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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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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.
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