The OpenOffice team recently released version 2.0, and in my opinion it is reaching with each release to Microsoft Office in features.

But now a new kind of attack is appearing on the net: performance comparisons. I will not say that OpenOffice do not need some tunning and design changes, but you can not compare a crossplatform product, that has an internal component model: UNO (Universal Network Objects) with multiple bindings to C++, Java and Python; his own crossplatform widget library; his own crossplatform drawing toolkit, and many other things without direct usage of COM, MFC or GDI that can force it to be a Windows only application. Abstraction has a price, the price of performance and memory consumption, but it has advantages, it is more easy to build a crossplatform application and we hope with OO 2.0 a more easy to understand code. Even Microsoft bloggers has admitted that Office for Mac is a different product that Office for Windows with only small parts of code being shared.

But this attack can be a good sign, Office and OpenOffice 2.0 are so identical in features than now the Achiles' heel is different.