I am very excited about the new, fully Aqua enabled, NeoOffice coming soon. This is a Java-free (in other words: it may actually work reliably, use little memory, and be fast) completely open source solution to the ongoing problem of reading proprietary/non-standard file formats (MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint) that people insist on sending around even though they require expensive crap software from MicroSoft.
Of course the idealist in me wants everyone else to simply stop using that crap software and send files around in standardized and open file formats (ASCII, HTML, RTF, etc); but I realize that is extremely unlikely to happen. MicroSoft may not be able to write decent software, but they are certainly fabulous marketers. Hell, they’ve manage to convince millions of people to pay to alpha test their operating systems experiment for decades. Clearly they’ve won the marketing game.
So getting something like NeoOffice working is really, really cool; as it means I can finally read all those MS Word document files everyone sends me. It also means people can do word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations without MicroSoft’s bloated, insecure, software… oh wait – nothing new there… been doing that without MS Office for decades.
Post a Comment