One area I hope Gnome Office establishes a solid, well researched strategy is with Open Office (and perhaps also with KOffice). Despite the various things people dislike about OOo, it has a definite lead in many areas, which means that there is non-trivial risk to projects that seek to compete head-to-head with it.
Well we're betting we can overtake OOo in quite a few areas over the next year as they struggle with their cumbersome code-base. Certainly AbiWord-2.2 and Gnumeric-2.0 will establish significant leads in a number of key features, in addition to the leads we already have.
Taking off my Inkscape hat and putting on my OSDL hat, a piece of advice I can share - From what I've been seeing and hearing in relation to OSDL's Desktop Initiative efforts, 2004 is likely going to see some strong pressures towards consolodation at the desktop level. It sounds like Freedesktop is going to play a key role in this, which is why I'd strongly suggest building a very good relationship with them.
What does this mean? If it means what I think it means I can't see how more pressure could be applied than I already feel to "join the winning team".
Frankly the pressure just motivates me to work harder om AbiWord and Gnome Office.
OO.o falls way short of my vision of a Productivity Suite could be.
I, and I suspect we all in Gnome Office, have nothing against working with F.D.O. We've benefitted greatly already from their work. (Particularly fontconfig and XFT2).
Cheers,
Martin
Bryce
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