From: scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us (Steve Simmons)
Subject: Oleo -- a few well-intentioned criticisms
Organization: Inland Sea
Distribution: gnu
Date: Sat, 2 Jan 1993 23:09:33 GMT

After having played with oleo a bit, I'm going to stick to sc until the
next major iteration comes out.  This is not due to any inherent flaw in
oleo itself, but for a number of ancillary reasons.  The folks who have
been working hard on it shouldn't take this personally; I'm impressed
with their work and hope to see them carry on.  Where I see a problem is
a matter of philosophy as to the purpose and intended target of the
application.

Spreadsheets were and are one of the two big end-user products that
fueled the home and desktop computer explosion.  They differ from the
other GNU products in one critical area: the audience.  These types
of packages are for the semi-technical and non-technical user.  As
such, critical issues for market acceptance are:

  o  clear and complete documentation
  o  "intuitive" interface (ie, what they already know works)
  o  online help
  o  full-screen access (x windows)

At the Simmons house and businesses, oleo "competes" with Lotus, sc,
and Quicken.  As such, the big place it loses to all three is
documentation.  For Lotus and Quicken there are full-bore manuals.  For
sc there's the less-than-easy-to-use man page, but the quite useful
tutorial.sc.  The oleo howto document is OK, but it's not designed to
be installed in any easy-access on-line place.  It wouldn't be a horrid
amount of work to turn it into a man page (and I'll even volunteer to
do it), but what's really needed is to integrate it into a tutorial,
help, and info system.

I push gnu/fsf software at my clients.  I build it for them, do brown
bags, print the documentation, walk them thru info, push them at Cygnus,
etc, etc.  They're nervous about free software, and I push them to
accept it by getting it to them in a form they expect from "professional"
software (we use the Avery Brundage definition here -- if you pay for it,
it's presumed to be professional and judged against that standard).

I will not be doing this with oleo, because the time ($$$) needed to
supply those missing things grossly exceeds the cost of buying Lotus or
Quicken or whathaveyou -- it's simply not cost-effective for me personally
or for my clients.

Even if these things were there, it's not clear if I'd push oleo at my
clients.  There is already a major investment on their part in learning
how to use Lotus and in large amounts of data in Lotus spreadsheets.
There's a real economic impact in making a conversion, especially to
a product which won't run on their large installed MS-DOS base.  So once
the docs are in place, what's desperately needed is a set of keybindings
that replicates the Lotus interface.

The X interface to oleo is disappointing.  No menus, no online help, and
some *very* confusing actions.  On my SunOS 4.1.3/X11r5pl19 box, the arrow
keys don't work.  By trial and error I managed to move off the first
screen, but that's not very acceptable for most users.  :-( 

In summary, if the point is to develop a spreadsheet for UNIX which will
enjoy the same general usefulness and popularity as the commercial sheets,
non-software issues should take a higher priority.
-- 
"When Dexter's on the Internet,    | "Make me taste like things I've never
 can Hell be far behind?"          |  tasted before!"  Mr Peanut to Candied
      scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us	   |  Bergen in `Caramel Knowledge'

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