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[Amedee Van Gasse (on Ubuntu mailing lists)]

On Sun, October 4, 2009 16:25, Liam Proven wrote:

> To "compete" better with MS Office, Corel decided to make its products
> more like Office. They decided to do this, not by, say, licensing the
> file formats, but by licensing the toolbars and the macro language.
> They ripped out their own and replaced them with MS toolbars
> (apparently not realising that MS redo these every release anyway) and
> replaced their macro languages with Visual Basic for Applications
> (VBA).
>
> The VBA thing might have been a good move, except that Excel, for
> instance, also has its own more primitive in-cell macro language and
> AFAIK they didn't get that too. So they did not get round-trip
> macro-compatibility, as VBA was adapted for their own object
> model/class libraries/whatever and wasn't 100% plug-in-replaceable.
>
> But in return for this, Micros~1 demanded some big concessions. And
> Corel bent over and took it.
>
> Result: Corel killed its 15-odd-year old entirely-separate Unix
> product line, meaning WordPerfect 8 for Linux. (WordPerfect used to
> run natively on almost /everything/ in the 1980s, from DEC and Data
> General minicomputers to the Commodore Amiga. There was a SCO Xenix
> version which I used and sold to clients, which became a SCO Unix and
> Novell UnixWare product, which became WordPerfect for Linux. It was a
> good app, too.)
>
> And Core also killed off its own Linux OS line.
>
> The Linux OS got bought out by a team put together by its original
> creator, Ming Poon, who set up Xandros.
>
> The other thing you said was that Xandros was dead without Novell.
> Well, the distro was less, yes - *everyone* has OpenOffice - but
> actually, Xandros is one of the more commercially-successful Linux
> vendors there has ever been. Its deals with Scalix and so on have
> helped, but mainly, the bundling of Xandros on the Asus Eee and some
> other netbooks has made them a /lot/ of money.

In my honest opinion, OpenOffice is still a step down from what
WordPerfect ever was, or could have been today if it hadn't been killed so
efficiently.
And that's just the electronic typewriter. It's even worse for the
spreadsheet. There are still a lot of things that I cannot do in OOo Calc,
that were already possible in Lotus 1-2-3 more than 10 years ago. MS Excel
was getting there with the 2003 version, but still barely scratching the
surface. The 2007 has too many emphasis on bells and whistles. Has anyone
seen the "improvements" to conditional formatting? Some sheets become
color books if you leave them in the hands of the beancounters. "Ooh, look
at teh shiney! I can haz colurz in mah cellz."

Meanwhile, if I want to make a 3-dimensional surface chart with variable
XY-axis, I should look at statistical software like *R*? Speaking about
overkill...

-- 
Amedee