The open source office suit OpenOffice has been released today in it’s 3.0 iteration. For a full feature list go to here but to list a few basic things

• New nice GUI
• New ODF (Open Document Format)1.2 specification
• Microsoft XML document support
• General performance enhancements
• And more

Now I don’t know how you see it but the way I think of this is that these heavy office suites are starting to really get sluggish, slow and although their feature set compared to the online office suites is vastly superior I am beginning to think they are really unnecessary for common users. Let’s be honest who really needs all of those extra features? I don’t. So I will give the new OpenOffice a try but my general feeling is that I don’t really need a heavy office suite.

The other thing is that OpenOffice.org announced the release of the new suite by email and the minute I received it I went to their site. What I found was that the site was unresponsive at the beginning and later completely down and it is still down as I am writing this. Doesn’t it remind you of an earlier open source projects release?