Sun dropping out of OOo wouldn't be bad
Although his official position at Novell nowadays describes him as "Desktop Architect" Michael Meeks main focus is on improving OpenOffice.org. A task which is not made easier by a severe lack of openness at Sun as he puts it. In an interview at the recent GNOME Users and Developers Conference (GUADEC) in Istanbul he talked with Andreas Proschofsky about future developments around the free office suite, the current need for Go-oo - an improved OOo flavor - and about breaking down barriers between KDE and GNOME.
The following interview is also available in a german translation.
derStandard.at: A lot of applications are moving to the web, also in the office space - like with Google Documents and other solutions. Is the need for a full office suite slowly fading away?
Michael Meeks: That's a very good question - and a very difficult to answer one. So I think there are lot's of different classes of users, lot's of different types of workloads. And typically the easy workloads are moving to the web and there are a lot of benefits that you can get from that. In particular collaboration is the killer feature that has made these fairly feature-free office-suites useful to people. But the problem is: As more and more simple stuff moves to the web, you are left with the increasingly non-simple stuff and you actually need quite some horsepower for some of that. Even a simple chart in your presentation can have a huge pivot-table behind it that is doing some serious data crunching.
Also OpenOffice.org isn't even finished right now and rewriting all of this in HTML and Javascript would be quite difficult, the web is not a beautiful, clean development environment. It's actually very difficult to produce something which looks like you want it to look like. And that's by design - it's not a fixed layout, which is good for the web but when you try to layout documents you need more precision.
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