Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Making Inroads in Small Businesses
prostoalex writes "In a story mainly about new OpenOffice release, NewsFactor Network quotes an interesting finding of Jupiter Research analyst: "Open-source productivity suites did "surprisingly well" in the mid-size business market, with the OpenOffice suite alone claiming a share of about 6%. Furthermore, [Joe Wilcox] found that some 19% of small businesses ran Linux on their desktop, and a whopping 26% ran Linux on their servers.""
If only schools could switch to OpenOffice to, and we could probably get rid of the MS Office dominance for ever in a few years...
I ran into several companies and except one, no one runs Linux as a Desktop operating Systems, and every computer runs Micorsoft Office.
Strange, is not it ? I don't believe in that report
For those companies that are:
1) Big enough to worry about getting busted with unlicensed (pirated and/or over-installed legal copies of) software, but
2) Unwilling to spend $x99.99 on Office per seat,
OpenOffice is a no-brainer alternative. Heck, Notepad is a better choice for some percentage of the staff, I'm sure.
It's pretty much inevitable -- good research becomes commoditized over time, everything from Velcro on the Space Shuttle to Spelling and Grammar checking in a Word Processor. I'm actually sort of surprised that it's taken this long for a Free office suite to start (more accurately, to be SEEN to be) really getting into mainstream commercial use.
Still, I think there will always be a percentage of people who want the latest and greatest features, and organizations that are willing to spend to provide them. And organizations with the money to spend will continue to standardize across their staff, etc.
IMHO, neither 'side' (MS, Oracle, etc. on one side and Linux, OpenOffice, MySQL etc. on the other) should really focus on 'winning'. Keep those core users, go after the others. MS is gradually learning to be competitive instead of anti-competitive, something that will benefit both sides in the long run.
You shouldn't verb words.
It would not be too hard to verify Open Office.org's market share by experiment. All we need to do is start sending out .sxw and .sxc attachments. If we get e-mails asking what programme opens them, we tell them Open Office {though I'd expect MS Office to be able to open them just fine; after all, the Open Office.org file formats are public knowledge, whereas the MS office file formats are closely-guarded secrets}.
Also, it might give some people a dose of their own medicine.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I visit tons of small businesses, and this guys telling me 1 in 4 are running linux somewhere?
.com startups or what? Sounds like a dataset skewed towards tech-oriented businesses.
And what exactly does he call a small business? Are these
I mean, your local mom and pop dry cleaner or deli stand doesn't usually have a server farm in the closet or care how many megaflips per flop the electrowizzer can do.
When I think small business and computers, I think of a cheap dell in the corner running QuickBooks..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
-A
About five years ago, I set up a linux server at my godfather's business, and it's been running like a tank since then. It replaced an NT machine that required constant fixing and administration on his end. Since he's not the most savvy user, this was a constant source of complaint for him.
The linux machine grew with his business, and was only recently replaced (due to a motherboard failure). When I asked him what kind of OS he wanted on the new server, the choice was clear: Linux. Since it requires so little maintenance (none from him and only remote administration from me) he's been one of the most vocal Linux advocates in the small business community, and had several business in our area come in to see how well Linux works with their existing technologies.
Did we have trouble? Yeah... ACT didn't like to be on a SAMBA share (until I found out it needed oplock tweaking), and getting tech support from his ISP was troublesome, but once everything was set up, there was nothing more to do.
Small businesses often can't afford to have a full time IT person, so this kind of set it and forget it proposition makes great business sense.
"This is not a company that appears to be bothered by ethical boundaries."
Attorney General Mike Hatch on Microsoft
I know you were kind of joking (trolling?), but my business, too, is 99% open source (except flash, acrobat, etc...) and we are at the forefront of teaching OS programs like The Gimp in Thailand. It is a big selling point.
Put identity in the browser.
For s small development company like this one, nothing beats the deal MSDN gives you. If you shop around you can get universal subscription for around 1k and that gives you enough dev licences to ALL of their software. The time saved from not having to reinvent the wheel pays for itself.
That's still not worth $400. Office suite software is a commodity item now. All of the problems involved with creating such software were solved 10 years ago. (That's why Microsoft is trying to invent new problems that we didn't know we needed, like DRM'd spreadsheets.)
For $400, I would expect to get some kind of specialized cutting-edge software, like a midrange 3D modelling/rendering package, not a bag of 15-year old generic office tools.
The only thing that allows MS Office to command its $400 price tag is the fact that so many useres have locked their data into its proprietary file format. That's what you're paying the gatekeeper for: access to your files and the files of others who are in the same situation.
If you look at the history of various industries, such a gatekeeper position is an unstable situation. It takes the utmost in business skill to maintain such a distorted marketplace when you're not providing intrinsic value. Microsoft may one day lose their grip on this golden goose, but OTOH they have shown unsurpassed skill managing their market so far. Only time will tell.
If so, a Microsoft spokesperson did not show it when he gave a cool response about his company's faith in the free market -- a safe bet when that company owns over 90 percent of the market for desktop-productivity suites, according to Wilcox's research.
and
Hiser said that OpenOffice version 1.1, due this week, can translate Microsoft files with an accuracy of 90 percent.
But anything less than 100 percent is not good enough, Wilcox noted.
So at the end of the day, why all the poncing around with Media Player and Explorer at the anti-trust trial. Bundling these two packages into Windows pales into insignificence in the MS monopoly when compared to the constantly changing and jealously guarded MSOffice file formats.
Until Microsoft is forced to compete on the quality and features of MS Office (neither of which are worth the price over OO.org) as opposed to locking everyone else out with convoluted file structures they will have a stranglehold on business.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
I've been asked for help over the past couple of years for by a small business contractor, but have always bumped up against the OpenOffice translation problem, so just helped with with the File/Print server on RH.
Finally, I said to hell with MS in any new office installs unless they don't want my help. Amazingly, OpenOffice works like hell on wheels when it isn't having to translate screwed up table formats, etc., and the contractor is able to lower his price for desktop support by a third because of far fewer infected/BSD'd machines. (Admittedly, he's really scoring here because his daily calls dropped by more than 70% at the new sites, and emergency calls stopped altogether.)
I guess the moral of the story is, make a clean break from MS whenever possible to realize the greatest efficiency increase, period.
BTW, none of those linux servers / desktops have ever lost any data or 'blue screened'. Newest versions of Mozilla seem to be THE exception, and the users can handle these problems ~90% of the time.