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Another call for sanity has been issued by Jem Matzan of the Jem Report:

I’m getting desperate for a word processor made for writing — letters, articles, books, essays, and that sort of thing. I don’t want to design banners, fliers, brochures, or hand-outs. If I need to do those things, I’ll use a desktop publishing program like Scribus. I don’t need to draw in my document; I have The GIMP and Inkscape for drawing. Please, somebody do for OpenOffice.org what Firefox did for Mozilla, and cut down Writer into something that resembles its name. If people really need to do all of that extra stuff, maybe it should be in its own separate desktop publishing program instead of jammed into a word processor.

And another appreciated insight:

The uselessness of a meeting is directly proportional to the complexity of the PowerPoint presentation. If you want to quote me on that in the future, mark it down as Jem’s Law.

I don’t agree 100% with the ideas in this article, but thought it was interesting to see another recommendation to Firefox-ify OpenOffice.

There’s some more discussion over here and over here that resembles some of my thoughts on the development of the OpenOffice.org office suite (a replacement for Microsoft Office).
Once again, my take on it is that:

1. While each individual OO.o application should be pared down and allowed to have “extensions” like Firefox does, the applications should be kept together as a complete suite. Otherwise, individual applications could lose steam/critical mass;
2. OpenOffice should be ported to a standard toolkit such as GTK+ so it doesn’t look so ugly! That is to say, so that it has an interface that really blends with the rest of the desktop rather than using GUI hacks to almost blend in.