Desktop Apps Ripe Turf for Open Source

Amy Kucharik writes "Two new reports on open source validate office suite application alternatives like OpenOffice.org and StarOffice and their push into the mainstream against market giant Microsoft Office. "

Comments

Inflated numbers don't make it credible.

[garcia]

As much as I know we all hate MS funded "research" I just can't trust the number of times that an application is downloaded as market-share. Sorry, that just does not compute...

Hell, I have downloaded Firefox on countless occasions (usually to test a new version). It never lasts more than an hour on my machine. Does that count as a piece of market-share in the browser war when I don't actually use it?

I have downloaded OpenOffice multiple times as well (on multiple computers) to test and to tour the features newer version have to offer. Again, the install may last a few hours while I test the features that I require. So my 25+ downloads counted towards the 16+ million?

I am glad to see that somewhat viable alternatives are coming into their own and getting media attention but I don't know if we really need to be associated with false numbers just to get the word out. It doesn't exactly give us a leg to stand on when MSFT fires back about the artificially inflated numbers.

Re:Inflated numbers don't make it credible.

[savagedome]

I have downloaded Firefox on countless occasions (usually to test a new version

And I compensate because I keep the latest version on my usb stick that I carry around in my pocket. And I upgrade it on all my work machines, my home machines and the friends that I visit. So there.

Re:Inflated numbers don't make it credible.

[16K Ram Pack]

That's a fair point, but there's also the fact that you can't count the cd installations.

I've got friends running OpenOffice.org because I popped round with a CD and installed it for them.

Re:Inflated numbers don't make it credible.

[SendBot]

I've downloaded 3 different versions of OO.o as new versions come out, and those get distributed to the 30 or so computers at my office.

Also, last x-mas I gave out copies of the open cd to family and friends, each containing a copy of OO.o.

Perhaps I'm not alone, and that others who do this balance out the figures for downloads that don't result in market share.

There must be some margin of error, but in lieu of a comprehensive survey, download quantity gives a good representation of how widely used a software product is.

Re:Inflated numbers don't make it credible.

[skaffen42]

On the other hand there are people like me, with a full suite of MS software on my PC at work that never gets used. I use OO and Firefox exclusively.

And I'm one of many in our dev team. The IT purchasing people makes sure you get a copy of MS office, but the majority of people are ignoring it and using software of their choice. Not that MS is the only people with skewed numbers. I think we have 3 JBuilder licences for every developer that actually uses it (Go Eclipse!).

Re:Inflated numbers don't make it credible.

[ZorbaTHut]

Wait a second.

"We can't determine A+B because we don't know A."
"That's okay, we don't know B either!"

Why does that not fill me with confidence on this particular statistic?

I for one ...

[Anonymous Coward]

am quite nervous about OpenOffice. I don't understand Sun's latest deals with Microsoft but I don't trust them.

Keep working on koffice guys. We really shouldn't be putting all our eggs in one basket.

Taking a foothold

[jeffkjo1]

In a report from El Segundo, Calif.-based consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Microsoft dominates the office suite market, with 95% of the overall share and more than 300 million users worldwide.

However, the report notes that OpenOffice.org, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market, with over 16 million downloads and countless CD installations. Even with Microsoft retaining 95% overall marketshare, the fact that OpenOffice now holds almost 15% of enterprise workstations, means it's only a matter of time before John Cubicle brings OO.org home.

Disclaimer: I use OO.

*sigh* So close..yet

[grasshoppa]

so far. The article seems to think cost is the reason to get excited. I agree, that is pretty damn cool, however, the real reason to get all a titter is because of the open formats used in open office.

The format being as open as it is ( you can read, in the code, the format if all else fails ), you can do a great many things that just aren't possible with ms office.

Re:*sigh* So close..yet

[PhoenixFlare]

The format being as open as it is ( you can read, in the code, the format if all else fails ), you can do a great many things that just aren't possible with ms office.

I think the question to ask would be, is the normal home or business user going to need or want to do those "great many things"?

There's a lot of stuff that may be pretty damn cool if you're a geek or hacker type, but I think you're going to have to find more relevant selling points if you want wider exposure than those limited circles.

Re:*sigh* So close..yet

[bfields]

The format being as open as it is ( you can read, in the code, the format if all else fails ), you can do a great many things that just aren't possible with ms office.

I think the question to ask would be, is the normal home or business user going to need or want to do those "great many things"?

There's a lot of stuff that may be pretty damn cool if you're a geek or hacker type, but I think you're going to have to find more relevant selling points if you want wider exposure than those limited circles.

The windows and mac users I know are often quite fond of downloading little extras for their favorite OS, many of which appear to be written by just random geeks who got excited when they noticed that the OS provided some API that would let them do some nifty thing.

So the "pretty damn cool" stuff for geeks can trickle down.

--Bruce Fields

Playing follow the leader

[coulbc]

If all we ever do is try to emulate the M$ Office and other popular desktop apps, We'll will never be able to offer a superior product. It's time to add non bloating features that outshine the commercial software.

Re:Playing follow the leader

[LnxAddct]

What most people don't realize is that Star Office's code base is 15 years old. Open Office and MS Office aren't emulations of each other, they've just both evolved around the methods in which humans naturally prefer to do word processing and the like. How else would you design a word processor for use with the average person? Saying Open Office just copies MS Office is like saying that is all Corel did too. It seems that, like the typical MS, they saw good proudcts out already, they also saw a market advantage to selling their own Office Suite, so they took all of the good ideas from the other Office Suites and combined them. As with most software applications, it evolves through time, some of those evolutions involve borrowing ideas from other suites that are admittedly implememnted better. You don't really think that MS came up with spell checking or mail merge, do you? But sure enough they have those features. Also, OOo is very usable in its current form, and the biggest issue people complain about (it's UI and load times, which are mostly interrelated) is going through a major overhaul right now. By the time 2.0 is released you should have no reason to stick with MS Office. The OOo gui used to be so horrible simply because they used to have to implement their own widgets and even emulate an entire desktop environment at some points because there was no standard back in the day, now there is more of a standardized base, and its being implemented using it.
Regards,
Steve

OpenOffice news, AbiWord, missing features

[otisg]

This is only somewhat true.
While I have been reading all Word documents with OpenOffice (OO) for the past 2 years or so, I often run into Word features not supported by OO. For instance, I recently received a password-protected Word document that I could not open with OO. I had to use AbiWord (how come the report doesn't mention that!?).
Another missing feature seems to be the ability to view Word document changes when the original document has 'track changes' turned on.

I guess reports like this one help larger, less up-to-speed corporate users by opening their eyes and mind.

Application Integration Still Not There

[unfortunateson]

More than just application quality, price, ease of use, etc. will be needed to get OSS into big corporations. Many of them have spent significant $$$ on add-ins and custom development in Word, Excel and Access. If OpenOffice supported VBA, it could be a slam-dunk, but integration with applications such as accounting systems, scientific data acquisition, or just automation of Word and Excel for productivity would need to be rewritten from scratch.

Those apps are a big part of my business -- I'd happily migrate them, but nobody's the least bit interested in the Pharmaceutical industry in moving away from MS Word and Excel.

Cross platform Opensource Music apps

[bstadil]

There is an interesting writeup about opensource music apps over at News Forge today. Just installed wxMusic and it looks excellent for large music collections.

Best Quote

[anocelot]

"They did not have the confidence that proprietary [applications] would allow them to be interoperable with other organizations..."

To think I would live to see that line. What an age we live in. And to think that there are now people posting on /. who will argue about it. Where's my time machine when I need it?

;)

The only Linux desktop apps?

[goldspider]

Why is it that whenever a story about Linux desktop application suites comes up, they always bring up OpenOffice and StarOffice? Are there not other good examples they can use?

I don't mean to bait flame here, but aside from OpenOffice and StarOffice (which essentially do the same thing), what other good, solid business apps are available for Linux? All I ever hear about are the same two.

Corporate features

[Anonymous Coward]

- a tool to go through specified directories and copy and convert all files to OO format.

- some sort of central server type connector that allows multiple users to work on the same document at the same time and the result mirrored to all users.

1 is required , 2 would be a selling point

.. blah blah DESKTOP blah blah ..

[torpor]

*Forget* about Desktop, its a straw man! Nobody gives a shit about desktop computing any more; the days of cubicle-bound misery-computing are numbered!

The real realm for application prosperity, *especially since Linux has a lead above and beyond WIN32*, is Embedded.

Yes, thats right folks, give up the Desktop War of Straw. Computers getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller .. and you can do a hell of a lot of computing/real-work with such devices.

{If you've got the temerity for bold app design, I might posit, oh and some cheap host-hardware to throw in that $400 software/hardware combo you're selling to your customer ..}

In short: Desktop is Dead. The New In is Embedded.

LDS church now using Open Office

[3arwax]

Here is something interesting. The LDS Church is now distributing Open Office for use on machines at local meetinghouses. This is very interesting because they are very very careful at which software they use.

No spin zone.

[cpn2000]

Quoting ... the report notes that OpenOffice.org, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office, has secured 14% of the large enterprise office systems market, with over 16 million downloads and countless CD installations

The interesting this about these numbers is that no one can put a spin on this. For instance, if these numbers were about 'number of PCs sold with Linux pre-loaded', you would have claims that this was only being done to circumvent the MS tax, and most people subsequently loaded the PC with pirated Windows OS.

You just cannot make those claims in this case.

Thoughts from an outsider...

[eV_x]

No, I'm not a Linux geek by any means. I am certainly not a MSFT lover, but I'm a best tool for the job, and most of my job requires MSFT today. On that same thought, I've recently been getting into some open source things, and have even installed Linux pretty recently (just instaleld a MythTV box at my house!).

I've made the switch to Firefox completely - both at work and at my home. Why? It looks really nice, functions well, and was easy to get my wife switched over to as it functions pretty similar to tools she already knows. Hell, I've even switched some of my less technical friends over, and they love it. I didn't do this with Mozilla though - it just seemed "too much".

Now, on the other side, I finally broke down and installed OpenOffice to give it a shot. I thought, will this be the Office breaker I've heard about? No way. I can't stand it - it's clearly designed by technical people and doesn't have the slightest bit of usability in mind. Bash MSFT all you want, but they spend a fair amount of cash on usability, and unfortunately flattery is the best form of competition right now (think about how early versions of Word had the ability to emulate certain WordPerfect functions).

Right when I installed OO I went to open the word processor. It's actually called a Text Editor. WHAT? Notepad and nano are text editors, this is supposed to a Word Processing suite! Further, the interface looks like Office 95 - honestly, people are visual and the interface makes me feel like I should be sitting in a tiny bricked wall office with no windows and a flickering flourescent light overhead. Sure, some may like that, but it's not most people. Finally, the product seems slow on WinXP - yes, it may be my setup, and your mileage my vary, but Word is snappy on my box so it doesn't matter.

The short short is that products like Firefox and MythTV can make me a convert. They're well designed, look nice, have a lot of functionality, but also keep the end user in mind. OO.org has a long way to go thought before I'd recommend it to one single person as a Microsoft alternative.

What is still needed...

[Rick Genter]

...is a good project management application. I just scanned SourceForge.net but didn't find one. IMHO this is sorely lacking in the Open Source world. So much so that I've thought about writing my own (I wrote one that was curses(3)-based back in the early '80s :-). Does anyone have any pointers to a decent[1] project management app? Or should I start coding? ;-)

[1] decent == Can track resources, tasks, costs; can perform some sort of resource auto-leveling; can report resource conflicts; supports GANTT charts; has a relatively easy-to-use UI.

Reminder: Do not pirate MS Office.

[xutopia]

We've heard often by MS Fudmakers (tm) that the GPL is viral but the truth is that MS Office is viral. It is intrisic to proprietary/closed format. What we need to do is to have less pirate versions of Office around.

As a teenager I gave countless copied CDs with Office or Windows on it and it only helped MS. Now I do the opposite. I have Slackware installed (might try some gentoo or Unbuntu soon though) and use solely OpenOffice and when people come to me for help or for software I point them to FOSS alternatives. Open Office works great with it's own format. It just has problems with closed formats. I think being polite and asking people to send me thing in RTF is a good way to save 300$+ on my OS/Office suite.

My experience

[prostoalex]

From my experience more people turn onto OpenOffice.org for its one-click PDF generation than anything else. People who publish newsletters, invitations, or just some documents they want on the Web site. Adobe Acrobat is $170 on Pricegrabber, but it's generally $250 retail in stores, so I've seen people wow'ed by OpenOffice single click Word->PDF conversion.

They are not switchers, they continue to use Office (MS Office 97 in some cases), but keep OpenOffice for this feature when they need another PDF.