[Sussex] Life without Microsoft - day 1

[Mark Harrison]

Well - I've finally cut loose from Microsoft Applications at long last...

As you will know, I've lived in a hybrid IT world for many, many years.

I started programming on a Spectrum, and then had an Amiga, which I
primarily used as a terminal for a Sun network at University (I was lucky
enough to get a terminal point in my room in 1990!)

After 3 years of Sun, I started work, and my employer used DOS as part of
its standard build for office-based tasks. I've used Windows since 3.0, and
I have always liked SOME of the things it did. The Windows 3.1 DDE interface
capability to share information between applications was something I used
between Excel and Project and found very powerful, but I still missed the
elegance of the Unix approach and found that DOS had some ludicrous
limitations.

I went through Windows 95, 98, NT4, and 2000, which I still use on my
laptops.

In installed OOo on one of my machines a few months ago, and then installed
the current version pretty much when it came out. There are still a few
things about OOo that I don't find obvious... but the same is true of Office
2000 and XP (particularly, say, the copy/paste behaviour in Excel which
works completely differently to that in any other Windows app - doh!)

However, yesterday I finally took the decision to uninstall MS Office 2000
from my last machine. It was, actually, a liberating experience.

The key "office productivity tools" for me are 1: spreadsheet, and 2:
presentation utility. I've found that the OOo spreadsheet is excellent, and
can handle anything I need to do (with one exception, which I'll come to.)
The presentation utility isn't quite as good as Powerpoint, but the
economics have changed radically.... while I might have been prepared to pay
the price of O2k for the value of the key tools, now the choice is pay the
price of O2k for the "difference in value between the MS tools and the OOo
ones", and O2k no longer stacks up.

The two things I miss about O2k:

1: Visio. I've used Visio since it was a Roderick Manhattan product... one
of my first bits of contract negotiation was with Visio International when
they took over from Roderick Manhattan. To be honest, MS haven't really
added ANYTHING I find useful to the product - Visio 4 did all I needed.

2: VBA. This is, I think, the battleground. When one buys an MS product, one
isn't just buying into that product - one's buying into a complete
architecture which includes VBA as a unifying tool for macro development,
and presents a consistent object model across an entire suite of components.
This is something that OOo has to address if it's going to tackle the
corporate space, still.

It's not that OOo does automation poorly, it's that it does it incompatibly.

Example, I've been asked to represent a Spanish outfit who've developed some
software for the growing Derivatives Trading market. (1) They have developed
the software in... VBA as a bunch of macros that take raw Reuters feeds and
calculate everything from Binomial Prices to Delta Ratios. The
sophistication isn't in the coding used, but in the understanding of the
derivatives business, but they've chosen to write in VBA for Excel because
that's the "standard system" found in 99% of that market. It's not a
particularly GOOD platform, but it's the one that will integrate best with
their clients' existing architectures.

Now, it may be that OOo will support VBA... and I'm willing to be pleasantly
surprised...

Regards,

Mark

(1) Hedge funds are where the boom is. Most traditional funds try to perform
in a way that mirrors (or aims to beat) some underlying volatile thing,
like, say, the FTSE100. Hedge funds, conversely, try to provide an absolute
consistent performance, irrespective of what the underlying assets do, by a
mixture of long, short and more complex "derived" positions. "Mark's Market
Prediction" is that there will be an onshore boom in these funds over the
next 5-10 years as an ageing investor base gets increasingly frustrated by
volatility in other asset classes and seeks to invest in hedge funds as
asset classes in their own right, rather than simply as, well, a hedge!