOo !! -
#7.1 Posted by eAi on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:43
- I agree, OOo is really good. I especially like 2.0. If 3.0 can be as much of an improvement as 2.0 is, they've got a lot of possibilities. With Office 2006 (or whatever) changing the way things work considerably, people may consider moving to OOo instead for a more "conservative" office suit...
They do need to work on porting to OS X though...
-
(1 reply)
#8 Posted by CDog on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:22
- Could be really good for the software
-
#9 Posted by Miran on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:27
- Sweet someone needs to fix it.
-
#10 Posted by llbbl on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:30
- OO version 2.0 is very good! I can't wait to see how they will make it even better!
-
(9 replies)
#11 Posted by danlu on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:40
- They should start with removing the java stuff. What were they thinking?
-
#11.1 Posted by matt74441 on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:53
- I get the idea that StarOffice was written as a way to show off or promote Java. I still don't understand what the big deal is. I personally don't need Writer to start up instantly, but it does get annoying when it takes up to a minute on my system when I have a lot of applications running in the background.
-
#11.2 Posted by neufuse on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:54
- It was written by sun... what do you expect... when i first tried out this program a long while ago i saw java and said screw this i dont want java on my system... i personally hate java... i think the program should be done in pure C++
-
#11.3 Posted by Colonel_Angus on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:56
- OpenOffice does not require Java. The Java features are optional.
-
#11.5 Posted by Airlink on 31 Oct 2005 - 18:52
- Not many of the features require Java.
Way back in the pre-1.0 days some of the builds did require Java present on the machine for the installer to install, but that was changed during the 2.0 builds. Now, if it doesn't find SUN Java on the machine, it doesn't ask which JRE you want to use for the optional features. It then continues to install as normal.
So, in short, Java isn't an issue anymore. -
#11.6 Posted by tiagosilva29 on 31 Oct 2005 - 20:43
QUOTE What features even require Java?
QUOTE
- Accessibility tools, such as the Gnopernicus Screen Reader and Magnifier and the GNOME On-Screen Keyboard
- The Report Autopilot
- JDBC driver support for Java-based databases
- XSLT filters
- BeanShell, the Netbeans scripting language, and the Java UNO bridge
- Export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC
- Base, the new Access-like database application
- The media player, which adds movie and sound clips to documents
- Mail merges to e-mail, which also require Java Mail
- All document wizards in Writer
- Accessibility tools, such as the Gnopernicus Screen Reader and Magnifier and the GNOME On-Screen Keyboard
-
#11.7 Posted by matt74441 on 01 Nov 2005 - 00:17
- The only person that even needs beanshell is Java developers. Mom and Dad ain't typing commands into it :p
-
#11.8 Posted by HawkMan on 01 Nov 2005 - 00:39
- Java isn't what's making it slow anyway.
Java is slower than regular W32 apps in regards to GUI drawin , yes... but since the last few years comptuers have been powerful enough so you won't ever really notice that.
So what ahppens if we take away the GUI layer then and just tests console apps...
OMG Java is faster than C++.....
the only problem with Java as such is the 50 ish megabyte default footprint by havign Java running. but all thigns considered you're unlikely to noitce any difference from it, and the more java apps you have running, the less percentage of total memory that 50 meg becomes.
So next time you want to blame OOo's slowness on something, find an actual target, like coding that isn't nearly as optimized as what the MS OFfice code is (yet all the Open Source peopel complain about MS writing scrap code and all that...) -
#11.9 Posted by LaNcom on 01 Nov 2005 - 04:59
- neufuse,
StarOffice was not written by SUN. If it were, it would be called SUNOffice or JavaOffice. StarOffice was written by Star Division Software, a Hamburg/ Germany based company founded 1984, that SUN bought in 1999 for $70 million. The StarOffice/ OpenOffice codebase is more than 20 years old...
-
#12 Posted by Chicane-UK on 31 Oct 2005 - 17:49
- Nice. I'd love to see OO being a serious competitor to MS Office. I think with the backing of someone like Google, it could easily happen.
-
(3 replies)
#13 Posted by matt74441 on 31 Oct 2005 - 18:07
- Is it just me or is Google cutting corners?
-
#13.2 Posted by matt74441 on 31 Oct 2005 - 20:25
- Well, I thought the reason that people loved Google so much was because they were "innovators". All Google is doing now is taking OpenOffice, which was doing perfectly fine by the way, jumping on board and trying to take all the credit for it and remake it in their image. This is the reason why people will never see GoogleOS or a pure GoogleOffice or something. Google is simply to far behind in the game to try and make one from scratch.
-
#14 Posted by Z3r0 on 31 Oct 2005 - 19:15
- I think this software is very useful, I really just use the basic letter writing features and basic excel functions, i've never found the need for more, even though it is there
It's good that a company like google will help out, at the end of the day, as long as they obey the opensource license of the software and don't make anything proprietory it's all good
-
(2 replies)
#15 Posted by tiwaris on 31 Oct 2005 - 20:15
- MS Office will have some serious competition now. Google and SUN joined can definitely make a dent in MS's share. Still wondering, how will google make money out of this investment?
-
#15.1 Posted by domgrimm on 31 Oct 2005 - 21:31
- It probably won't, directly. But it'll drive users to their website.
Either that, or they could introduce ads, like in Gmail, that are updated as you type
-
(2 replies)
#16 Posted by rekka on 31 Oct 2005 - 20:46
- OpenOffice.org is great, but it doesn't seem to start as fast as MS Office. Infact at times it can be a little sluggish. Google helping out to get it moving quicker can only be a good thing imho.
-
#16.1 Posted by indiehead on 01 Nov 2005 - 09:36
- i think ms office loads services into memory at system startup so that their package starts quicker, whereas OO has to start from nothing.
-
#17 Posted by denzilla on 31 Oct 2005 - 21:29
- I hope the release schedule gets a speedup. The wait between 1.1.4 and 2.0 was terrible.
-
#18 Posted by toadeater on 31 Oct 2005 - 22:09
- I hope Google doesn't put any spyware in it.
-
#19 Posted by Galley on 31 Oct 2005 - 22:35
- Open Office... is that any relation to OpenOffice?
-
(1 reply)
#20 Posted by confucius on 01 Nov 2005 - 03:00
- Recently read this Zdnet test. Hope google can help improve...
-
#20.1 Posted by MrCobra on 01 Nov 2005 - 03:47
- I've tried it a few times in the past and in all fairness I've tried the new version as well. IMO, the UI is just plain nasty. Yes, it's slow(ish). They'll have to some major overhauling on this beast. IMO, it will be a long time before this is a serious competitor to MS Office.
-
(1 reply)
#21 Posted by a67543210 on 01 Nov 2005 - 09:24
- They say they want to reduce the download size down from 80MB. Doesn`t MS office come with 2 CDs?
They should work on speeding, optimization of the Code, optimizise the marriage between Java and GUI to get more speed( since Java is faster than C++ by default). But the Java and GUI get it lil slower though not noticeable these days with AMD 64
-
#22 Posted by indiehead on 01 Nov 2005 - 09:29
- regardless of what they do, it will still take up less space, memory and crash less than MS Office.
google are on to another winner, let's hope they keep the final free, can't see why not.
Open Office 2.0 was released on October 20th. Nearly 50 million copies of the software have been downloaded since the project's inception nearly five years ago.
What's new:
General
Components