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I believe they've been shipping Corel WordPerfect instead of MSWorks for some time now.
HP, on the other hand...

It is only a 60 day demo now. It used to be the full version.

Easy.. support. Community based support wont be enough to convince Dell, and I highly doubt they'll pay people to support a product that is apparently 'free'.

As more people use it, support calls go up driving higher costs.

As good as OO.o is, I doubt it'll happen any time soon just on the support factor.

I'm always confused by that argument.

All the people I know who have called Dell for Windows or Office support get told to call Microsoft, and they always have an unpleasant experience.

At the very worst, wouldn't this save people $400 before they're told "Ask on the forums", and then having an unpleasant exerience?

I believe that MS Works is included with an OEM license. If this is the case, Dell have all support obligations, and MS do not have to offer support at all.

I do not believe that it is harder to support OpenOffice than MS Works. So if Dell have to do the support, why not give the customers the better product?

"All the people I know who have called Dell for Windows or Office support get told to call Microsoft, and they always have an unpleasant experience. "

That because the major OEMs are supposed to the support, not MS, my brother worked fot XP Support for MS and Convergys, and OEM's are just being lazy, making you phone MS when they are actually the ones who are supposed to support OEM versions

All the people I know who have called Dell for Windows or Office support get told to call Microsoft, and they always have an unpleasant experience.

Back during the days when I was still using Windows, I was never even told that by my PC vendor. I guess I just assumed Microsoft didn't even HAVE a customer service department.

Considering what I think of their software, that wouldn't surprise me.

I think preloading would be a great idea, especially for the customers as they get into contact with very mature Opensource software.

Yet I still have to disagree on one of your points: At least on three PCs - so all I tested it on - Impress works sluggish or needs a lot of cpu power. So for me it is not only calc that lacks in many aspects but also Impress.

From a user experience point of view, it looks like Writer is what gets worked on most. Writer replaces Word with ease. Calc is almost as good as Excel, it just isn't as snappy as Excel and doesn't handle large documents as well. Impress has a long long way to go to catching up to Powerpoint.

I won't argue about the points of performance of either Calc or Impress. They could both benefit from improvements in that area.

Developer snapshots show some nice feature enhancements in the works for Calc that should go a long way toward allowing me to use it as a complete replacement for Excel. In the past Calc only sufficed for my most basic needs.

With regards to Impress, I haven't seen any glaring issues with the feature set (other than performance). In fact, I have had times using PowerPoint that I missed a feature from Impress that seemed like it should have been a completely elementary design decision (like far superior formatting control for fonts and characters). People often try to do too much with presentation software that distracts from a message. Those are the people that I usually hear complaining about Impress.

I'm looking forward to v2.3 and v3.0, and I hope that the developers are able to package everything in a way that it is even harder to find a reason to justify the expense of an office suite costing more than $100.

So are Pivot-tables more comfortable to use in those dev-snapshots? That would really help me a lot.

If you have a presentation without text moving around Impress works fast, but as soon as you have that it is slow here. No, I don't use moving text as it looks unbusinesslike imo, but well many people I know want to use that "fancy" stuff.

Does Impress support "Presentation Tools" like in Powerpoint? My understanding is that it doesn't offer anything like that.

Presenter Tools in MS Office Powerpoint allows you to have 3 miniature slides on one side (what you covered, what slide you are on, and what is next) with the current slide enlarged to the right. At the top is a timer from when you started your talk. At the bottom is your notes for the slide. On a second display, what is shown is your current slide.

I'm in academia, so I give lectures several times a week. This is an invaluable tool to have. Does OO.o offer that in Impress? If it does, than it just jumped up a few points in my book. I saw a wiki at the OO.o site earlier today which indicated that this was a major problem for Impress and that they knew it would never catch on in academia or for many business environments until they had an offering similar to Presenter Tools in Powerpoint. Or is that just an outdated wiki entry?

As far as Writer goes...no problem. I've used it on both Linux and Windows andd I really like it (except launch time was a little slow). Calc does more than most consumers need. Those of us with scientific pursuits find it lacking, but it does fine in a pinch.

Personally, I am looking forward to the aqua port of OO.o, but I will likely continue to use Powerpoint if Impress hasn't caught up on the Presenter Tools issue.

I don't see how this could go wrong.

How about: Microsoft not likely being very pleased when one of the premium partners helps promoting something (ODF) the are in competition with?

Dell provides a fair revenue stream for MS. They wouldn't be stupid enough to do something like increasing Dell's OEM prices just because Dell preload OO.o.

I also believe MS is bound by court order such that they can't do that (unless they increase the price for all OEMs).

Edited 2007-03-12 23:45

"I also believe MS is bound by court order such that they can't do that"

Actually,with respect to the monopoly conviction, Microsoft seems to be not quite bound by law, on the contrary, it seems to be allowed to BEND THE LAW or to cleverly circumvent it, whenever it see it fit.

Yes, the hardware manufacturers could -should- include free alternatives to Microsoft expensive products preinstalled: OpenOffice, Gnu/Linux..., but they are too much afraid of MSFT's wrath. The redmonian giant could then favor some or other OEM in order to damage the one not obeying them.

But in the long run, if the OEMs follow their supplier's quasi-extortionating requirements instead of their customer's they will suffer even more. And now there are software alternatives to Microsoft for the OEMs. Microsoft, in contrast, cannot find alternatives to estabilished OEMS to distribute their software. If either Dell or HP follow the free software strategy and play their cards cleverly, they will succeed and then the other OEM will follow the same direction. It will be game over for microsoft's upper hand game over the OEMs in the industry.

Edited 2007-03-13 00:12

Dell provides a fair revenue stream for MS. They wouldn't be stupid enough to do something like increasing Dell's OEM prices just because Dell preload OO.o.

They don't have to raise prices. Ms provides all sorts of benefits to their premium partners like the fact that Dell customers don't need to call MS to activate their Vista (the process which allowed Vista to be cracked) :

"This version of Vista uses System-Locked Pre-Installation 2.0 (SLP 2.0). It allows the "Royalty OEMs" to embed specific licensing information into the operating system which Vista can activate without having to go back to Microsoft for verification"

They can just take away these and other priviledges away on a whim. Let's face it, Dell is chained hand and foot to the 600kg gorilla that is MS. And when you're chained to a gorilla it is not a good idea to piss him off.

Asking them to bundle OOo AND give money to it is a charity plea.

Not quite. Dell has to pay loads of money for MS Office licenses. Not as much as consumers and businesses do, but a good chunk of change nonetheless. They also pay for Works or WordPerfect or whatever. OpenOffice is not only offering Dell as many licenses as they want at no cost, but they hinted that they would like to make a special version of OpenOffice for Dell (whatever that might entail).

This isn't some trialware , this is a full productivity suite! People hate the crapware that comes preinstalled on their OEM PCs. At OpenOffice is something useful that adds quite a bit of value to the product. Dell's target market has clearly indicated that they would like to see OpenOffice bundled with Dell PCs, and the OpenOffice team wants to help them make it happen.

Nobody has offered to give Dell a free productivity suite until now. Dell can charge the same for PCs with OpenOffice as they would have for PCs with whatever entry-level suite they were offering before, and they get to pocket the usual licensing fee. Of course it wouldn't make sense to offer an entry-level suite when OpenOffice is available. You would either pay extra for MS Office or get OpenOffice instead. Dell would be offering a more capable product for the same price and would be making more money in the process. How is this charity?

"How is this charity?"

Dell has to pay loads of money for MS Office, but this is still less than they charge customers for it.

On their low end ($300) PCs, if not for upselling software they probably would not make profit on them at all.

The ability to create word documents is seen as an essential function even by the most basic users.

Giving people OOo for free to do this would hinder the ability to upsell them MS Office (read: eat profits)

On Dell's site, Microsoft Office Home and Student costs about $200 on top of the system price.

Dell probably makes something like $75-$100 on each copy sold and on budget computers that is enough to make or break you.

Open Office is free, they may be able to charge $15 - $20 for it but in order to stay profitable they will probably have to raise the hardware prices for the lower end systems to compensate.

"Open Office is free, they may be able to charge $15 - $20 for it but in order to stay profitable they will probably have to raise the hardware prices for the lower end systems to compensate."

Except that they would be able to sell their systems at an overall *lower* price than the competition...

[i]"Except that they would be able to sell their systems at an overall *lower* price than the competition.."

You don't get it. Yes, the total system cost could be lower if they charged people $80 for OOo instead of $200 for Office, but who is going to pay $80 for OOo?

As stated earlier, Dell banks on software sales and bundled applications in order to make any kind of a profit on their low end ($300-$400) systems.

Take that away and these systems are sold at a loss.

As a public company (not a charity), they actually have a legal obligation to attempt to make a profit.

The fact is that they make more money selling Office than they would giving away OOo. It will take more than "MS is Evil, mmkay?" to convince the stock holders this is a good idea.

Dell makes money by selling MS Office to its customers. If these customers take the free OO.o rather than Office Dell loses money.

The only way it would make sense is if Dell be able to steal customers from other competitors due to offering OO.o. I find that rather unlikely.

If these customers take the free OO.o rather than Office Dell loses money.

They also lose money when customers choose their entry-level suite instead of Office. So if they can't sell Office, they might as well provide something that's free rather than an entry-level suite that costs them some amount of money per license.

Not quite. Dell has to pay loads of money for MS Office licenses.

You are incorrect!. Dell will sell you MS Office and I'm sure they get resller pricing which means they make a load of money selling MS Office.

They have NO incentive to bundle OO.o because it's free and nobody is going to pay Dell for OO.o.

There is no benefit for Dell because they aren't competeing with Microsoft.

Dell will sell you MS Office and I'm sure they get resller pricing which means they make a load of money selling MS Office.

I'm sure they make money selling Office. But they still need to pay for the licenses. Nobody is going to pay Dell for OpenOffice. They are going to pay Dell for a PC and get OpenOffice as well. It doesn't cost them anything, so why not?

In the scheme of the Dell sales and marketing paradigm, OpenOffice wouldn't compete with MS Office. It would simply replace the entry-level suites like Works. For most users who use productivity software extensively, MS Office will remain the compelling value-add that it always has been. Every everyone else, OpenOffice is superior to an entry-level suite at no extra cost.

Butters, if you read between the lines in this thread, you'll notice that the nay-sayers imply that OO.o is not entry level at all and that including it would negate the need for MS Office.

Including OO.o is suicide for an "MS Shop" like Dell. No more up selling MS Office. No more ad rebates from MS. Overall, the selling of MS systems would become more expensive for Dell than its competitors.

Preloaded FOSS will most likely come from an unknown source out of the blue. The incumbent manufacturers are too tied into the business model of riding on MS's coat tails. They can't change, because it would rock their lifeboat too much.

As much as I hate to say it, that was the case for one person here. He used Office 2007 as a trial, and it locked up on them (also preventing him from accessing his documents that he wrote, as he saved them on .docx format). I installed OO.o on his computer for them to try, and instead of using it, he goes to another friend to get a pirated version of it.
I hope it just depends on the person though.

I'm not a Microsoft Office user, but I find OpenOffice's layout to be a bit hard to use. All things take time to learn, but it's just not intuitive to me.

With that said I still hope they include it will dell (or any other manufacturer) computer systems. It may not win millions of converts, but it might snag a few. And with more people using it it might also become a better products.

I haven't seen a Word Processing Suite yet who's format WASN'T non-intuitive in some major ways. Open Office is no worse in that respect than any of the others, but it could certainly stand some improvement anyway.

Some are better than OpenOffice by a mile and other are not. With that said though it's all about personal preference. I like WordPerfect and find most of it's functions intuitive and well placed, but other (most of whom come from a Word background) find it hard to use.

OpenOffice is good for basic word processing task using basic formatting. Complex formatting just simply can't be done in OpenOffice (or done easily) in my experience.

An example of complex formatting would be to have multiple columns in the footer or header. Another example would be to have multiple columns (with out tables) in the body that end a third of the way down and start again a third of the way to the bottom. However, that kind of complex formatting probably isn't used that often.

People will just ask a friend to borrow their copy of MS Office, pirated or not because they don't like this "new Office"

Yes, I fear that will be true. Allthough OpenOffice is more than enough for all the users treating their PC as a better typewriter, users will want to have it from MICROS~1 because that's the only thing that exists. And of course, they want to have the same pictures ("pictures" refers to desktop elements in general as well as to application programs) at home as they know it from their place of work.

As it has been mentioned before, users will install pirated copies of some obsolete MICROS~1 product (e. g. "Office 2000" or "Office XP"). At least in Germany that's a common fact today. Nearly everone has the "Professional" edidion of OS and office suite, but no one owns a valid license...

I'm very sad I have to agree with you (because I do not own or use any MICROS~1 binary garbage), but I think you're right with your prediction.

We'll see if OpenOffice will get mainstream. I hope it will. BTW, we use it at work (established certificated psychologists), and it works completely fine, even in our multi-OS environment. So neither home nor corporate users should encounter serious problems using a preinstalled version of OpenOffice instead of any MICROS~1 product.

People will just ask a friend to borrow their copy of MS Office, pirated or not because they don't like this "new Office"

You mean Office 2007? That looks, well, unfamiliar? :-)

Maybe they typed it up in Word.

"I believe that the World Revolution is coming and the victory of Socialism is inevitable."

Mixing Political ideology will be the reason of the demise of Open Source Software.

Didn't this revolution happen about a century ago?

90 years ago this fall. Didn't seem to work too well in the long run though.

The open question is whether it WOULD have, if it had arisen in post-industrial societies (as Marx predicted) instead of agrarian (pre-industrial) ones. Whether anyone who tries it in future will ultimately go back to democracy is another open question, but put it this way: democracy has its faults and its detractors, but who apart from the asylum inmates wants to go back to feudalism?

So I'm going to have to pay $200 more for a blank system from Dell to compensate developers??? I think I'll simply buy a computer from someone else, thank you very much. You (like most of your socialist comrades) really aren't very good at this business thing.

> So I'm going to have to pay $200 more for a blank system from Dell to compensate developers??? I think I'll simply buy a computer from someone else, thank you very much. You (like most of your socialist comrades) really aren't very good at this business thing.

You are probably right but we will never know until somebody tries. There are many examples when people are happy to pay higher prices when cheaper alternatives are readily available. Think Mac computers or organic food. Your cannot buy a blank iMac, can you? What I am basically suggesting is for Dell and others to get into Open Source software. They could make people pay for it because they control distribution. And no, I'm not a socialist. Just because I believe socialism is coming does not mean i welcome it.

Except there aren't any real alternatives to an iMac. People buy (and pay a premium for) iMacs since they offer something no other company can, the combination of OS X and the design. Where as Dells are virtually indistinguishable from HPs or any computers from any other box shops.

If Dell wants to get away with charging $200 more than HP for the same hardware they're going to have to offer some pretty major incentives and I seriously doubt a slightly customized version of OO.o and some other OS apps(which you could download and install yourself within 30 mins) is going to cut it.

Translation: Bundle us and obtw, you gotta pay us!. If you don't bundle us we're gonna set our Open Source goons on you.

Hey, don't mod him down! This one is funny.

This would give MSFT a great incentive to create and sell an extremely cheap version of Word for the same market.

Like Word Starter Edition?
You can only type one word a minute.
Only create documents one page long.
You can only use one font and not larger than 6 point.
You can only have three paragraphs on the page.
And only the author can ever read the document.
Spellchecking is limited with a dictionary of 500 most common words.
If you reopen a document second time in the same day you must immediately validate your copy of windows and word.
Oh, and agree to license all your data to Microsoft to use any way they see fit.

You mean that version of Word?

Holy crap man. If you know what abiword is I'm sure you'll be fully capable of choosing "don't install anything" and downloading it from the web.

This is about providing everyday people with a word processor. These are people who may think that Word is the only word processor left in existence.

Give the choice thing a rest. If you complain about not enough choices every time someone tries to add one you're just going to make sure no one ever ads any.

Holy crap man. If you know what abiword is I'm sure you'll be fully capable of choosing "don't install anything" and downloading it from the web.

This is about providing everyday people with a word processor. These are people who may think that Word is the only word processor left in existence.

Give the choice thing a rest. If you complain about not enough choices every time someone tries to add one you're just going to make sure no one ever ads any.

Have you used OO on OS X? If so you will know the reason for that. If you're talking about plain vanilla OO, then you'll need X11. That means the fonts don't look right, the keybindings are all wrong, and the dialogs just look out of place.

At this point, someone will point out NeoOffice. NeoOffice is better, it uses Aqua (via the Java bridge) for rendering and this has two main benefits. No need for X11 and font rendering is much better. The NeoOffice team have also started using native looking Mac OS X dialogs and the keybindings are inline with what you'd expect from Mac OS X applications.

However, this is where people will start to disagree. I personally think the NeoOffice looks alien on the Mac OS X desktop. Why? Look at those tiered toolbars. More and more applications are moving to using floating palettes as these work better at handling the complexity of modern day word processors. Take a look at Word 2004 for example. Not only that, I think it speaks volumes about how far NeoOffice has yet to go when MS Word 2004 loads and feels more snappy compared to NeoOffice on my Macbook. This is significant, because NeoOffice is compiled for Intel (yes, I downloaded the Intel version) while MS Office is running in Rosetta emulation. One can only imagine what this performance delta will be like when a native Intel version of MS Office is released.

Preloading OpenOffice onto OS X will never happen, until OpenOffice improves to the extent that it becomes a viable competitor to MS Office. This can only happen when people who are OpenOffice fans pump money into the native Aqua port or hope for the day Apple gets involved.

Have you tried copying files between Microsoft Word for Windows and Word for Mac? A most frustrating experience.

Only last night I was fighting font metrics, where Word for Mac used a totally different set of metrics, messing up the layout. I've had vector images mangled too. NeoOffice worked perfectly, identical to Word for Windows and OpenOffice.org.

Which do you prefer, perfect results after a few seconds longer startup time, or hours tweaking the documents to make them look correct again?

I've never had a problem. I use as my primary machine a Powerbook running OS X 10.4 and my office suite is MS Office 2004. I exchange MS Office documents with my WinXP boxes running Office XP and I have one running Office 2003. No problems. I have people in my office running a variety of MS office suites. No problem there either.