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Open Source Software Serves Niche Markets
mahendra writes "News.com is carrying an article about localisation of OpenOffice.org.
'So, what's new about that?', you may ask. The article talks about the potential markets that proprietary software markets are ignoring. By the time they realize the potential, Open Source software will have made deep inroads into these markets..."
"The language spoken by most Rwandans has no word for "computer." After considering the use of an English or French term, the Rwandan developers created their own: "mudasobwa," which roughly means "something or someone that does not make mistakes."" Hmm, wishful thinking. The name sound good though
The retail industry is just waiting for someone to put a CHEAP cash register with some major bank (credit card) support in it. The first person to cash in on this will make $$$! The issue is providing support to such some vendors at a price that's reasonable. Is this possible with open-source? Could it be incorporated with Linux to finally provide a cheap POS for small retailers, that they could actually CUSTOMIZE themselves? Time will tell, but most of us know the story of NCR...
btw- POS = Point of Sale.
Mod +5 Drunk
Could this be a type of viral OSS marketing? OSS is not going to have any marketing by definition, but this could be the way that it makes serious inroads into the mindshare. Be first, Be best, let the others play catchup. Sort of a perfect world MS approach.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Now there's a form of localization!
IAALS.
Kinda difficult to meet the win2k minimum requirements on a toaster or blender, much less a new fancy electricly-controlled car. I mean, gee, you can't even strip out the GUI from that thing, Bill Gates said that himself. Mabye you can get rid of useless stuff, like solitare, or ppp networking options, but that only takes away like, 40 or 50 megs, and you remove the ability for your car to network with your laptop. Some people like using joysticks or keys to drive their cars, what about the innovation?
Then you've got the EULA. Oh dear god, could you imagine how long it'd be for a car running win2k? No less than 2 miles in 4 point font no doubt.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Can someone actually give me a feature for feature list of things the OpenOffice lacks compared to MS Office? Im sure there are many advanced things but what are they? For most areas tho - certainly the home, I cant possibly think of a reason to use MS Office. My uni has MS Office on all the Windows machines in the campus and i cant for the life of me think why, considering the only thing its used for is students writing reports and presentations, unless they got a special, and i mean really special deal on it, it seems like a waste of money, they could have bought some useful equipment or maybe enough bloody BNC connectors ;)
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Will this end up being the next metric system?
I.e., where the mainstream U.S. goes one way (English or Imperial measurement/MS-Office) and U.S. scientists/geeks and the entire rest of the world goes the other way (metric measurement/OpenOffice)?
Too soon to call, probably.
While you could argue that the strength of a company or a brand is in its scope, and how big its market is, many businesses have been quite successful in being very targeted to certain customers.
Just look at Bentley and Burberry who have very specialized markets and enjoy actually seek these markets, as seen when, if I recall, Burberry was upset when Ja Rule wore and promoted their products, thus giving them a widespread appeal and "cheapening" their product.
Of course, the irony is that Microsoft products generally have wide use, large market share, and cost significantly more than OSS, so I guess the explanation is that OSS caters to the high-class "knowledgable" customer, even if it is not necessarily much more lucrative.
It's indeed wonderful that niche markets and languages are served by open source software.. Regardless of the language that people choose to use, I would prefer to have the same interface to work with each time. I would prefer also, to not have to explain why the "close document" command is found in the "file menu", when those words may not necessarily be familiar or easy to find for a person whose native language is not English.
However, if the niche markets are small ones, it may make more sense for some speakers to adapt or learn to use the more common English variant. Interoperability is one reason why. The Rwandan effort in the article has 20 college students translating about 20k strings of text.
What happens when a new version is released? Will there be the same set of maintainers ? Will the next version be supported ? If you're used to the Rwandan (or Finnish or whichever language) version, and you don't have language support in the next version, what do you do ? Keep using the old version ? Look for alternatives ?
The second point to ponder for me is more an observation than anything else. Not being a native speaker of English myself, I was educated in another language. If I hadn't learnt English, then I would be forever dependent on translated texts to be able to use an application or read a fairly current technical journal or book. From an enduser perspective, it might be just be worth your while to get used to the English version as well, because the interface concepts (the File menu and so on) can be applied across many different applications, not just your localized OpenOffice.
Is it possible for MS to use OpenOffice source, and come out with MS-OpenOffice, which of course is also an OSS.
However, they also package this MSOO with a 3-year support and some other candies. So they can have the very same MS-branded OpenOffice which they can sell at the same retail price as MS Office.
The only difference is the support, and MS brand is so well-known, most people and companies are likely to buy into it since it is now (1)OSS, (2)Very secure because of OSS and (3)With excellent support.
Pretty much like what RedHat and Mandrake do to Linux, but MS brand is a lot more recognizable.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Can a programmer explain this to me. How can there not already be a standard way to translate strings in the UI? What happens when they change the dialogs and menus around? How do you easily maintain the different language versions from release to release?
Surely there must be a uniform way to handle translation of UI in other Open Source applications -- a single file o' strings to be translated. Right?
Shouldn't be there be a simple way for non-programmers to help translate (not to mention proofread) UIs? Isn't there one already?
I know plenty of people that run OpenOffice.org on Windows. I attend a (mostly) art school, and many of my friends are not the most technical. When they ask me something like, "I need powerpoint!" or "My word is too old to open this thing my teacher sent me!" or anything of the sort, I always point them to OpenOffice.org.
I understand your point about "if Linux zealots are the only people making inroads...", but as long as we keep thinking that way, we'll just perpetuate our own problem. Go convert a friend to OpenOffice today! They'll thank you!
Sig.i>
This article doesn't hold much weight for me, on the very same day that I read in AlJazeera.net English that Microsoft are porting a load of their Office software to Hindi. Proprietary software manufacturers like MS *are* in fact porting their software to lots of different languages. Some, like Magix, even seem to only offer software in other languages like German (yuch)!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
My company makes software for niche markets in the telcommunication industry. Our product extends the features of existing hardware that our customer would already own. Its a small enough niche that we have virtually no competition. That is also due to the fact that there is very little growth in our niche market. Even though I'm an advocate of opensource, I think if we opensourced our software we would lose more customers than we would gain. In the case of our customers, they likely would not care that it is open source, they would only care that it didn't cost them money anymore. If we had competitors and were in a growing market we could opensource our software and leaverage that as an asset over our closed source competitors.
1. Keep software proprietary and expensive
2. No one buys it because its not worth the money
3. ?????
4. ?????
You left out,
5. Make Billions.
Odd, that seems to be the route that Microsoft, Oracle, Peoplesoft, SAP, CA (to name a few) took. Now to only figure out magical #4 and #5 ...
Apple could be seen as targetting a niche OS market, and generally making a nice profit.
Yes, the prevalent stereotype, evidenced in, say, this comment is that Apple, and its OSs, are "high-class", "name brand" OSs, much like the Bentley or the Prada of the computer world.
It may seem obvious, but simple supply and demand states that the smaller the market is, reasonably, the more that suppliers will need to charge, while the greater the consumer base, the lower the product will generally cost. Apple is (I must admit) a quality product that has a high-class appeal, and so they get to charge a premium.
The thing is that Microsoft is not necessarily a high-quality/high-class product (we rant and rave about all the security holes and such) with a huge consumer base that is still relatively expensive (due to standards, compatability, monopoly), and this is an anomaly, economically.
Likewise, OSS and such are products of reasonable quality (trying to stay objective) with a relatively small consumer base that are much more affordable, which is another anomaly.
If economics were to hold, OSS would be the standard, and MS products would be the ones catering to a "niche market", which is why I feel something's gotta be screwed up that so many would choose an expensive OS over one that is so much cheaper.
Computers are underutilized. There is no such thing as 'niche computing use'. There is just 'using a computer', and 'not using it', for some specific task, infinitely definable ...
... Desktop Computing is an utter waste of computing power, yet nevertheless, it is an application of computer science technologies which still bears fruit for modern commerce and industry above and beyond what was previously possible only a few years earlier ...
... there isn't such a thing as a 'niche' in the technological sense. Only in the sense of 'control over it from afar', which is all a Madison Ave type cares about ...
Less than %2 of all the people who could use a computer in their lives in some way (productively, I mean), actually do.
There isn't really 'such a thing' as a "niche" computer market. I'm serious. There is 'general purpose computing' and there is 'dedicated focus computing' (embedded/etc.), and either model can be applied to any other science in the world to good effect.
This idea of 'niche markets' is a Western notion, predominantly derived from 'marketing' and has nothing at all whatsoever to do with the actual facts of the technology, which factually has no bounds for application.
A computer can be adapted and bent to any and all application; therefore there isn't a 'niche' for its application in any sense other than a Madison Avenue Spin^H^H^H^HMarketing Merchants arbitrary lines on a board. In fact, niches are arbitrary.
The computing industry is still growing, essentially, at the same rate it always has. Computers are radically applicable to so many spheres of life that in fact the problem is not "if", or "how" to use computers, its "when" and "where". Pick a human endeavour: somehow, it can benefit from having a computer applied to it.
That said, its my belief that the majority of computer systems in the world are still radically underutilized
This isn't going to change. As more and more 'niche markets' get discovered and 'covered', it will become pretty clear that really
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I think that this is a very strong conclusion to draw esp. if you are talking of open-source. Open-source does not mean that you are not trying to give it away for free.
The assertion strongly suggests that in the "localization market" there is a driving force for open source that lacks in corporations (esp. Microsoft). Something about this market attracts open-source but does not attract closed-(though now compromised)-source. I wonder what it is, and if something like that is really there.
Is there some fundamental shift in what is driving these markets compared to what we think drives markets? If it is not profits, then what is it? Maybe it is about profits, but not about humongous profits.
Maybe it is about being comfortable with decentralization, and not bearing the centralization burden of presenting a single face to the rest of the world - and, hence unflexible corporate-wide policies.
Maybe it is about not being such a big target that it attracts life-threatening law suits.
Maybe it is about so many people being able to pour over your "crown jewels" that you can now tap into the knowledge of anyone who is willing to look and tamper with your code.
So, there there is nothing really of much to big and very big corporations.
But then the article goes on to say that the same "localization markets" will some day draw the attention of Microsoft and others.
But why would they want to do such a thing? Is the whole PC market going to change in such a way that it will become attractive for them. Or are they going to change in a way that the now find the market attractive. Will it happen? When will it happen? Will someone else come into the picture by then?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Actually, the one thing that I've missed on linux is the seemless support for polytonic Greek Windows has. When I was studing classics at university, I used MS Office to do my homework all the time. In the last two years I've been running linux, I still haven't figured out how to get my browser to display the unicode properly, and there aren't (to my knowledge) any easily downloadable fonts to allow for display of accented characters.
Well, the linux kernel hackers seem to like Klingon in unicode. (Well, at least Peter Anvin) /usr/src/linux/Documentation/unicode.txt
Read the
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