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I have wanted to like OpenOffice for a long time. Partly because I have unloving feelings toward the maker of another competing office suite, but also because the project raises the bar for anyone trying to make money off of desktop publishing for the average person. It's been around long enough, it doesn't require new technology, it should be free or at least really cheap.
So now Microsoft Office has a valid competitor. A fully functional cross-platform office suite. There have been other offerings before, but this one is different in that it truly levels the playing field, opening Microsoft Office documents, and providing feature parity across a surprisingly wide range of tasks and tools. OpenOffice beats Microsoft in 2 really important ways that will quickly make the average consumer take notice. First, is price. Free is great, and free without violating the licensing agreements of multi-billion dollar corporations with packs of rabid lawyers is even better. And for the increasing number of people who use computer platforms other than Windows, OpenOffice runs well on Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. With these alternative platforms gaining (or in the case of the mac, re-gaining) ground against the Windows monopoly, exchanging documents becomes a real concern, and OpenOffice is a real solution. Perviously I had laughed at the macintosh port of Open Office, but something happenned. NeoOffice/J. It's still pretty foreign looking on a Mac OS X desktop with its square grey buttons, but it's just familiar enough that you don't feel frustrated by the interface. This is good, because mac users are notoriously picky about interface. The downside is that NeoOffice/J seems to run at something like 10% the speed of OpenOffice, from which it is derived. So if you find that your machine doesn't happily run the nice interface, you can opt for OpenOffice to get the speed back, but for so many Mac Users the feeling of familiarity will be more important, and so NeoOffice/J brings it home. For businesses with workflows and in-house training will not likely abandon Microsoft Office any time soon, if for no other reason than the cost of change at that level is difficult to quantify. But home users who find out that the copy of Microsoft Office on their computer only lasts 60 days will be looking for a low cost way to open the files they brought home from work, or got in an e-mail. For all of them, OpenOffice seems more than adequate. And after that adoption takes place, the idea that it may be a viable workplace product will begin to be considered. Even if adoption of OpenOffice never gets very far, it makes it obvious how much can be had for free in the modern computing world, and Microsoft will have to either come up with features that matter to people, or dramatically reduce its selliing price for its office suite to keep its current high market share. It's a sad day for capitalism when the only way to make a company compete like it's supposed to is to introduce a product that can't be stopped by lack of money. |
I
have to tell a lot of people (on a regular basis) that they don't
have a product for writing papers that way they want on their computer
even though they just paid $1500 for it. It doesn't do the one
thing they took for granted that it would do: write papers. They
say something like "Can't you just give me Office?" Often
with confused looks and followup questions along the lines of "But
I thought my computer came with Microsoft?" I say to them,
disappointed that all of the money they spent and all of the technology
they have at their disposal, despite that the concept is at least
20 years old in the common concept of personal computers, they'll
need to buy additional software to write a paper in something that
can do spell check.