OpenOffice.org
Readies New Version
As Linux
Desktop Pushes Forward
Open
Source fans take note.
OpenOffice.org is nearly ready to offer Release 1.1 of its
Office Suite, with a number of new features.
These include a more contemporary look and feel, a faster initial
load time, support for complex text layout, additional support for
Arabic, Hebrew, Thai and Hindi, and two real treasures (easily worth
the price of admission) – Native Export to PDF and Flash.
These are, of course, high-ticket items in the proprietary
software world.
Sam
Hiser, marketing lead for OpenOffice.org reports that nearly 20 million
copies of OpenOffice have been downloaded so far, but counting copies
in use – or comparing them to copies of Microsoft Office in use –
is very difficult.
For example, counts of Microsoft Office include all of the
copies ever shipped, Hiser points out, including those that have presumably
been replaced by subsequent updates to later versions.
But no one has accurate data as to how many copies should be
subtracted as no longer in use.
For
that matter, we’d add, no one knows how many copies of any open source
product are actually in use.
On the one hand, a download doesn’t necessarily mean the product
then gets used permanently – lots of people download software out
of curiosity and discard it or set it aside, unused, after they’ve
had a chance to look it over.
Others are unable to implement it satisfactorily.
That is balanced, we’d bet, by the fact that there are no legal
limits to copying open source applications.
A single OpenOffice download could represent one user or it
could be the download to a network that was then distributed to ten
or a hundred users.
No one knows.
Surveys,
using good statistical techniques, are the best way to determine actual
usage.
Eventually, we will hope this information can emerge.
OpenOffice aficionados hope that with the huge markets in Asia,
Africa, and parts of South America interested in OpenSource, even
with relatively slow growth in the North American market, OpenOffice
will have a very large installed base over the next 3 to 5 years.
Hiser
is nothing if not ambitious for his product.
He says a “50% global office suite market share is a reasonable
or natural minimum target market share objective, say, for the 10-year
span.”
For that he will need not only the continued improvement of
Open Office’s feature set and its expansion to new platforms (Macintosh
is next, moving beyond a partial implementation to a fully compatible
one with the Aqua interface) and new markets, but also a well documented
and publicized tracking of increasing market share.
It’s no secret that customers like to follow success, so it
is growing market share that will, in the end, determine where customers
will choose to go.
You
can download a copy of OpenOffice 1.1 RC4 (Release Candidate) at http://www.openoffice.org/.
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