Thursday, October 27, 2005
Why OpenOffice.org is not a good alternative to Microsoft Office
It has not been thoroughly polished and has a few bugs that I have noticed already. For example, try to open an office document from a webpage. OpenOffice.org will crash.
OpenOffice.org also feels VERY slow compared to Microsoft Office. OOo runs on top of the Java runtime environment. Java is slow, end of story. Here are some number comparisons on the actual performance of OOo compared to Microsoft Office:
| Calc 2.0 ODS | Calc 2.0 SXC | Excel 2003 XLS | Excel 2003 XML | Excel 2003 ZIP XML | |
| Create | 179 sec | 184 sec | 1 sec | 13 sec | 18 sec |
| Load | 141 sec | 161 sec | 2 sec | 38 sec | 47 sec |
| RAM used | 234,496 KB | 232,932 KB | 89,164 KB | 41,980 KB | NA |
OpenOffice.org takes up more system resources than Microsoft Office, by a long shot. Here are some numbers to back me up:
| Application | Memory footprint | Processes measured |
| Write | 37,660 KB | soffice.bin & soffice.exe |
| Calc | 37,544 KB | soffice.bin & soffice.exe |
| Impress | 44,788 KB | soffice.bin & soffice.exe |
| Base | 36,036 KB | soffice.bin & soffice.exe |
| Word | 9,812 KB | WinWord.exe |
| Excel | 7,102 KB | Excel.exe |
| PowerPoint | 6,884 KB | PowerPNT.exe |
| Access | 7,302 KB | MSAccess.exe |
Maybe someday we will have a product that can perform on par with Microsoft Office, but that time has not come.
(Numbers taken from George Ou's blog at ZDNet)
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Hello FREE cant beat that. Also you can disable the JRE part of OO.o and get TONS more performance out of it
ReplyDeleteUh, yeah, you can beat free. If you are in a large coporation and are actually trying to get something done without having to wait on the software to work for you or having to learn how to use the crappy interface then free doesn't help you with your productivity. Large coampanies actually save time and money by going with Microsoft Office.
ReplyDeleteOOo isn't FOR large companies. It's for people like us that can't afford to shell out hundreds of dollars to an evil tyranical monopolizing coorporation just to be able to have word processing software.
ReplyDeleteSave memory in OO.o by disablinig JAVA
ReplyDelete"To disable it is actually quite easy, go to Tools -> Options, under "StarOffice" go to "Java". Uncheck the box that says "Use a Java runtime environment"."
I had a big old argument lined up for you but then remembered I was posting in a blog and can state my opinion without backing it up with fact. So, life is a like an ice cream cone (you'll understand later on):
ReplyDeleteYes, Java sucks and it isn't likely to change. I hate Java. It's platform independent (if an interpreter has been written for your platform and you happen to have a version compatible with the byte code of the program) but it's not machine independent (meaning if a Java application works correctly on any two machines, it's because there's a bug in your code). But the answer is to do like Bob says and disable the use of the JRE.
OO itself is still relatively young considering what it's trying to do. The code Sun started with was incomplete at best and the source was only released publicly mid to late 2000. Also, despite the fact that big names are behind OO, the only company helping to develop it has been Sun (which seems to see it as a fun side project, rather than anything major). Criticizing OO now is like criticizing Linux before RedHat got involved. We've got 31 flavors, they're all named vanilla, and the cones haven't arrived yet. But we're giving out all you can eat free samples so it's still better than the shop down the street which charges $440 for a cone with sprinkles (i.e. MS Office 2003 Pro) or $370 for a cone with sprinkles that then has the sprinkles scraped off before giving it to the customer (i.e. MS Office 2003 Std).
But we're likely to see some major improvements in the near future. Google announced yesterday that they are hiring a team of software engineers solely dedicated to full time OO development. Their first goal: to eliminate OO's high mem useage. This means that the cones have been ordered but before they get here the store is going to try to offer two flavors: vanilla and vanilla low-fat (i.e. low mem usage - which if we're all lucky means less Java). Either way, both flavors will be free and when the cones finally arrive, you won't be charged anything extra.
See "Google throws bodies..." at:
<http://news.com.com/Google+throws+bodies+at+OpenOffice/2100-7344_3-5920762.html?tag=nefd.lede>