GEORGE TOWN: Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng has demanded that Independent Bayan Baru MP Datuk Seri Zahrain Mohd Hashim resign as the board chairman and director of Island Golf Properties Bhd (IGP).
IGP is a subsidiary of the Penang Development Corporation (PDC), the state economic arm.
Lim said Zahrain was appointed as IGP chairman and director based on his previous position as a state PKR leader.
‘‘As a matter of principle, he should quit. I am waiting for him to make the move although as the PDC chairman, I am empowered to remove him,’’ he told a press conference here yesterday.
Lim said that in Zahrain’s statement on Friday when he quit PKR, the first two paragraphs were devoted to the controversy in IGP.
“This shows he is interested in personal issues rather than his party’s struggle,’’ he said.
Lim said their relationship turned sour after he went against Zahrain’s recommendation that the operations of the Bukit Jambul Country Club, an 18-hole golf course under IGP, be outsourced and awarded to a RM2 company.
“The RM2 company has no track record of managing golf courses.
“Furthermore, it was only formed two months before the open-tender process was initiated in December, 2008,” Lim said.
Zahrain, when contacted, said he would quit the IGP post and was in the process of drafting his resignation letter.
He said that since his announcement, he had been deluged with SMSes, both in support of and against his decision.
Zahrain urged his ex-PKR colleagues to respect his decision and appreciate his contributions to the party.
At another function, Umno supreme council member Datuk Dr Mohd Puad Zarkashi urged PKR members not to delay in leaving the party as they had “long been played out” by party leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.
“I urge PKR MPs, there is no need to ponder any more. It’s time to leave and become independents,” Dr Mohd Puad said, adding that he was certain that there would be more resignations among PKR lawmakers.
Source:By IAN MCINTYRE and ANDREA FILMER
newsdesk@thestar.com.my
Saturday, 13 February 2010
The New Generation Leaving Ireland, now rated to junk by Moody
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"The lack of jobs is driving people away," says Trinity College senior Simon Phelan Jude EdgintonDublin - When Simon Phelan started a civil engineering degree at Dublin's Trinity College four years ago, he figured his biggest problem upon graduation would be deciding which job to choose. Ireland's economy was growing at 5.4%, unemployment was a mere 4.4%, and construction was booming.
Today, with graduation fast approaching, only two of Phelan's 100 classmates have even had interviews. Worse, in these recession-scarred times, just two people from the class ahead of him are employed. So Phelan and many contemporaries see emigration as the only option. "The lack of jobs is driving people away," the 20-year-old Dubliner says after trawling through the meager offerings at Trinity's career office, a small building tucked off the school's cobblestoned quadrangle. "Ireland will lose a whole generation of graduates."
It's a scenario most Irish thought had gone the way of the potato famine and two-shilling pints of Guinness. Two decades of prosperity had transformed the island nation of 4.5 million from a European laggard into the so-called Celtic Tiger. After a century and a half in which Ireland's young and energetic routinely fled to South Boston or London's Kilburn, today's twentysomethings grew up expecting to live and work at home. But with one in three males under age 25 out of work, their confidence seems to have been misplaced. "It used to be employers were fighting over graduates," says Shane King, a 22-year-old Trinity senior from County Mayo on Ireland's west coast. "Now graduates are fighting each other for jobs."
The country's budget swung from a surplus in 2007 to a deficit of nearly 12% of gross domestic product last year as the economy shrank by 7.5%. A decade-long property bubble, which saw real estate prices triple, led to a banking crisis that Standard & Poor's estimates could cost taxpayers as much as $34 billion. "Everything we have is being spent on the banks," says David Begg, head of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
Drive the 10 miles from central Dublin to Citywest, an industrial park near the border of County Kildare, and you'll see ample evidence of overbuilding. On the banks of the Liffey River, there's the half-finished shell of Anglo Irish Bank's new headquarters. Farther on, "for sale" signs dot posh developments where new homes stand unoccupied.
Last year emigration exceeded immigration for the first time in 15 years as 65,100 people left, outpacing arrivals by nearly 8,000. Almost half of those who decamped were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. But with few opportunities at home, growing numbers of native Irish are also headed for the exit. "There was loads of work three years ago, then it just dried up," says Patrick Maye, an unemployed bricklayer who traveled to the Aussie seminar from Carlow, some 50 miles south of Dublin. The 22-year-old hopes to move to Australia once he finishes retraining as a fitness instructor.
With unemployment set to hit 13.8% this year, things are sure to get worse. The Economic & Social Research Institute (ESRI), an independent think tank in Dublin, predicts net outward migration of 40,000 for the year ending in April, the highest level in more than 20 years. "We are right back to the 1980s," says Piaras Mac Éinrí, a lecturer at University College Cork.
Back then, unemployment soared to 18% as the economy took a dive. Then in the 1990s, a wave of foreign investment swept Ireland, lured by low corporate taxes and inexpensive workers. Now the blue chips are scaling way back. In the past year, Intel (INTC), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and Waterford Wedgwood have downsized; Dell (DELL) moved PC production from Limerick to lower-wage Poland; and some 1,500 smaller companies have folded. Last year 170,000 Irish jobs vanished, and ESRI predicts 76,000 more will be lost in 2010.
One problem is that Ireland got too pricey. The American Chamber of Commerce Ireland estimates that from 2004 to 2008, Irish wages rose 50% faster than the average of advanced European economies. Former Intel Chairman Craig R. Barrett says that of the 14 reasons Intel came to Ireland two decades ago, only one remained: a low corporate tax rate of 12.5%. "Ireland needs a new game plan," he said at a Dublin conference in September.
In the past, the state has been a big creator of jobs by hiring civil servants and promoting investment. But to plug a yawning gap in public finances, Dublin in December announced spending cuts of $5.6 billion, including $1.4 billion from public sector pay and $1.1 billion from social welfare benefits. The tough measures have helped restore Ireland's standing among global investors, but the cuts make it difficult for the government to launch the policies that might enable people to ride out the recession, either in on-the-job training or higher education.
The biggest job casualties have been in construction. At its peak in 2007, the building trade employed 1 in 7 Irish workers. But over the past two years, the sector has shed 200,000 jobs, according to Ireland's Construction Industry Federation. "We went from being in high demand to no demand," says Gordon Cobbe, a construction manager from Cork. Out of work for a year, he plans on moving to Perth, Australia.
Many Irish aiming to get out face problems similar to workers in, say, Detroit or Toledo: They can't afford to leave their homes. John McKenna is eager to join more than a dozen friends who have moved to Australia. With business slow at the plumbing supply store where he works, "I don't know how much longer I'll have a job," the 39-year-old says. But the house he bought for $306,000 in 2006 has halved in value, so it'll be tough to depart anytime soon.
The emigration surge comes as Dublin tries to implement a program called "Smart Economy." The plan is to boost innovation through tax breaks for research, expedited visa processing for skilled workers, a $689 million fund to back promising tech startups, and other incentives. The glue holding it all together, the government says, is "the knowledge, skills, and creativity" of the Irish—a problem with so many people leaving. "There is a risk that many of the talented individuals envisioned as the foundation of the innovation economy will make their careers elsewhere," says John McHale, an economics professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Other economists are more optimistic. Alan Barrett, a research professor at ESRI, says the current exodus is likely to be benign. As part of the EU, Ireland will again lure immigrants from across Europe as growth picks up. And he points out that many who left in the '80s returned with better skills. "As soon as the economy recovered, people came back in droves," he says.
Kevin Carey, CEO of moving company Careline International, can attest to that. His firm helped relocate emigrants in the 1980s before bringing many back a decade later. Now most of his work is again outbound, and business was up 23% last year. His customers weren't so lucky. "They're all leaving; the cost of living here is too high," says Carey, who was manning a table at the Australian emigration event at the Citywest Hotel. For him, at least, business was good.
Reuters) - Moody's cut Ireland's credit rating to junk on Tuesday, warning that the debt-laden country would likely need a second bailout -- just the latest move amid heightening concerns about Europe's ability to address its debt crisis and prevent it from spreading.
Moody's move comes a week after it slashed Portugal to junk status with a similar warning about the need for a second round of rescue funds. It reflects the credit rating agency's view that any further financial assistance from Brussels will require private investors to share part of the pain, possibly through a debt rollover or swap.
European finance ministers have acknowledged for the first time that some form of Greek default may be needed to cut Athens' debts, and if that materializes, Ireland's rating, never before in junk territory, could be set for a further round of cuts.
Investors fear a Greece default could ripple through Europe's banking system, putting pressure on stretched public finances in other euro zone countries. Italy, the euro zone's third largest economy, looks especially vulnerable with a debt-to-output ratio second only to Greece, and markets fear political bickering may derail a plan to slash spending and rein in the deficit.
Moody's one-notch downgrade on Ireland weighed on stocks and the euro, which hit its lowest level against the dollar in four months.
The Irish government, which wants to return to debt markets in 2013 when its current EU-IMF bailout runs out, offered a vexed response.
"This is a disappointing development and it is completely at odds with the recent views of other rating agencies," the finance ministry said in a statement. "We are doing all that we can to put our house in order and the progress that we are making is there for all to see."
Moody's now rates Ireland Ba1, one notch below former financial market pariah Colombia and two notches below Brazil, and has kept a negative outlook, meaning further downgrades are likely in the next 12 to 18 months.
Ireland's rating is still one notch above Portugal and six above Greece. Both Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings have Ireland at BBB-plus, three notches above junk status, with S&P's outlook stable and Fitch on outlook negative meaning it does not expect a downgrade in the short-term.
Moody's move, however, will likely put pressure on the other ratings as the downgrade forces some investors to dump Irish bonds because they no longer enjoy a clean investment-grade sweep of the three major ratings agencies.
"It's amazing to me that Ireland was still investment grade," said Suvrat Prakash, interest rate strategist at BNP Paribas in New York.
"A lot of people assume that these rating agencies tend to move with a lag so there could be more downgrades to come.
Ireland's borrowing costs are already at levels once thought unimaginable, with five-year paper yielding over 15 percent on the secondary market and 10-year paper close to euro-era highs of 13.86 percent.
When Ireland agreed an 85 billion euros ($119 billion) bailout package with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund last November -- a move designed to soothe market fears -- its 10-year paper was yielding around 9.5 percent, a level viewed as shocking at the time.
Economic growth in the European region as a whole has been sluggish, as a number of nations have struggled with mounting debt costs and have had to pass harsh austerity plans that have slowed economic growth further, creating a vicious cycle where tax revenues drop, reducing their chances of repaying the debt even more.
But the more investors fear that heavily indebted euro zone governments will be unable to repay their debts, the more the yields on their bonds rise, dragging down their value in banks' balance sheets, erasing their capital, and increasing the need for yet more bank bailout's by stronger euro zone governments.
A CORK BOBBING IN THE OCEAN
Unlike Greece, Ireland is meeting its bailout targets and Irish officials have felt frustrated at how their efforts have been swept aside by events in Athens.
An agreement by the euro zone finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup, late on Monday to cut the interest rate for countries borrowing from their rescue fund and an agreement to make the fund more flexible and extend its loan maturities was hailed by Dublin as helping it return to debt markets.
The finance ministry said Moody's move appeared not to reflect the Eurogroup developments, but Moody's analyst Dietmar Hornung said the risk of private sector participation in any future bailout meant investors would be put off lending fresh funds to Ireland.
Hornung, in an interview with Reuters, warned over the risks even though Moody's is confident the euro zone is "willing to continue to provide liquidity support for peripheral countries and give them time to achieve a sustainable financial position.
"But at the same time we see a growing possibility that, as a precondition of additional rounds of liquidity support here, private-sector creditors participation will be required," he said.
Ireland's debt management agency said on Tuesday the country was fully funded until the end of 2013. Ireland has a financing requirement of nearly 34 billion euros over 2014 and 2015, based on estimated deficits and maturing debts.
Even before Moody's downgrade, Finance Minister Michael Noonan admitted Dublin was at the mercy of the markets.
"Ireland is a cork bobbing on a very turbulent ocean at present," he told state broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.
Officials from the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank are expected to confirm Dublin is meeting all its bailout targets in their latest quarterly review, expected on Thursday.
But Ireland's weak domestic economy is hitting spending-related tax revenues, and Moody's warned that another downgrade would be considered if the government can't meet its fiscal consolidation goals.
(Reporting by Walter Brandimaret and Carmel Crimmins; Additional reporting by Daniel Bases; Writing by Carmel Crimmins; Editing by Leslie Adler)
Some 170,000 jobs vanished last year, and the lack of employment is driving a generation away
"The lack of jobs is driving people away," says Trinity College senior Simon Phelan Jude EdgintonToday, with graduation fast approaching, only two of Phelan's 100 classmates have even had interviews. Worse, in these recession-scarred times, just two people from the class ahead of him are employed. So Phelan and many contemporaries see emigration as the only option. "The lack of jobs is driving people away," the 20-year-old Dubliner says after trawling through the meager offerings at Trinity's career office, a small building tucked off the school's cobblestoned quadrangle. "Ireland will lose a whole generation of graduates."
It's a scenario most Irish thought had gone the way of the potato famine and two-shilling pints of Guinness. Two decades of prosperity had transformed the island nation of 4.5 million from a European laggard into the so-called Celtic Tiger. After a century and a half in which Ireland's young and energetic routinely fled to South Boston or London's Kilburn, today's twentysomethings grew up expecting to live and work at home. But with one in three males under age 25 out of work, their confidence seems to have been misplaced. "It used to be employers were fighting over graduates," says Shane King, a 22-year-old Trinity senior from County Mayo on Ireland's west coast. "Now graduates are fighting each other for jobs."
The country's budget swung from a surplus in 2007 to a deficit of nearly 12% of gross domestic product last year as the economy shrank by 7.5%. A decade-long property bubble, which saw real estate prices triple, led to a banking crisis that Standard & Poor's estimates could cost taxpayers as much as $34 billion. "Everything we have is being spent on the banks," says David Begg, head of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
Drive the 10 miles from central Dublin to Citywest, an industrial park near the border of County Kildare, and you'll see ample evidence of overbuilding. On the banks of the Liffey River, there's the half-finished shell of Anglo Irish Bank's new headquarters. Farther on, "for sale" signs dot posh developments where new homes stand unoccupied.
AUSTRALIA BOUND?
Many would-be emigrants have made the same trip. On a chilly Sunday, hundreds of people gather in a conference room at the Citywest Hotel for a seminar on emigrating Down Under. Representatives of several Aussie states sit behind foldable tables stacked with pamphlets extolling Australia's low unemployment and "no worries" outlook. Carpenter Michael McGerr, 38, drove more than 100 miles with his wife and toddler to attend. "Our goal is to go away for good," he says.Last year emigration exceeded immigration for the first time in 15 years as 65,100 people left, outpacing arrivals by nearly 8,000. Almost half of those who decamped were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. But with few opportunities at home, growing numbers of native Irish are also headed for the exit. "There was loads of work three years ago, then it just dried up," says Patrick Maye, an unemployed bricklayer who traveled to the Aussie seminar from Carlow, some 50 miles south of Dublin. The 22-year-old hopes to move to Australia once he finishes retraining as a fitness instructor.
With unemployment set to hit 13.8% this year, things are sure to get worse. The Economic & Social Research Institute (ESRI), an independent think tank in Dublin, predicts net outward migration of 40,000 for the year ending in April, the highest level in more than 20 years. "We are right back to the 1980s," says Piaras Mac Éinrí, a lecturer at University College Cork.
Back then, unemployment soared to 18% as the economy took a dive. Then in the 1990s, a wave of foreign investment swept Ireland, lured by low corporate taxes and inexpensive workers. Now the blue chips are scaling way back. In the past year, Intel (INTC), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), and Waterford Wedgwood have downsized; Dell (DELL) moved PC production from Limerick to lower-wage Poland; and some 1,500 smaller companies have folded. Last year 170,000 Irish jobs vanished, and ESRI predicts 76,000 more will be lost in 2010.
One problem is that Ireland got too pricey. The American Chamber of Commerce Ireland estimates that from 2004 to 2008, Irish wages rose 50% faster than the average of advanced European economies. Former Intel Chairman Craig R. Barrett says that of the 14 reasons Intel came to Ireland two decades ago, only one remained: a low corporate tax rate of 12.5%. "Ireland needs a new game plan," he said at a Dublin conference in September.
In the past, the state has been a big creator of jobs by hiring civil servants and promoting investment. But to plug a yawning gap in public finances, Dublin in December announced spending cuts of $5.6 billion, including $1.4 billion from public sector pay and $1.1 billion from social welfare benefits. The tough measures have helped restore Ireland's standing among global investors, but the cuts make it difficult for the government to launch the policies that might enable people to ride out the recession, either in on-the-job training or higher education.
The biggest job casualties have been in construction. At its peak in 2007, the building trade employed 1 in 7 Irish workers. But over the past two years, the sector has shed 200,000 jobs, according to Ireland's Construction Industry Federation. "We went from being in high demand to no demand," says Gordon Cobbe, a construction manager from Cork. Out of work for a year, he plans on moving to Perth, Australia.
Many Irish aiming to get out face problems similar to workers in, say, Detroit or Toledo: They can't afford to leave their homes. John McKenna is eager to join more than a dozen friends who have moved to Australia. With business slow at the plumbing supply store where he works, "I don't know how much longer I'll have a job," the 39-year-old says. But the house he bought for $306,000 in 2006 has halved in value, so it'll be tough to depart anytime soon.
The emigration surge comes as Dublin tries to implement a program called "Smart Economy." The plan is to boost innovation through tax breaks for research, expedited visa processing for skilled workers, a $689 million fund to back promising tech startups, and other incentives. The glue holding it all together, the government says, is "the knowledge, skills, and creativity" of the Irish—a problem with so many people leaving. "There is a risk that many of the talented individuals envisioned as the foundation of the innovation economy will make their careers elsewhere," says John McHale, an economics professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Other economists are more optimistic. Alan Barrett, a research professor at ESRI, says the current exodus is likely to be benign. As part of the EU, Ireland will again lure immigrants from across Europe as growth picks up. And he points out that many who left in the '80s returned with better skills. "As soon as the economy recovered, people came back in droves," he says.
Kevin Carey, CEO of moving company Careline International, can attest to that. His firm helped relocate emigrants in the 1980s before bringing many back a decade later. Now most of his work is again outbound, and business was up 23% last year. His customers weren't so lucky. "They're all leaving; the cost of living here is too high," says Carey, who was manning a table at the Australian emigration event at the Citywest Hotel. For him, at least, business was good.
Source: Capell, Capell is a senior writer in BusinessWeek's London bureau .
Moody's cuts Ireland to junk, warns of second bailout
NEW YORK/DUBLIN |
Reuters) - Moody's cut Ireland's credit rating to junk on Tuesday, warning that the debt-laden country would likely need a second bailout -- just the latest move amid heightening concerns about Europe's ability to address its debt crisis and prevent it from spreading.
Moody's move comes a week after it slashed Portugal to junk status with a similar warning about the need for a second round of rescue funds. It reflects the credit rating agency's view that any further financial assistance from Brussels will require private investors to share part of the pain, possibly through a debt rollover or swap.
European finance ministers have acknowledged for the first time that some form of Greek default may be needed to cut Athens' debts, and if that materializes, Ireland's rating, never before in junk territory, could be set for a further round of cuts.
Investors fear a Greece default could ripple through Europe's banking system, putting pressure on stretched public finances in other euro zone countries. Italy, the euro zone's third largest economy, looks especially vulnerable with a debt-to-output ratio second only to Greece, and markets fear political bickering may derail a plan to slash spending and rein in the deficit.
Moody's one-notch downgrade on Ireland weighed on stocks and the euro, which hit its lowest level against the dollar in four months.
The Irish government, which wants to return to debt markets in 2013 when its current EU-IMF bailout runs out, offered a vexed response.
"This is a disappointing development and it is completely at odds with the recent views of other rating agencies," the finance ministry said in a statement. "We are doing all that we can to put our house in order and the progress that we are making is there for all to see."
Moody's now rates Ireland Ba1, one notch below former financial market pariah Colombia and two notches below Brazil, and has kept a negative outlook, meaning further downgrades are likely in the next 12 to 18 months.
Ireland's rating is still one notch above Portugal and six above Greece. Both Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings have Ireland at BBB-plus, three notches above junk status, with S&P's outlook stable and Fitch on outlook negative meaning it does not expect a downgrade in the short-term.
Moody's move, however, will likely put pressure on the other ratings as the downgrade forces some investors to dump Irish bonds because they no longer enjoy a clean investment-grade sweep of the three major ratings agencies.
"It's amazing to me that Ireland was still investment grade," said Suvrat Prakash, interest rate strategist at BNP Paribas in New York.
"A lot of people assume that these rating agencies tend to move with a lag so there could be more downgrades to come.
Ireland's borrowing costs are already at levels once thought unimaginable, with five-year paper yielding over 15 percent on the secondary market and 10-year paper close to euro-era highs of 13.86 percent.
When Ireland agreed an 85 billion euros ($119 billion) bailout package with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund last November -- a move designed to soothe market fears -- its 10-year paper was yielding around 9.5 percent, a level viewed as shocking at the time.
Economic growth in the European region as a whole has been sluggish, as a number of nations have struggled with mounting debt costs and have had to pass harsh austerity plans that have slowed economic growth further, creating a vicious cycle where tax revenues drop, reducing their chances of repaying the debt even more.
But the more investors fear that heavily indebted euro zone governments will be unable to repay their debts, the more the yields on their bonds rise, dragging down their value in banks' balance sheets, erasing their capital, and increasing the need for yet more bank bailout's by stronger euro zone governments.
A CORK BOBBING IN THE OCEAN
Unlike Greece, Ireland is meeting its bailout targets and Irish officials have felt frustrated at how their efforts have been swept aside by events in Athens.
An agreement by the euro zone finance ministers, known as the Eurogroup, late on Monday to cut the interest rate for countries borrowing from their rescue fund and an agreement to make the fund more flexible and extend its loan maturities was hailed by Dublin as helping it return to debt markets.
The finance ministry said Moody's move appeared not to reflect the Eurogroup developments, but Moody's analyst Dietmar Hornung said the risk of private sector participation in any future bailout meant investors would be put off lending fresh funds to Ireland.
Hornung, in an interview with Reuters, warned over the risks even though Moody's is confident the euro zone is "willing to continue to provide liquidity support for peripheral countries and give them time to achieve a sustainable financial position.
"But at the same time we see a growing possibility that, as a precondition of additional rounds of liquidity support here, private-sector creditors participation will be required," he said.
Ireland's debt management agency said on Tuesday the country was fully funded until the end of 2013. Ireland has a financing requirement of nearly 34 billion euros over 2014 and 2015, based on estimated deficits and maturing debts.
Even before Moody's downgrade, Finance Minister Michael Noonan admitted Dublin was at the mercy of the markets.
"Ireland is a cork bobbing on a very turbulent ocean at present," he told state broadcaster RTE on Tuesday.
Officials from the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank are expected to confirm Dublin is meeting all its bailout targets in their latest quarterly review, expected on Thursday.
But Ireland's weak domestic economy is hitting spending-related tax revenues, and Moody's warned that another downgrade would be considered if the government can't meet its fiscal consolidation goals.
(Reporting by Walter Brandimaret and Carmel Crimmins; Additional reporting by Daniel Bases; Writing by Carmel Crimmins; Editing by Leslie Adler)
OpenOffice 3.2 - now with less Microsoft envy
It's 2010. And 2007 is finally here
Review OpenOffice 3.2 - now now available for Windows, Mac and Linux - boasts faster start-up times than before. But the really big news is that now - finally - this open-source suite offers full compatibility with files created using Microsoft's Office 2007.
If you've ever tried opening or converting .docx and other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats outside of Office 2007 itself, you've likely pounded your head against more than a few walls - downloading plug-ins or struggling with online conversion services.
That should be a thing of the past with OpenOffice 3.2, which supports all the Office 2007 formats out of the box. That said, the conversion process still isn't completely perfect, especially if you're trying for pixel-perfect document formatting or, in my testing, spreadsheets with complicated equation cells.
Of course, it's hard to be too excited about the new conversion tools given that they arrive three years after Office 2007 hit the shelves. If your business had a mission-critical need to work with Microsoft's formats let's hope you weren't holding your breath for OpenOffice to come through for you.
Is it fair to give an open-source project a hard time for taking three years to reverse engineer a document format more or less invented to make OpenOffice's life more complicated?
Well, no, but in the real world Microsoft Office is - for better or worse - the moving target OpenOffice.org must aim for - and, in this case, taking quite a while to hit.
Also on the document support front, OpenOffice 3.2 boasts improved compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standards as well as the ability to open password-protected Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
Given that Microsoft's preview release of Office 2010 offers support for ODF files there's some small chance that OpenOffice might actually have an easier time integrating with Microsoft's Office in the future.
The latest version of OpenOffice isn't all about format wars, though, and version 3.2 makes a worthwhile update for the considerable speed boost - especially in start up times.
It's so fast, I no longer had time to grab a fresh cup of coffee while the suite came to life. No, I double clicked the icon and - just like - that OpenOffice was ready to go. Also, I found most of the applications were somewhat snappier in general usage. The one exception seemed to be the database application, which felt sluggish in comparison - particularly with large database files.
After the speed and file format improvements, the OpenOffice release notes get very technical, very quickly. The gory details can be found on the OpenOffice site, but suffice to say that the Calc tool spreadsheet application has received quite a few improvements - such as improved copy-and-paste features - while the rest of the applications also see minor updates and bug fixes.
Oracle has pledged to continue OpenOffice and plans to keep the entire Sun team on hand, running OpenOffice as an independent business unit. Of course, Oracle clearly sees the online office suite as the future and plans to launch Oracle Cloud Office at some point. Whether that means OpenOffice will suffer neglect remains to be seen.
It would be nice to see Oracle do for OpenOffice what Microsoft is trying to do for its Office - integrate an online component - but do it without creating a massive vendor lock-in scheme.
Some might argue the future of office suites is all online with things like Google Docs or Zoho one day becoming the norm, but while document storage in the cloud is all well and good, editing documents in a browser is still nowhere near as pleasant or powerful as with dedicated software.
If Oracle can provide a first-rate connect-anywhere, edit-anywhere online office suite, it might have finally found something that can break Microsoft's stronghold on business productivity tools.
That's what I'd be looking for in follow on versions to OpenOffice 3.2. ®
Source:
Review OpenOffice 3.2 - now now available for Windows, Mac and Linux - boasts faster start-up times than before. But the really big news is that now - finally - this open-source suite offers full compatibility with files created using Microsoft's Office 2007.
If you've ever tried opening or converting .docx and other Microsoft Office 2007 file formats outside of Office 2007 itself, you've likely pounded your head against more than a few walls - downloading plug-ins or struggling with online conversion services.
Is it fair to give an open-source project a hard time for taking three years to reverse engineer a document format more or less invented to make OpenOffice's life more complicated?
Well, no, but in the real world Microsoft Office is - for better or worse - the moving target OpenOffice.org must aim for - and, in this case, taking quite a while to hit.
Also on the document support front, OpenOffice 3.2 boasts improved compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standards as well as the ability to open password-protected Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
Given that Microsoft's preview release of Office 2010 offers support for ODF files there's some small chance that OpenOffice might actually have an easier time integrating with Microsoft's Office in the future.
The latest version of OpenOffice isn't all about format wars, though, and version 3.2 makes a worthwhile update for the considerable speed boost - especially in start up times.
It's so fast, I no longer had time to grab a fresh cup of coffee while the suite came to life. No, I double clicked the icon and - just like - that OpenOffice was ready to go. Also, I found most of the applications were somewhat snappier in general usage. The one exception seemed to be the database application, which felt sluggish in comparison - particularly with large database files.
After the speed and file format improvements, the OpenOffice release notes get very technical, very quickly. The gory details can be found on the OpenOffice site, but suffice to say that the Calc tool spreadsheet application has received quite a few improvements - such as improved copy-and-paste features - while the rest of the applications also see minor updates and bug fixes.
Time for a fluffing
However, what's perhaps most significant about this release may have nothing to do with the improved applications at all. Rather, it's the fact this will be last release before OpenOffice moves to its new owner Oracle, which finally closed its purchase of Sun Microsystems last month.Oracle has pledged to continue OpenOffice and plans to keep the entire Sun team on hand, running OpenOffice as an independent business unit. Of course, Oracle clearly sees the online office suite as the future and plans to launch Oracle Cloud Office at some point. Whether that means OpenOffice will suffer neglect remains to be seen.
Some might argue the future of office suites is all online with things like Google Docs or Zoho one day becoming the norm, but while document storage in the cloud is all well and good, editing documents in a browser is still nowhere near as pleasant or powerful as with dedicated software.
If Oracle can provide a first-rate connect-anywhere, edit-anywhere online office suite, it might have finally found something that can break Microsoft's stronghold on business productivity tools.
That's what I'd be looking for in follow on versions to OpenOffice 3.2. ®
Source:
Posted in Applications, 13th February 2010 07:45 GMT
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