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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.
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 ...
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. --
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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