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Open Office

23 April, 2010 - 07:50 | by fyl

The discussion started on NicaLiving about using Windoze vs. Linux. It is the usual uninformed caca. But, we have moved on to applications software. My question, which I want to present here, is why is anyone still using Microsoft Office?

OpenOffice(.org) is an office suite which will look very familiar to users of Microsoft Office but have some significant benefits including:

  • Support a true open format as well as Microsoft's proprietary format and quasi-open formats
  • Run on additional operating systems (including Linux and UNIX)
  • Is free

Initially developed with funding from IBM, it was further developed by Sun Microsystems and is now a product of Oracle Corporation (because Oracle bought Sun). Thus, commercial product that just happens to cost nothing.

If you are still using Microsoft Office, I would really like to know your excuse.

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Comments

by fyl | 28 April, 2010 - 09:58

Let's Sell It

I just followed the links on one of the ads in the sidebar. It was for OpenOffice. Totally legit free download site. But, if you didn't know better, free seems pretty scary.

It reminded me of when Carlie and I were in a boot at a DECUS show in Washington, DC over ten years ago. At the time, DECUS was selling some "free software" on a magnetic tape for around $100. That is, $100 for each program. We were selling the InfoMagic 4-CD set which included Linux and other things for $20.

People knew it was a trick. You couldn't get all that software for only $20. I was sure if we had some fancy stickers that said Professional Edition to put on the CD cases, we could have sold more at $100 each.

Now, some people need help with their office suite. It seems like someone selling OpenOffice with one year of e-mail support or something along those lines might be able to sell more copies than they could give away. Any Capitalist pigs (or ex-Microsoft employees) out there that want to give it a try?

by Anonymous | 24 April, 2010 - 23:14

Why MS Office

My response is that very few corporate customers switch for the sake of switching. I have been reading a book called "Crossing The Chasm, Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers". First of all, they define the chasm. Take the technology adoption life cycle, the bell curve, which is divided into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. They are all customer types with different attitudes. You are an innovator. You like technology for technology's sake. You want to evaluate it, find the next big thing. Historically, you wrote about it for others. You will put up with crap in your technology and support it yourself in your quest. The next group, early adopters, brings new technologies into their companies, often at great career risk and perhaps reward. They usually have big budgets, bring in the big innovation, and then move on. Then there is a chasm, a big gap in attitude between these two types and the start of the much larger group of mainstream customers. The mainstream, early adopter people want a whole product, a well supported product, a widely accepted product and absolutely no hassle. They won't put up with problems. In our case, they want to use the application software to accomplish something. They want the 3rd party add ons that Microsoft Office enjoys with smooth integration. Is it available in every language? Is it supported by our document management software? They want to use the application software to accomplish something. They want their documents to be compatible with those they share with. They absolutely won't support it themselves. Many products die before they ever catch on with this group. The late adopters and laggard group are self explanatory.

So what can we say? The innovators like Open Office. Have the early adopters accepted it? Are there many large companies that have adopted it as their standard? The free part is good. How many leaders in IT departments are willing to make career risking moves bringing it in versus the widely accepted Microsoft standard? Then before it gets to the mainstream, how much 3rd party support is there? Does it have all the add-ons that Microsoft office supports? Can a customer get one stop support? And I hate to say it but there isn't much linux or unix on the average office desktop in my area. In engineering departments, sure, but there is that big chasm between that type of user and our mainstream customer.

by Anonymous | 26 April, 2010 - 10:38

Interesting Opinion

It reminds me of "you can't go wrong if you buy IBM" from so many years ago. It even was true for a while. Of more recent interest was Microsoft's attempt to get people to move from UNIX servers to Windoze servers. The result has been two paths to Linux servers: one driven by lower costs than UNIX and one driven by the need for reliability.

You compatibility suggestion is as overrated as your standard suggestion. Anyone in corporate America Microsoft-based IT is well aware of Microsoft's selective free copies of non-compatible software approach to marketing, particularly in terms of MS-Office. Give a few company executives a free upgrade that, by default, saves documents in a better format and soon the whole company will upgrade.

As for standards in general, if Microsoft would follow one rather than create a new non-standard, questions such as add-ons just wouldn't exist. If you go back to the beginnings of Word you would find:

  1. While RTF, the interchange standard that Microsoft invested to show how open they were, while well-supported by WordPerfect and others, didn't work in Word. Specifically, Word produced RTF files that did not follow Microsoft's standard and, thus, caused other applications to fail.
  2. Early versions of Word were support to support PostScript output but, in fact did not. Again, things would fail and the consumer would need to go to another approach.

Whether you like Microsoft or not, it is hard to like proprietary solutions over open solutions. While OpenOffice is an Oracle product today, you can still shop for others to fix things or, more important in general, create third-party add-ons.

As for one stop shopping, while Oracle's acquisition of Sun is new, Oracle has been shipping a version of Linux for some time. Soon, if not already, you will be able to get your hardware, operating system and applications all from one place.

by Anonymous | 2 May, 2010 - 19:07

I can tell you're a geek

It is like "you can't go wrong if you buy IBM". That's how the mainstream customer acts. Now how can I tell that you're technically inclined? It's easy. 1) RTF - The mainstream customer doesn't need it because everyone is using Word so there is no need to convert between formats. 2) The mainstream customer wouldn't be using an early version (but you would). They wait until the problem is fixed and trusted. 3) It's hard to like proprietary systems? They always have. It's harder to change to the latest greatest just because some reviewer, not responsible for a couple of hundred/thousand users, says better exists. In fact, these people are known for keeping the standard the standard when something better exists. 4) Soon? Well I'm impressed. That's about 15 years too late!