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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..."
1. Localize software for small markets
2. Give away software and make deep inroads into these ignored markets
3. ?????
4. Profit.
I always wanted to do one of those.
is openoffice available in esperanto? or, cu ie cu tie parolas la esparanton?
So how big is the size of these niche markets? Maybe mainstream companies aren't interested in them in the first place.
And when these niche markets become mainstream, I am sure big companies like MS can easily enter these markets either by buying out or squeezing out.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
"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
Ancient Greek & Latin versions of OpenOffice for l33t classics geeks.
Kinyarwanda, the language spoken by most Rwandans, has no words for many basic technical and computing terms, including the very word "computer," explained Steve Murphy, organizer of the project. After debating whether to borrow English or French terms or come up with their own native word, the group settled on "mudasobwa," which roughly translates to "something or someone that does not make mistakes."
They forgot the "if it wasn't for those fucking developers or floating-point errors" part.
Everything is a "niche market." The trick is covering as many niches as you can. That's why MS Office is so successful. Ubiquitous word processor of marginal quality? Check. Crappy relational database software? Check. Slide-show software with gazillions of incredibly annoying backgrounds and clip-arts? Check.
Open Office, if it is to succeed MS Office, must be of better quality. Makign inroads into niche markets is fine, but if Linux zealots are the only people your making inroads to, it doesn't really help much.
As for my niche, I'll use emacs, thanks.
I have discovered a truly marvelous
True! They use non-MS products!! ;)
DrkBr
Alternate solutions have always filled niche markets. The only real special part of it today, as I have seen, is that Open Source offers a free or readily customizable solution to what used to be an expensive problem to deal with.
Mainstream software providers aren't generally interested in true niche markets. Growth isn't predictable and that doesn't look good to shareholders. Instead they concentrate on the masses, where their solution will work for a large enough population to make profit without having to work harder. It's simply better sense for them if they're market-driven rather than based around a central individual money-source.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Based on what I've seen on Slashdot, there will be OpenOffice in Klingon and both dialects of Elvish long before it is in Esperanto.
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...
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
OO didn't keep losing my dictionaries and for speal checking every time I do an aptget upgrade...
That would make a big difference to its usability in this locale.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
Does this mean niche applications to program my robot.... .....my GIRL robot?
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.
A small team of developers in Rwanda was just beginning work on a project to produce a localized version of OpenOffice....
:)
This is why linux has flourished with developers. It was by developers for developers. This is nothing new, we know the difference, and are willing to make it work to suit our needs.
Scientists seem to feel OK with Linux, *NIX, and open-source software as well.
Its that damned 99% of the rest of the population that we have problems with
A very good day to you.
I am Barrister Barry Dapo Smith, an attorney at law. I was the Personal Attorney to Mr. Jarold Freeman, who lived in PortHarcourt, Nigeria for years, and whom hereinafter shall be referred to as my Client.
I have a very confidential business proposition for you. On 17th February, 2004, we started developing open source products valued at US$12,500,000.00 (Twelve Million Five Hundred Thousand American Dollars) Upon maturity, I was notified by the bank and subsequently sent a routine notification to his forwarding address but got no reply. After a month, we sent a reminder and finally we discovered from his contract employers, the OpenOffice that Mr. Jarold Freeman died along with is wife Mrs. Barbara Freeman in a plane crash.
MoFscker
And now you told them? Moron!
Localization of software is one of the easiest things to do *IF* your software is set up properly.
Coming from Canada, where everything is in French as well as in English, I learned very early on (like day dot,) that you had to set up your software without any strings in it.
By using only symbolic references and setting up a dictionary of text strings or icon references you can refer to any 'local' attribute without having to muck with the code.
By switching the dictionary you can then switch the language that your users see without any performence hits and without any code changes.
Furthermore, by laying out the text in ''plages'' and letting the dictionary fill in the details, you achieve a much simpler screen and.or prport layout.
Debugging is easier too since you refer to the symbols you used for programming instead of whatever your users refer to (as this changes almost from user to user.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Must resist, must resis...
I guess it was a deal he both could and couldn't Welsh on!
just shoot me; I'm weak...
;^)
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Rimmer: Holly, as the Esperantinos would say, "Bonvolu alsendi la pordiston? Lausajne estas rano en mia bideo!" And I think we all know what that means.
Holly: Yeah, it means, "Could you send for the hall porter? There appears to be a frog in my bidet."
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.
RTFA, and this sounds like the classic investor-targeted article explaining why product x has an advantage because it targets the under-targeted market y.
You do have to think about how much of a profit market there can exist for computers in a place where the local language has no word for computer. There is a reason MS is not bothering to make inroads in Rwanda. It's about making money, so MS is just as evil in this particular case as almost any other business on earth. We could apply this case to any number of products, software or otherwise. "Volunteers build houses in Rwanda, international contractors ignore upcoming market".
Still, this highlights a difference between open and closed source. Open source needs a community, not a company. That community actively shares and extends itself.
"Computer technology is seen as at least one possible route to lead the country out of poverty..."
We can debate that all day. Needless to say, industrialization happened in most countries before computers. I would love to have computers without industrialization's problems, but that doesn't seem to be a reality.
"It's one of those areas where proprietary software companies are fundamentally at a disadvantage because of their method of allocating resources..."
They are disadvantaged because there is no money there. Open source doesn't use money, it uses people (volunteers). So money is the not the goal, hence money is not the deciding factor. We should not need analysts to communicate this.
They do this by making those that are interested fund the development. For example the Linguistics Institute of Ireland worked on the Irish Gaelic spell checker. The Welsh work was undertaken by the University of Wales and the Welsh Language Board.
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?
What part of "mudasobwa" don't you understand?
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.
I guess this means I'll now be seeing nicely formatted and spell-checked scam letters from Nigeria, including presentations on how the money was tied up and how I can share in the profits.
Disclaimer: I work on OpenOffice.org OS X
The OpenOffice.org localization argument for serving niche markets has been around for a long time. A prime example of that is the Hebrew Office v. X incident. For me personally, however, I see OSS as a great way to provide competition in non-profitable markets such as office suites.
It's near impossible to try to form a cogent business plan around making office productivity software given the current state of the market. Microsoft has office suite dominance almost as large as Windows market share, and may even be more. Most every company has created some type of workflow based on Office and has legacy documents in Office formats that may stretch back for decades. With the advent of Visual Basic for Applications and Access, companies have also been writing custom business applications coded to work only with Office.
It's difficult to convince investors to pour money into a startup where you're competing directly against Microsoft, especially in a market where they've got the upper hand, established customer lock-in, and decades of software development. As an investor it's almost a sure bet that any money dumped in such a startup would be lost. It's near impossible to create a viable long-term self sustaining business with Microsoft as your competitor in a market they've already monopolized.
Open source software doesn't need to abide by the standard rules of business. It doesn't need to create a revenue stream and find investors. It doesn't need to worry about being underpriced by market dumping practices. As long as there are starving (or subsidized) programmers willing to work on it and eager users, OSS can produce competition in a market where convential businesses would most likely fail. This is one of OSS's greatest strengths.
Competition is at the core of evolution and innovation. It's comforting to know that OSS keeps open these avenues for competition when traditional capitalism fails. Hopefully this will help motivate both the OSS alternatives and Office to continue to improve and evolve.
ed
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.
As for Classical Greek, it may have escaped your notice that it has developed into modern Greek. I guess a different typeface might well fix it (capitals only and the sigma is different.)Actually, the Omega (not the Sigma) is usually written differently. Classical texts have been written in minuscles for several centuries, so you'd also need them for ancient Greek. And you'd need even more than in modern Greek: where modern Greek's demotiki has one accent, ancient Greek (and the church's ye-olde form katharewousa) has three accents plus two spirits plus the iota subscriptum plus most combinations of the former three.
As we know, Microsoft applications are consistantly attacked because of its large market share and the damaging effect that the security holes in it have.
You're partly right. Microsoft applications _are_ consistantly attacked. The reason you propose as a given is wrong, though; it's not about market share, it's about fundamental design flaws making Microsoft's products inherently insecure.
Open source is checked by many eyes for security and other problems; MS products are only inspected in that way when, ahem, the code is leaked. If you think that an open-source developer who submitted a security backdoor or similar bug wouldn't be noticed, then I would have to question your experience with open-source development is limited.
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
...like this? Doesn't look like free-as-in-speech but it's only $200 so I'd say it qualifies as "cheap". This outfit is pretty local (to me anyways) and has been offering a POS system of some kind on Linux for a few years now.
As for OPEN SOURCE...POS seems to be an area lacking in a high profile solution (where OS has Linux and BSD, WWW has Apache, DBMS has MySQL and PostgreSQL). There is one aspect of a POS system where you may run into legal barriers in releasing source code and that is direct interfacing with credit/debit card systems (POSpad hardware, Datapac networks and so on).
You can legally reverse engineer the comms but in order to use the system on a live network it needs to be approved by the financial institution. To be approved requires you to obtain the specs and sample user-acceptance-test scripts prior to development. To obtain (ie. **BORROW** since you must return these on demand and cannot copy them without permission) these materials you must sign an NDA which could possibly close up a portion of your system's code (you'd have to make it modular and do the NVidia-type idea).
Once development is complete you must perform the U.A.T. under the bank's supervision, and if you score 100% you are granted access to the real system with a proper merchant ID and Terminal ID(s) set up on their mainframes to work with the MAC ID's burned into the firmware of your POSPads and modems.
Not a very hack-friendly system. Of course, the NDA may allow the software to be open-source, but if anyone so much as changes one byte and recompiles (such that the checksum of the binary files differ) that party must sign the same NDA and do the entire U.A.T. AGAIN.
Sooooo....cheap/free/Free POS is a good idea, but integrated credit or debit support would be a PITA (FYI = Pain In The A$$). Perhaps a bank has a gateway interface for CC auth that is open source but I'm not aware of it. That is definitely not the case when interfacing with retail POSpads that I'm aware of.
"Open Office, if it is to succeed MS Office, must be of better quality."
No it doesn't. Not at all. The only thing it must be is good enough and cheaper. That's all it takes.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
scripsit Bananenrepublik:
FWIW, the Katharevousa is not the form used in liturgy, but the `purified' version created by the nationalists in the modern revolutionary period. (When my father went to school, they still taught Katharevousa, and that's what all the newspapers etc. were written in.) It is, if you will, the old form of Modern Greek. The Demotiki is the normal spoken and written form today.
The Church uses more-or-less Biblical Greek, which, I guess you could say, is intermediate between Classical and Katharevousa.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
If your area becomes less isolated from the world, you'll start exchanging documents with the other Microsoft-infested areas, you'll need common format. If your software can't read theirs, you'll need to make a switch because people will start sending you their documents in MS formats, and you won't be able to just ignore it.
This is how they were forcing others to upgrade their Office instalations to the latest version.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov