Why OpenOffice Needs IBM
Recent reports have it that IBM will join the effort behind Open Office, the competitor to Microsoft Office. The company is expected to contribute some of the code that makes Lotus products accessible to the visually impaired. The move is just the beginning of IBM's foray into the area with more information do to come out next week at the Lotus Collaboration Summit. Let's just hope that part of that effort will be to make a reasonable competitor to Outlook.
About two months ago, I decided to be good a corporate citizen when I launched Strategic Technology Analytics and eschew copied software. So I downloaded OpenOffice, installed it, and then used it -- for about two weeks.
Sure the open source community has done a terrific job inventing an MS Office clone and adding a few twists. I love being able to save files in Acrobat format, a reason alone to keep Write, their answer to Word, on my system. And there's nothing in MS Office that comes close to Open Office Draw.
But what's missing is an integrated calendar, email and personal information manager (PIM), like Outlook. For all of its faults, Outlook still provides me a center for organizing and maintaining my essential pieces of information. What's more the rich ecosystem of add-in applications surrounding Outlook solves many if not most of the problems not addressed in the base application.
Need to grab contact information from other applications (ala the old Shooter in Eco)? Take a look at Anagram. Want to add advanced PIM capabilities? Try FranklinCovery's PlanPlus add-in for Outlook. What about something as arcane as scheduling a reoccurring email? Checkout Sperry's Add-in.
Without an Outlook killer with a robust eco-system of add-ons, OpenOffice won't be able to replace MS Office. Which leaves the OpenOffice community with two choices: bundle in one of the Outlook killers (More on your choices tomorrow.) or build an Outlook killer from scratch.
On this latter point, IBM certainly has the expertise in its development of Notes and Lotus Organizer to lead that effort. By contributing code or resources to the open source Outlook effort, IBM would undercut Outlook sales and would create an entry point that could ultimately lead to Notes migration.
Sure it would galvanize sales of Organizer, but those sales are likely nominal today anyway. Is there anybody you know who runs Organizer? I certainly haven't heard of anyone and a read through the IBM SEC filings shows that SmartSuite and Organizer are petty much out of the picture.
Contributing to an open source Outlook effort would help IBM, OpenOffice, and all of us in search of a great PIM-Email-Address Book solution.