the law of averages

Luis has some suggestions for the OpenOffice.org team, the same ones he made two years ago. Users don’t necessarily care about feature parity, they care about performance and ease of use. I’ll use Gnumeric over OOo Calc any day, but presentations are really just medieval. PowerPoint isn’t great (especially when compared to Keynote’s two-display aware presentation mode), but Impress makes baby Jesus cry.

Of course, I also do think that the idea of writing a sane plugin interface for OOo could be a step in the right direction for usability. One could argue Firefox has been so successful with the “less is more” approach because it provides a good plugin interface which allows people to add features they’re missing from a larger, more bloated package. While OOo currently has some idea of a plugin, it’s not fully baked (IMHO). I recently looked at implementing a Creative Commons licensing interface for OOo, similar to the one Microsoft shipped this summer. When I compare my initial experience with my experience when I started doing MS Office “development” nearly 10 years ago, there’s no comparison: Office 97’s plugin model kicks OOo’s ass. Of course, in all fairness it may be more accurate to say that Office 97’s Plugin Documentation kicks OOo’s ass, but is that really a different statement?