Letters To The Editor: More On Openoffice.Org

Federal Government User Likes Staroffice/Openoffice.Org – A Lot

First, since we have been personally a bit less than enthusiastic about StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice Release 1.0 (on the basis of interface, function, and the difficulty of competing with an entrenched player with a more than 90% market share), we’d like to share with you the very enthusiastic comments of an Opinions subscriber who works for the federal government.  It’s good to know that they’re being careful with our money.

--Amy:

We are evaluating StarOffice/OpenOffice for use at our government site. Even with discounts Microsoft Word is very expensive and the features are overkill.  They simply are not used by most of our staff.  Frankly we do not use support from Microsoft other than occasionally researching an issue on their knowledgebase.  It is hard to justify spending tax dollars on the MS product when OpenOffice 1.0 (so far) seems quite capable of meeting our needs. Also, so far, the learning curve is not that steep and fairly intuitive for most users.  Even for a modest site like ours (under 1000 users) we could save over $100,000.00 by moving to StarOffice or even OpenOffice.

It is also nice that it is a cross platform office product that works equally well on Microsoft or Linux OS's.  As revenues dry up in government I suspect many will seriously consider options like StarOffice, OpenOffice and even Linux, once it matures a bit more.  If I were a business person I'd also seriously consider migrating to free software -- a one time move to the new software platform could result in significant savings over a 5 to 10 year period.  That's my cut on all of this "free" software.  Think hard before pumping major dollars into a product that may be overkill at best.

--Federal Government Employee and Opinions Reader

Note how our reader has hit every point:

	It’s substantially cheaper
	It’s smaller, but his users don’t use much of the bigger Microsoft Office product anyway
	They’re expecting less support, but their experience is that they don’t need much support
	It’s cross platform
	The migration and training hasn’t been bad

I’m going to check back in with this subscriber in six months to see if he’s changed his mind.  If he’s just being overly optimistic, this doesn’t matter very much; if he’s the leading edge of a market break in favor of new office tools (we’re getting ready to write about that), things could get very interesting.  Don’t worry; we’ll keep you posted, too.

--Amy

Openoffice.Org Community Comments On Release 1.0

We’ve also heard some more from the busy and enthusiastic community that surrounds OpenOffice.org. (They call is OOo.)  They took issue with my complaint about backward compatibility, pointing out (correctly) that if you want to improve a product you may, at some point, have to add features or make changes that make it incompatible with what went before.  They then go on to say that even Microsoft did this and that proves it isn’t amateurish; I stand behind my previous statement, here.

--Amy

--Amy:

One of the big news (items) of StarOffice 6 (which OOo inherited, of course) is full support for Unicode. That was a BIG issue technically, and it's a BIG issue for users; particularly for those that speak languages which have trouble with the 8-bit character set. :) The problem is that there is no way, really no way, to remain compatible if you change the definition of what constitutes a character.

Just think about it, even if you don't care about the details of file formats: If one changes what defines a character, then what is left of a document? How much remains of a document, if you take away the characters?

I suspect that the Word format change occurred for the same reason. There's just no way around it, and no amount of effort or money will help.

So if you started life in the pre-Unicode era, you have the choice of either biting the bullet and breaking your format (which Word did, which we did), or to not support Unicode. My guess is that you (the program, that is) won't survive the latter for very long. (...as the fates of certain other, once popular programs seem to confirm.)

The problem isn't that developers don't understand the issues. The problem also isn't an 'amateur hour mistake', as it was called. The problem is more fundamental than that.

So yes, there is a problem. A real problem for some. But not an avoidable problem, or even a fixable one.

To our credit, I'd like to add:

1. We completed the change before going open source, so OOo just doesn't have the problem.
   
   

2.  XML has certain features that make it easier to remain compatible in the future.
   
   

3. We used the chance to do something new, namely embracing XML. The advantages (and customers) we gain through this may well make up for the format change in the long run. Maybe even in the short run.

(Note that) You can set the default format of OOo and StarOffice to the old format so an organization that doesn't want to upgrade all machines simultaneously could use this flag to mandate company-wide saving in the 5.2 format until the conversion is complete.

Also, I expect a frequent reason for not updating all machines is simply financial matters: One doesn't want to pay for all new licenses up front, but rather acquire them over time (i.e. with every new PC). With OOo being free, this simply doesn't apply. And SO is reasonably priced, so the problem isn't as large as with certain competitors.

(NOTE:  The long time corporate accounts take to update isn’t simply a matter of money, but also a matter of the disruption it causes.  Updating anything for thousands of users is a big job, regardless of what the software costs.  The Editor)

Staroffice Soars On Amazon.com

Sun wrote to tell us that StarOffice 6.0 was at the top of Amazon.com’s software charts in both the U.S. and Germany.  We congratulate Sun on its success, but note that we don’t know many who buy their software on Amazon, so we’d want some numbers – perhaps total sales and the percent of StarOffice sales at Amazon.com to understand what this really means.

We do agree that there seems to be some demand for both a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office on the Windows platform and for a Linux office suite.  StarOffice seems to be getting the attention for both of these. 

We’re seeing several new products that are moving into existing and new spaces hovering around the office productivity category (ThinkFree is another, just released for Apple OS X) and we’ll be gathering them all up shortly and trying to figure out whether this is just a little side action or a shift in the mainstream.  

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