Slashdot Mirror
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
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 ;)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
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.
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.
What part of "mudasobwa" don't you understand?
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.
"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.