Re: [tlug] The Great Mistake is thinking OOo is different [was: Why Vista Sucks]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Nguyen Vu Hung writes:

 > I don't think so. It is revolution and one of the solution.

It's not a revolution, it goes back to the first monkey smearing mud
on a rock.

 > Because it is *productive* ( means: easy to get the job done, and
 > everyones has MS Word installed ).

As far as I can tell, neither is true.  It is possible to produce very
nice-looking documents with text/plain and a sufficiently smart
processor (POD, which is very specialized, but is fine as proof of
concept, reST, asciidoc, and YAML are all examples).  It is damn hard
to terminally break a reST document, even, and that's quite vulnerable
because it depends on significant whitespace as part of the markup
syntax.

Word requires formatting standards perhaps more than other systems do,
because Word tables and box diagrams can be extremely fragile.  I've
wasted several hours trying to fix laboriously input documents, only
to realize that editing a broken Word document is not worth the
effort.  Keep a copy of the original, and start over.

And it's not good enough to have Word installed; you need to have at
least as recent a version as everybody around you does.  Office 2007
.docx is a case in point, as you point out yourself.

So what it comes down to is that Word is productive because everybody
has it, and therefore it's a convenient standard for exchange of
trivial documents.  (By "trivial" I mean "lacking semantically
significant internal structure".)