So as some may have worked out...
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Years and years ago I used to be involved quite closely in the the "Desktop Productivty Wars" (DPW), this would involve numerous demo, competitive pitches etc. against the two other key players Microsoft and WordPerfect.
However, every now and again I would have to go and sell against a little German company called StarOffice because they had written an Object Oriented (that was their spin) Windows and OS/2 Suite. So before giving any of these these pitches, I'd always spend time learning the competition, figuring out their UI, how they were weak, and especially how to crash them doing regular spreadsheety, doc editing type things etc. (Sadly Word Pro 96 made it really easy for the competition to show crashing in Lotus apps). Anyway, StarOffice got purchased by Sun, went on to become OpenOffice and has now forked into what is Lotus Symphony. So this evening I decided to try out some of the old Spreadsheet tricks that would show 1-2-3 in a good light and would crash the competition or make it look much slower.
Some 10+ years later, the StarOffice crash bug still exists in both OpenOffice 2.x and the new Symphony, I guess it's in their gene pool.
So if you want some fun, do the following, bring up Windows Task Manager (C-A-D) and look at processes, look for soffice.exe and look at the memory counter, you might want to make the column wider so you can see how high it can go and then type into cell A1 (the one in the top left) =RAND() and press enter, now copy that cell to the clipboard. Now click the little block above A and to the left of 1 so that the entire spreadsheet is highlighted. Now Click paste, now watch that memory counter!
Now 1-2-3 peaks at about 800Mb and Excel peaks at about 850Mb, OpenOffice doesn't appear to have a peak, actually it does, it hits the 32bit memory limitation for an application of 2Gb and crashes.
The Random number was always a good test, as it immediately lead into the oppotunity to show how long the spreadsheets took to recalc/refresh. Funnily enough the key to do this in Excel is F9 and also F9 in 1-2-3.
One area that really needs looking at by IBM in OpenOffice Calc and now the spreadsheet in Symphony is the keyboard shortcuts for highlighting ranges and cells. For the old 1-2-3 junkies out there, or people that learnt spreadsheets using 1-2-3, they still enter a lot of formulas and numbers etc. without touching the mouse. Highlighting cells, rows etc. is very weird in OpenOffice.
Besides that, Symphony is significantly slower to launch than OpenOffice, although if we ignore the 64mb for Expeditor takes up about the same amount of memory, it will be adequate for most SMBs. For enterprises the issue is still going to be 100% file compatibility (I loaded a few user guides I've written in Word and Word Pro and most had issues of one kind or another with layout and formatting) and the huge number of apps that have been built around VBA and their COM/OLE interfaces.
OK I promised no more about Lotus Symphony for at least a week...
PS Does it worry anyone else that I remember this useless information? It worries me, as it means I'm leaving less space in my head for the important stuff.
Years and years ago I used to be involved quite closely in the the "Desktop Productivty Wars" (DPW), this would involve numerous demo, competitive pitches etc. against the two other key players Microsoft and WordPerfect.
However, every now and again I would have to go and sell against a little German company called StarOffice because they had written an Object Oriented (that was their spin) Windows and OS/2 Suite. So before giving any of these these pitches, I'd always spend time learning the competition, figuring out their UI, how they were weak, and especially how to crash them doing regular spreadsheety, doc editing type things etc. (Sadly Word Pro 96 made it really easy for the competition to show crashing in Lotus apps). Anyway, StarOffice got purchased by Sun, went on to become OpenOffice and has now forked into what is Lotus Symphony. So this evening I decided to try out some of the old Spreadsheet tricks that would show 1-2-3 in a good light and would crash the competition or make it look much slower.
Some 10+ years later, the StarOffice crash bug still exists in both OpenOffice 2.x and the new Symphony, I guess it's in their gene pool.
So if you want some fun, do the following, bring up Windows Task Manager (C-A-D) and look at processes, look for soffice.exe and look at the memory counter, you might want to make the column wider so you can see how high it can go and then type into cell A1 (the one in the top left) =RAND() and press enter, now copy that cell to the clipboard. Now click the little block above A and to the left of 1 so that the entire spreadsheet is highlighted. Now Click paste, now watch that memory counter!
Now 1-2-3 peaks at about 800Mb and Excel peaks at about 850Mb, OpenOffice doesn't appear to have a peak, actually it does, it hits the 32bit memory limitation for an application of 2Gb and crashes.
The Random number was always a good test, as it immediately lead into the oppotunity to show how long the spreadsheets took to recalc/refresh. Funnily enough the key to do this in Excel is F9 and also F9 in 1-2-3.
One area that really needs looking at by IBM in OpenOffice Calc and now the spreadsheet in Symphony is the keyboard shortcuts for highlighting ranges and cells. For the old 1-2-3 junkies out there, or people that learnt spreadsheets using 1-2-3, they still enter a lot of formulas and numbers etc. without touching the mouse. Highlighting cells, rows etc. is very weird in OpenOffice.
Besides that, Symphony is significantly slower to launch than OpenOffice, although if we ignore the 64mb for Expeditor takes up about the same amount of memory, it will be adequate for most SMBs. For enterprises the issue is still going to be 100% file compatibility (I loaded a few user guides I've written in Word and Word Pro and most had issues of one kind or another with layout and formatting) and the huge number of apps that have been built around VBA and their COM/OLE interfaces.
OK I promised no more about Lotus Symphony for at least a week...
PS Does it worry anyone else that I remember this useless information? It worries me, as it means I'm leaving less space in my head for the important stuff.
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