What's the best defense for open source?
Summary: What if Open Office really were a solid enterprise alternative to Microsoft Office? The best defense may indeed be a good offense.
The OSBC is in San Francisco this week, worrying over defending against Microsoft patent claims.
Our own Ed Burnette was intrigued by hints in Jonathan Schwartz' blog this week that Sun Microsystems might help defend Ubuntu and Red Hat, if push came to shove.
Interesting given that Sun isn't even a member of the Open Invention Network, the corporate patent disarmament group headlined by IBM, Philips and Sony.
Personally, I was more intrigued by another aspect of his blog post. Schwartz repeated the point, with pictures, but it's something which deserves special emphasis.
Get Open Office, he said. Instead of waiting for Microsoft's lawyers to lay the hammer down, cut off Microsoft's air supply by downloading, and using, the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, which is as big a driver of Microsoft's revenues and profits these days as Windows.
I have Open Office, and have used it for months now. It's powerful. But it's far from perfect. I have major problems cutting-and-pasting ODT files into blog posts, for instance. The documentation is still poor, and not integrated into the product. Don't even get me started on its drawing, presentation or database tools.
Still, Schwartz has an excellent point here. (Given that Open Office descends from Sun code, it's a self-serving point, I know.) Rather than paying lawyers and waiting for a legal attack, what if large vendors, like Sun and the members of OIN, put some real money into improving Open Office, as was done with Firefox?
What if Open Office really were a solid enterprise alternative to Microsoft Office?
The best defense may indeed be a good offense.
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Talkback
It's Database tool?
Now Open Office does fall short in many areas. One issue I find is formating pages. I can create a Table OO 100 times faster than in MSOffice but I can't format it as nicely. One thing I do is create the table in OO then save it as DOC file to open in Word to format the rest of the way then move back to put the database fields in place.
Put the money into marketing, not product.
No, put those hundreds of millions of dollars each year into making the Open Office name prominent. That's the way to make a reputation for a new product competing with an established brand that controls most of the market.
After approximately $1 billion invested the returns will start to roll in.
Use Microsoft's XBox campaign as an example, and hope that Microsoft is as foolish with a new version of Office as Sony was with PS3.
No guarantees for your $1 billion, but that's business.
Have to agree ...
Sun Microsystems already has brand recongtion so StarOffice/OpenOffice would be just be an extension of this. :)
Sometimes that works, but...
A problem for competitors with a market dominating product is that people think they know what they should have, and a product used as a lagniappe is not going to be considered competition. I think.
The history is correct
But I fail to see the relevance to the present situation.
Fact is, Microsoft can no longer dictate browser design because Firefox has substantial market share. That's what I'm advocating here. But I also believe Open Office needs more corporate support, the kind Firefox got, in order for this to happen.
Thanks again for writing, Anton. I very much appreciate all you do for this blog. While we disagree, you've never been disagreeable.
More OpenOffice users.
That was the relevance.
Also, one reason why FireFox has not gained a larger market share is that corporate adoption has been less than the reported percentages, which are disproportionately home users. Many companies use features in IE which FireFox and other browsers do not use because they were invented by Microsoft. Also called non-standard features.
Microsoft predominance in the browser is still significant enough that the company can design the browser any way it likes.
I'm glad you appreciate my posts. Soon enough I think you'll appreciate my opinions.
Microsoft's browser
Well, they still have changed their browser in other ways, such as including RSS, tabbed browsing, and a pop-up blocker.
(Personally, I hope you're not depriving the advertisers of their well-deserved revenue by using the pop-up blocker. But then again, you also don't use Flash, so those ads don't show up. Don't you know that advertisers have mouths to feed?)
Re:
As opposed to what? You telling them what they want?
Here we go again, full circle. The open source elists claiming they know better, that they know what people want. Great job!
Resources hog
I practically never use Microsoft Office anymore, because I practically never use Windows. But I must credit Microsoft for that: MS Office is much lighter than Open Office.
Let's face it: Open Office is a marvelous initiative, but it needs improvement, especially where resources are concerned.
Greetz, Pjotr.
Accustomed to Office?
I must be missing something, but I find the inline help provided with Open Office to be very high quality and easy to use. I haven't used it to connect to a database, but having used their presentation create a few thousand times, I find it fantastic. The publish to HTML is fantastic, and never had a problem with master pages, etc.
The very odd (and I mean odd, like at site when someone needs me to work on their presentation in Office), I find it very very hard to figure out.
Either way, I use OO 100%, never had or needed Office and have no troubles in an MS Office world.
TripleII
Open Office meets all our needs...
Now that I've stopped tried to set heading level and outline numbers as per the "Word" method, it has got a lot easier. The drawing tools are a lot better than they were on Office last time I used it.
It would be cool if Google would Summer of Code it
An almost adequate obsolete clone
The real question is WHY would anyone spend money on making this better - remember it's free.
OO is a useful tool when you are unable to use MS Office, but that's about all.
Security
People who are concerned about computer security, should avoid all Microsoft products, whenever possible. At least, that's my view.
Greetz, Pjotr.
Well, that's one opinion....
As for Office, it doesn't exist here in the office. It works fabulous. I guess being an MS Zealot, you need to bolster the party line, but in reality, OpenOffice is equal, and in many ways, better than MSOffice, and it keeps improving too.
Try it once, you'll like.
I don't entirely disagree with Tony McS
I'm glad you like it. I have it, and I sometimes use it. But there are still times when I go back to Office.
Office '97, that is.
Open Office vs MS Office
I found that each time I tried a new distro of Linux I got a newer version of OO.o. I quit putting in Word in my XP system. Instead, I now run Open Office 2.2 and Abiword.
I view my computer like Al Gore does a hybrid car. Sometimes I have to use the evil, polluting Windows. Most of the time I use open source, Ubuntu and PuppyOS to preserve my way of life. Maybe that is the way Open Source should be marketed. Preserve the ecology by avoiding the wasteful use of petroleum to make CDs and plastic shirkwrap. D/L the iso of a distro or the open source app and use a CD-RW to save resources.
Works?
I don't think anyone here thinks Works is an acceptable solution to most people's needs especially business.
I understand that,
My main point was I no longer use any MS word processing of any type. Sorry for the confusion.
Keep floundering on the desktop