George Ou posted a blog in ZDNet “OpenOffice.org 2.0 is here, but is it a pig?” which has been blogged to death over the past week, generating lots of heat but not much light. George’s test spreadsheet consisted of 16 sheets each with over 16000 rows of database data and no calculations – about 4Mb. No doubt there may be some people out there for whom this is a typical spreadsheet. I would hope not (that’s what databases are for).

I count myself as a pretty typical office productivity suite user. I use OpenOffice.org on Linux (at home) and MS-Office on Windows (day job) on a daily basis, often with the same files, and in all honesty I don’t see any difference in performance. I would guess that’s true for the vast majority of users.

That’s not to say the OpenOffice.org community is complacent about performance. Open-source developers love squeezing more out of applications. At the recent OpenOffice.org conference there were fascinating presentations from developers at Intel and Novell keen to get more out of the code. Since then, Google have announced they want to get in on the performance action too.

The fact is that OpenOffice.org 2 is faster than 1.x – the Intel team had independently produced benchmarks to prove it. Tens of millions of people downloaded version 1.x. People don’t download software – even free software – in these numbers unless it’s genuinely useful. Plus, many people have commented that the money saved on MS-Office licences would pay for a hefty RAM upgrade which would speed up all the software on the typical PC…

If OpenOffice.org is a pig, then it’s certainly flying off the download sites.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 at 6:27 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.