Office Suite Action
The
industry is trying to make OpenOffice into a real contender against
Microsoft Office, with the articles getting more positive all the
time.
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We like OpenOffice – a lot.
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We are quite certain that outside the U.S., where most people
have never used personal computers, much less copies of Microsoft
Office, OpenOffice is more likely to be the software of choice –
if we’re still using office suites by the time we get to those
users.
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In the U.S., where Microsoft Office has enormous penetration
into the corporate market, we’d expect change to come much more
slowly. Decision makers
would have to feel there was a good reason for investing in that
change – cheaper software, a small percentage of the cost of any
information system – would not be enough.
A lot would ultimately depend on the cost of support and the
cost of migrating from current environments.
Of
course, you should keep up-to-date with the latest developments –
and be a pilot or an early user if you fit the profile, but don’t
feel pressured if you work for a company with little appetite for
risk or patience for trying things early.
There’s plenty of time.
(Of course, if you can’t wait, there’s always your home
system!)
Openoffice.Org Vs.
Microsoft – A Status Report
This is not a personal opinion or a report of a study
we’ve made. Rather
it’s a note that we’re seeing lots reported in the press about
the fact that OpenOffice is now perceived as “okay” rather than
“not good enough” which is how it was perceived as recently as
last year.
We’re not sure that’s due to changes in
OpenOffice. It may be
due to changes in our perception of what we expect a productivity
suite to do. That may
be reinforced by reading about the government wins in Europe.
Or the fact that with 44 languages available now and 60 more
in development it’s sure to be used in many foreign countries.
Or it might be that we’re feeling more comfortable
with the idea that if you live in a browser half the time (and have
no idea what operating system is under the application you’re
actually using on the web) that an open source office suite could be
okay. The fact that other open source products, like Mozilla’s
Firefox, are getting good press, might be a contributing factor,
too.
And then there’s the fact that OpenOffice has
become a component for larger projects, like IBM’s Workplace 2.
In any case, you can read the reviews for yourself.
(We don’t do product reviews, but here’s a comparison
that appeared in eWeek http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1571626,00.asp).
At the same time, Microsoft is reacting in a very
interesting way. (At
least we think it’s a reaction; maybe it’s just a plan they had
all along that has nothing to do with this at all.)
They have started providing “light” versions of Windows
for five emerging countries (Indonesia, Russia, India, Thailand, and
Malaysia). These much
less expensive versions have been suitably “disabled” so that
they are not useful for anything but an individual or a very small
office – they can’t work on a LAN, for example.
We suspect that Microsoft could follow that up with
“light” versions of Office, something mid-way between the old
Works product and the lightest version of the Office Suite, again at
a bargain price, restricted to foreign markets.
Never mind, my brilliant economic analysis on why you
can’t, in the day of the Internet, restrict the sale of software
to one part of the world. In
this case, Microsoft not only has to compete against itself, it also
has to compete against something it doesn’t control –
OpenOffice. And (important And), OpenOffice isn’t one thing.
It’s Sun selling Staroffice and JDS.
It’s OpenOffice itself in 44 soon to be 100+ languages on
Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. It’s also all the products developers build on top of
OpenOffice (because it’s open source), like the four products that
competed in the Chinese MOST competition (see IN CHINA, below).
Some think that Microsoft is up to something else,
planning to create software for the office that runs on both servers
AND desktops. Rumors
are beginning to emerge, unconfirmed by the company, that Microsoft
is developing a server version of Excel and perhaps one for Visio.
We’d expect that these aren’t intended to be used with
thin desktops instead of rich client software, but rather WITH rich
client software. Microsoft has already introduced other Office
System products (like InfoPath) that work partly on the Server and
partly on the client, and mainly together, that seem to foretell how
this might work.
In China, A Native Son Wins
China’s
Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) recently ran a bake-off
between four office suites built in Chinese on top of OpenOffice.org
and a Chinese Office Suite, Evermore Integrated Office, written from
scratch in Java. Evermore
won, hands down.
China
hopes that low-cost, native products would put an end to the use of
pirated software. Cities
and provinces will be required to use only legal software copies by
the end of 2005. Evermore
hopes, of course, this victory will give many of these opportunities
to them.
The
tests were run by three independent organizations who evaluated
"domestic" Office productivity software that runs under
both Windows and Linux. These requirements eliminated Microsoft
Office and StarOffice, while permitting Office productivity suites
with development work done primarily in China that are based on
OpenOffice, the open source, multi-platform productivity suite.
Five
products were tested including Evermore Integrated Office 2004,
Co-create Office from Co-create Open Source Software, Hurricane
Office from Kingsoft, NeoShine Office from China Standard Software,
and Red Office 2.0 from Beijing RedFlag Chinese 2000 Software.
The
three testing organizations included the Military Equipment
Assessment and Research Center of the People’s Liberation Army,
the China Software Testing Center and the Beijing Software Testing
and Quality Assurance Center. Testing covered 14 major criteria,
including frequently-used functions, powerful functions shared by
applications, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation graphics,
and compatibility with Microsoft Office data files, security,
reliability, performance, scalability, usability and performance.
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