[Sussex] A Year without windows

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

On Mon, 2005-05-23 at 22:30 +0100, John D. wrote:
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> Perhaps, once OOo 2 hits the streets in anger, we might see a few more 
> of these kind of articles.

Maybe so, though the shift in mind share is something that takes time
and slowly accelerates.  I doubt Linux will be the most common OS on
desktops anytime in the next few years, but it's slowly becoming a
significant player in that market.   

As for OOo 2, yeah it's great, it has an Access like DB frontend
(indeed, OOo 1.x has one too, it's just very well hidden!).

OOo2 even has a planned .mdb file compatible driver layer, that might
help a few people migrate.

Now though, I see a perfect opportunity to bang on my favourite drum for
a while.  :-)

Personally I'd rather see more companies waking up to the fact that
office software is counter productive.  Think about these things:

 - How much time do staff spend dicking around with font's?
 - How much business critical data is locked up in spreadsheets,
documents and  crappy little Access databases that are known (and/or
understood) by only a small percentage of the people who could make use
of them?
- How much business process is only defined in terms of Word macros,
Excel macros, Access forms and VBA?

... add these things together and you're sitting on a mass of people
quietly frittering away their hours making a million variations on the
same spreadsheet.  Dave puts in hours and hours of effort on his new
year-on-year budgeting spreadsheet not knowing (or caring) that Bob in
the office upstairs has already gathered those figures in his Access
database for forecasts that lives in his departments shared folder that
Dave never looks at.  Jane has spent the best part of a day making her
powerpoint sales presentation look spiffy (she really loves those
lab-dissolves), but unfortunately she won't make the sales your company
needs because she didn't spend enough time researching the content and
left out some points vital to the client in order to fit in a nice piece
of clip-art of stick man scratching his head.  At another meeting Jane
couldn't provide the figures they needed because Bob said they didn't
have them, even though Dave has a spreadsheet with those figures broken
down by month that he keeps in his departments shared folder (that no
one else ever looks at).

Back in the days before Sun Microsystems with actively involved in the
development of office software (you remember, when Scott McNeally use to
called Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates "Beavis and Butthead"), they
commissioned an investigation into the added productivity provided by
"productivity software".  What they found was exactly as detailed above,
for organisations of a non-trivial size office software destroyed
productivity.  Sun went so far as to claim that removing office software
from all but essential use cases and providing users with just
plain-text email, plain text editors, a desktop calculator application
and web browser gave them an 80% increase in productive computer use.
They saw an change in the way that people communicate, people spent more
time making sure the information was right and the language clear.  All
"databases" and "systems" had to be created by a centralised team who
could attempt to ensure that information was redistributed to all
appropriate parties instead of people with no software engineering
expertise creating a thousand and on identical spreadsheets.

Now of course Sun didn't have an office suite in those days, indeed they
were selling a platform that didn't have an office suite to speak of at
all.  That report was almost definitely sending a message that Sun
wanted us to buy into so we could consider buying their thin-client
products.  They have since retracted that report, now they _love_ office
software.   StarOffice is the monkey's gamete-glands they tell us.
Trouble is, that report raised some very good points, situations I've
seen over and over, and I can't get the idea out of my head - wouldn't
we  all be better off without massive, bloated, over-complex software
creating extra tasks in our jobs that never used to exist? 

Discuss...

 
-- 
Geoffrey J. Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation