On Wed, Feb 18, 2004 at 10:37:18PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Particularly, it would be of use to have some clearer explanation of the specific and tangible benefits of being part of a suite, as opposed to simply using similar underlying libraries and following similar guidelines.
I see benefits on several levels.
1) Mind share. Like it or not people have been conditioned to believe that office/document apps are part of a suite. An informal literature search at the local bookstore a few years ago turned up 10 references to Star-Office (before OO) 8 references to KOffice, 5 to abi and 2 to gnumeric. The authors just didn't consider stand alone apps worth mentioning.
2) Shared code. Many tasks associated with document centric applications are common across applications boundaries. - Managing plugins - Handling multiple import/export types - Simple widgets like undo/redo and colour selectors - reading/writing various file formats ...
None of there are inherently impossible, or even terribly difficult to create a functional implementation for. However, resources are required, which is not something any of our projects want to waste. Doing high quality implementations, with a reasonable amount of polish for the user takes alot of time. Sharing this effort to get a best of breed implementation would seem like our only chance of moving on.