Office 2007 vs. OpenOffice Comparison - Only A Ribbon Cutting Ceremony

I came across a blog post by capslock assassin comparing Office 2007 and OpenOffice. CA's methodology, as the writer described, came down to five reasons why Office 2007 is better than OpenOffice; user interface, help system, speed of common tasks, templates provided, and innovation.

In a nutshell, it was a pretty light treatment of the topic. Most of what was highlighted as strengths in Office 2007 were due to the new Ribbon menu feature. The ribbon menu won the day in the user interface, speed of common tasks, and innovation categories.

If you've followed my blog posts you know that I'm not a fan of the new ribbon menu. It's tough to give this comparison of Office 2007 and OpenOffice much credence giving the weight put on this questionable (in my book) ribbon feature of the new Office 2007.

Frankly, you could have replaced OpenOffice with Office XP and written almost exactly the same comparison, based on this blog post. Pre Office 2007 releases don't have the ribbon menus or some of the new features like SmartArt (which I love!).

I don't think comparisons like CA's do much to convince anyone that OpenOffice is inferior to Office 2007 and would probably only speak to an already biased Microsoft crowd who have never used OpenOffice.

Like this? Here are more recent posts.
Interview with Virtualization Expert Mark Russinovich
Join the Microsoft Bloggers Network
Xen Publishes Benchmarks And Roadmap

How Microsoft Can Save Vista And Windows Server 2008
Microsoft Live Workspace - Anybody Home?

Visit Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, opinion from around the Web.

Sign up for the bi-weekly Microsoft newsletter. (Click on News/Microsoft News Alert.)

Also check out Mitchell's personal blog The Converging Network and SSAATY Podcast.