GullFOSS on OOo Learning from Firefox
GullFOSS is a new Sun group blog for OpenOffice.org engineers. Only a few months old, I’ve already found numerous postings of great interest. The development team is doing a good job of describing their technical and programming work in a straightforward way for an audience containing many non-programmers like me.
A recent post discusses “What can OpenOffice.org learn from Firefox?”
In discussing two issues (the perceived light-and-fast Firefox vs. the “bloated” Mozilla, and the value of Firefox’ extensions), Mathias Bauer reaches a very valuable conclusion. Technical analysis of speed, and the ability to create extensions, are not as relevant as getting the right information (framed in the right way) to the marketplace.
Marketing, not an order-of-magnitude technical advance, is what seems to have launched Firefox to its current success, and marketing of its existing capabilities is what OpenOffice needs to make a similar jump.
The GullFOSS blog itself is one of the major tools to help achieve this marketing and communications success. A direct line from the actual developers to the press and end-users will cut through a lot of perceptual chaos and portray OOo in a new, more positive and also more accurate light.
Nevertheless, in my experience the above really only affects the savvy technical user. Normal end users to whom I have introduced OpenOffice have not had any complaints about speed or OOo extensions. Instead, they have been delighted by its free cost, familiar interface, compatibility with MSO file formats, and its unique features (particularly PDF export).