Open Office Options.

With the advent of Office 2007 the ribbon interface was introduced. Open Office now proposes a new look and feel to their popular alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. I'm not sure the introduction of such a controversial feature into my preferred open source Office alternative is such a great idea.

In the case of Microsoft Office, I did get used to it and eventually found it less annoying than many more rabid haters. I finally was frustrated by other issues and have now migrated away from the entire Office suite behind in favor of Open Office by Sun.

I love the simpler and more compact interface of the current Open Office. It is akin to Office in the 97-2000 versions and is a pretty faithful representation. Simple and straightforward.

At the same time there must be some reasoning behind this experiment and progress much march forward. I don't mind that the new Open Office ribbon clone is such direct rip-off of Microsoft, but I don't want it forced on me either.

Please Sun, make it optional and leave it in the hands of users to decide what interface they prefer.

Read More at Mary Jo's ZDNet blog.