As a tech-centric person myself, i love the idea of self checkout, and as you do can see the nature of the design of these systems.
however, unlike you I am not so keen to immediately jump into the self check line…
In the UK, there are 3 supermarkets near me that use them. of those 3, 1 of them has them set to totally untrustworthy… the most obscene settings where if if everything doesn’t measure up exactly right it spends a long time wailing at you that there’s a problem somewhere. My attempt to expedite the process results in me working faster than the system can cope with, ulimately slowing the whole situation down.
In this particulat chain, I ALWAYAS go for te human, where they scan as fast as they possibly can…
and guess what… the chail involved is owned by… a ‘mart’ next to a ‘wal’
Could the problem be that the people who actually want to use OpenOffice are not the people who can or want to contribute to open source projects?
There are many software developers who have to express their ideas to others by creating images (draw), presentations (ie. conferences), and documents. How else are you supposed to pass documents back and forth with clients to elicit requirements and project proposals and what not. Businesses live in office software; they do e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets (to represent EVERYTHING… uhh), presentations, and that’s it. Any interaction with them will be through those tools, so I don’t see how there isn’t any overlap between developers who can contribute to that environment.
As for the ‘want’ to contribute, that may be the big taker…
@timberwolf
every store near me that has those hand held scanners, gets my vote. there just aren’t any in the proximity i’d like… I have to go an extra 10 miles to get to the nearest one. but they are ALWAYS faster than any scan-all-in-one-go system
I had to use on of those blasted self-checkout contraptions once. They’re incredibly unintuitive, even for a young person like me! It’s a pretty daunting experience too:
You’re all alone at the front of a queue; one full of impatient people.
There is no store clerk or assistant in sight.
If you get stuck, you’re doomed!
You can’t just abandon the machine and leave the store, that’s shop-lifting!
And clearing a transaction (cancelling) couldn’t be harder!
Don’t get me wrong! I love the idea of self-service but the supermarkets that implement it really screw up when they assume people will know how to use it. If supermarkets are to integrate systems like this then their responsibility surpasses any monetary limits; they have the responsibility to teach the masses how to use this scary machine!
I find OO.o quite uninteresting. At the same time, I find it completely absurd MS is still allowed to make money from their office suite. Or, better put, I find it incredible that a bunch of governments or even the UN haven’t teamed up to create a worldwide available free office suite. It’s not like those things haven’t proven themselves.
Sure, fighting hunger, bringing democracy and supporting cease-fires is important too but having a Free Software office suite would be a fairly simple and cheap way to distribute wealth and be probably a lot more effective than most of the money spent at development nowadays.
MS losing their cashcow to unfair competition? True except they’re not exactly free from sin when talking 'bout unfair competition. It’s the size of the cashcow that tells us how important it is for the people in the world.
There’s only one core benefit of using a checkout. Sometimes, you find that rare exemplary staff member who can actually process and bag your items faster than you can put them on the belt.
I haven’t seen this often however, but when you see it, its impressive.
Also, the self checkout gets over-popular some times, just like the 12 items or less express lane. Sometimes it can be faster to bet the odds and take the slow lane and you’ll get through faster.
( Although, quantify speed of an isle by the net amount of produce to be processed, not by number of customers )
I think Harry M has it right - developers tend not to use office suites and therefore don’t care about them. Wild horses couldn’t drag me to working on something like OOo.
I think it’s a pipe dream that something like OpenOffice can survive only on volunteer contributions. It needs an organisation to sponsor it, with money or developer time. And that organisation needs to benefit from the existence of OpenOffice - not like Sun who (IMHO) turned it open source just because they hate Microsoft. Candidates might be goverments who don’t want to pay up for Office - China, India, are you listening?
Have a look at what Joel said about the economics of open source - many big open source projects are backed by big business, because they stand to benefit.
`Josh, your first post (well, the one right after that first) was extremely insightful. You took the words off my screen. I always hear: if you don’t like it, fix it. Well… yeah, I would, but how? I have to find out how to get the code, learn to use whatever versioning system they use, learn the language the application is written in, find out where the bug is, find out how to fix the bug, fix the bug, find out how to create a patch, find out how to apply a patch, find out how to make the patch public, find out how to get rights or someone’s attention to be able to merge the patch into the trunk.
Once, I’ve actually made a very nice code improvement but I simply couldn’t find someone to merge it and I couldn’t find any way to make it public. I could post it on my blog (which I don’t have) for which nobody would care. I could post it to Slashdot which is full of crap and the front page material always sucks. So I finally managed to create a good patch for a very annoying bug but there was no way for me to get the community to know about it and use it. It’s not the case with OOo, but it’s often the case with forgotten software which isn’t abandoned, because lots of people still use it, but the original authors stopped caring about. You can try to reach them by email, there is no community, even if people would want one, because there’s no way for them to get in touch with each other since the main website is forgotten, etc…
Let’s not forget, this is brand new code, which I’ve never seen before and first I have to get familiar with it, otherwise, I risk screwing up some things. The main problem is that every OSS project is brand new code to whoever tries to change it.
Good luck with OOo, you’ll need it! I would help, but I’m afraid that it would take TOO long until I actually get anything done. I rather just read Slashdot, Coding horror, XKCD, TDWTF and play a game.
I think the reason it’s hard to get developers interested in working on a project like OOo is that developers don’t typcially use office software much in the first place. And when we are likely to use it, we’re usually in a place where MS Office is already available and is the default.
In Sweden the self service checkout generally consists of getting a hand-held scanner when you enter the store and you scan on your own good time as you walk through the store. When you get to the actual checkout there are store clerks that ring up your total and ask if you had trouble scanning any items. Every once in a while you also get a spot check where they scan all your items again. This relieves much of the stress you talk about and gets you better throughput at the checkout.
@xyz,
I agree that it feels ‘slow, bloated and ugly’. I also don’t see a way out. For instance, I use it on Mac OS. They moved mountains to make OpenOffice.org 3.0 a native Mac application (previous versions used X Windows), but it’s still obviously Carbon. This is a problem which will only get worse as Cocoa leaps ahead while Carbon is deprecated. On Windows, it will have the same problem sitting next to slick new .NET applications, when it can’t use .NET while staying massively cross-platform.
Apart from general shininess, there’s all the modal dialogs, which are SO last century. Changing those could well require massive changes to the underlying data structures, so they can cope with updating every time you change a property.
I’d dearly like to see OpenOffice.org enter wider use. I don’t want to see MSOffice die - I just want to be able to e-mail people OpenOffice.org documents and have them be readable. On my end, I don’t have Microsoft Office installed, but that’s only achieved through three different applications: iWork (for rapid page layout and presentations), OpenOffice.org (for medium-length text and graphics) and LaTeX (for academic writing). I can hardly recommend this to anyone who isn’t a programmer!
I think it’s slightly more subtle than developers don’t use Office. Since most developers (the invisible part of the iceberg) work within enterprise situations, they’re largely Windows-based and they almost certainly have at least the basic version of MS Office available to them. Say what you like, the OO apps only just match their MS equivalents at best and fall way short at worst.
It’s probably fairer to say that developers don’t use Office - or Open Office - much, and it’s adequate for what they do use it. So there’s simply no incentive, no interest no value, real or otherwise, to getting involved. Heck, it’s not even sexy!
OO doesn’t do enough for me to be able to stand using it but that’s OK, I have Office Pro, which mostly has what I want and I have years of experience extending it where it doesn’t. OTOH, OO has more than enough capability for the rest of my family so there’s no pressure from them for additional work.
When I contribute to open source, it tends to be small tweaks (extensions and/or fixes) to small, grokkable items, such as Ruby gems (libraries) that I actually use and are small enough for me to be able to grok them.
Once OS stops being fun, then you need to be compensated in some more material way to continue working on it. Which I guess means some sort of financial model. Philanthropy is good but rare, after that being paid to work on open source requires a revenue stream to fund it. What’s Sun’s business model for OO? I can’t imagine. And now it’s stuck: no-one wants to work on it for free and its principal backer doesn’t want to pay for it.
Last week I was checking myself out of Tescos and was stopped because I was purchasing a product that required authorization of age. As a programmer I knew exactly what the problem was without first having to ask the assistant. I had bought plastic cutlery. Knives.
@Jeff: I don’t think expecting a developer to know C++ is a major requirement. You’re likely to get some more developers interested by embedding python/ruby/someotherscriptinglanguage somewhere, but the C++ community is large enough that you’re not really limiting yourself by using it. Likewise for the java components in OO.org, there’s a huge community there that could potentially contribute. Remember that most of kde was written in C++ and you don’t see them struggling to get developers.
Just pointing out that you got this one ass-backwards: people who cannot code (in this case, in this particular language) are not the people who ever contribute code to projects. They can however contribute bug reports or (positive) critiques of the UI design for instance. Or they can develop some good example apps to show case the toplevel APIs of your work, such as the access-like features OO.org has.
In any case, consider as well that OO.org is not the only os office suite. KOffice has been around for a while and is apparently quite good. Gnumeric shares a lot of code with oocalc and abiword is a favourite of many developers. There’s choice there, and putting all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea, since projects do fail and open source projects probably at about the same reason as propietary ones, if sometimes for slightly different reasons.
And then there’s the annoying way the entire thing freezes if you buy a bottle of wine until the dozy onlooker notices that he needs to press the stop being stupid; the customer looks grumpy and middle-aged button. It’s fair enough that they have to abide by silly laws that require such checks, but it should allow you to continue scanning other items in parallel whilst you’re waiting for Mr Dozy to notice.
What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they would normally pay their employees to do.
– Before they used to pay their employees to get the products using your product list. Now we are used to pick 'em for ourselves. You are not just used to it yet. That’s all.
The suggestion that you’re working for the store for $0 is fun to think about, but falls apart pretty easily. When you choose the self-check line, you’re opting for a less service-oriented experience, but you’re not working for the store anymore than you are when you choose to walk the aisles aimlessly until you find the pickles, when you could have stopped and asked an employee for help.
It seems that another lesson to take from the supermarket model is that not every customer wants the expensive full service that paid employees provide. If there are customers who would happily opt-out of such services, then the business and its customers can both win by facilitating a path that doesn’t them.
When a business outright cuts out services such as checking or pickle-directing, I suppose you could argue that customers are taking the burden of those jobs, but there are always components of customer labor in a business transaction. For example, most restaurants don’t chauffeur you from your home right to the table, but we don’t describe driving to the restaurant, let alone waiting inside for a table, as working for the business.