Random thoughts

[sardisson]

Is it just me, or have we gotten a lot more active (a lot more new users) here since OOo 3 shipped? I suppose even if we have gotten busier here, it could be simply a coincidence.

Smokey

[pluby]

I have been wondering the same thing. But from handling the many support requests, I get the sense that we might be seeing a lot of new Mac users as a result of the global economic meltdown. Since I have been seeing quite a few questions for PowerPC Macs, my current theory is that many people with a Mac as their home machine are starting to use their existing Mac to write their resume, start their consulting business, etc. Of course, that is just a wild guess on my part.

Patrick

[K-9]

I have noticed this too. As to the cause of it; that i cannot say.

[pluby]

One other possible source of new users is that some organizations are experimenting with NeoOffice as possible replacement for Microsoft Office. Although I do not believe that NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org are direct replacements for Microsoft Office (I tend to think of them more as equals to AppleWorks and Microsoft Works), many organizations are looking to trim costs by looking at ways to reduce the number of Microsoft Office licenses that they must buy.

Patrick

[Lorinda]

This is tangential, but I keep an eye on the Mac forum over at the OpenOffice.org Community Forums, and I've seen at least a half a dozen different people comment that they are returning to NeoOffice from OOo 3.0 because of crashing or other performance issues with OOo 3.0. I haven't been able to tell whether those are mainly PPC users or not. I do know that the most active volunteer in that forum has not had these kinds of problems, so it is not a universal experience with OOo 3.0 for Mac.

The folks returning to NeoOffice, of course, wouldn't be likely to account for the uptick here, since they all have already been NeoOffice users. But it's possible that other Mac users have seen those posts and decided to give NeoOffice a try. On a few occasions, Mac users there have indicated that they had never heard of NeoOffice before someone else in the forums mentioned it, and they were excited to give it a try.

Lorinda

[sardisson]

I'd quite forgotten about the possible economic causes; the uptick in layoffs also came at about the same time as OOo 3. Certainly a number of interesting possibilities out there.

[OPENSTEP]

One interesting stat that I have seen recently was the increase in market share in small business. If that is true, and assuming it's safe to assume that the total number of small businesses isn't increasing dramatically, perhaps that could be a source.

ed

[James3359]

Although NeoOffice is deliberately careful not to bill itself as a substitute for MS Office, there are many users who use only a subset of MS Office's capabilities in each of its modules for whom NeoOffice or OOo is a practical and affordable replacement. They are happy to do without some of the extra features of MS Office or to work with clunkier solutions.

I wonder if there may not also be a kind of snowball effect where a relatively small user base reaches a point where it is suddenly much more visible in search engines, on forums etc. and there is then a higher number of people trying NeoO either for that reason or because they've picked up on the OOo 3 hype and are trying NeoO as well/instead.

[ovvldc]

[human]

Don't sell yourself short. Although you are correct that, feature for feature, they aren't quite direct replacements for M$ Office, NeoOffice and OOo are far superior to either M$ Works or the late lamented AppleWorks. On the Mac side, I'd put them on a par with iWork, although NeoOffice and OOo still have some catching up to do on Impress as it compares to Keynote, but then Keynote might even have a bit of an edge on PowerPoint. That said, I feel there are very few home or educational users who would find NeoOffice or OOo inadequate for their needs, and there are still some tasks I prefer doing in NeoOffice.

[yoxi]

Speaking as a 'home user' who has used MS Office in the office (and uses it on the mac at home too, when absolutely necessary), I find Neo does everything that I've ever needed to do in Office - and I find the Neo UI much more user-friendly (the only exception being that damned annoying OOo feature of Calc where you have to tab to another tab on a panel to click on 'Range contains column labels' EVERY damn time... still not part of the API in v3, so not possible to switch it on via macro grmmmbl...)

- padmavyuha

[human]

Agreed, although I do find Word's mail merge function to be a bit more robust. Fortunately, I don't use mail merge very often. In all, I find myself using M$ Office more than I would like simply because it's easiest to use the same thing my students are using.

I teach writing at a community college and because so few of my students have printers, I allow them to e-mail me their assignments. It actually works pretty well because I can grade them on the computer and e-mail them back, so they don't have to decipher my chicken-scratch handwriting. The only major problem is that about 10 of my students use M$ Works. I've successfully gotten a couple of them to make the switch to OOo for Window$. After a brief adjustment period, they seem to like it just fine and I can grade their papers using OOo 3.0 because its commenting feature, like Word's, places the notes in the right margin.

As far as I know, only one or two of my students use Macs. I received a paper from one the other day, who said her computer had died and she was borrowing her brother's iBook for the rest of the semester. The essay was a .odt file, but I have no idea whether she was using OOo or NeoOffice.

Surprisingly, several students I've suggested OOo or NeoOffice to have been reluctant or even intimidated by the idea of downloading and installing a piece of software from the Web. I'm thinking of burning a couple of OOo and NeoOffice installation CDs over the semester break and setting up a disc exchange program for my students. They can trade me a blank CD for one of the burned ones and I'll just make a new copy for the next student who wants it.