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OpenOffice.org Newspaper Ad Mockup Released
Benjamin Horst writes "The volunteer effort raising $10,000 to place at least two backpage ads in New York City's free daily paper Metro is now entering its second full week. We've collected over 10% of our goal already and continue to find new pledge donors at a healthy pace. Our project's purpose is to help 'cross the chasm' and bring awareness of OpenOffice.org 2.0 to the large number of computer users who stand to benefit from its broad feature set and range of useful capabilities. This is not the first time an open source project has sought a high-profile newspaper ad buy. In fact, our effort was directly inspired by the Firefox New York Times ad. Firefox's famous effort announcing its arrival on the world stage helped push it from about 10 million downloads to its current tally of over 185 million!"
Is it really worth the money?
The only way I would consider donating to the project is if they'd remove Java from the the default setup. It's like those annoying M$ office features that you need to go shut off after a fresh install. I realize it's just a checkbox, but you'd think the free, open source software org. would expend a little more effort to rid their software of slow, proprietary bloatware. I, among numerous other people, have asked for them to remove java, but they will not.
Other than that, the software is worth a download if abiword doesn't float your boat. Until they actively work on the slowness and non-free portions of their code, I'll stick with abiword and gnumeric.
Now that's a fugly ad. Compare it to the famous Firefox NYT ad - that one was beautifully well-designed, but the mockup for OpenOffice's ad looks like something that any amateur would put together in 15 minutes using MS-Paint and a pic ripped from a school book. Also, it is too in-your-face ideological, it barely mentions the app's qualities!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Be careful what you wish for.
The comparison of Open Office to Firefox is apples/oranges. Firefox is at least as accessible to the end user as IE, and is a better choice for many users. Open Office might not be as favorably compared to MS Office as Firefox is compared to IE.
Despite its flaws, code blot, and so forth - when I reach for my own money, I choose Open Office every time. I imagine that many NY Times readers will reach the same conclusion. Will NY Times do for Open Office what they did for Firefox? Only time will tell.
The ads will says "World's best word process ..." and lists off all the products. These are tactics I expect from Microsoft, not the Open Source world. I know the name of the game is to get the most attention and the most people trying your product (especially at a $10k price tag to advertise) ... that I respect, but OO.Org is definitely not the best software package for those jobs. Don't get me wrong -- it's really good, it's growing, and I use it and love it. The tactics suck, plain and simple. This advertising is no better than we see from any other large corporation. There's obviously enough creativity in the open source community to be able to hit these ads from a multitude of other angles that are more truthful. I think it's unfortuneate and I hope the strategy is altered before these ads go to market, especially because MS Office power users (note: not necessarily day-to-day users) are going to be disappointed and word-of-mouth can be equally detrimental as it is good.
The advertisement professes very little of the capabilities of which it can perform, moreso, the fact it provides indpendence from the Office Suites people pay money for usage. The fact the programs in Open Office are quite expansive and offer a very well integrated ability to best the products people "pay" to make their lives easier. I don't feel that the Mt. Rushmore with the ubiquitous yellow "...for idiots" color is beneficial in the developement of which they created. The programs are, and many would argue, easily to use for the purpose they provide. I helped a friend to use it and they were very grateful at the purpose the tools were developed. I like how you are able to take a break and load the spreadsheet; type in "=GAME("StarWars") and take a minute to smile at the few moments of gameplay before toiling again. I think the developers are worthy of Advertising what they have accomplished but wish they did it in a better way than something archaic...IMHO
OpenOffice.org is really jumping the gun here, and I think it's gonna backfire pretty hard.
... and being annoyed by it.
I do use OpenOffice on a daily basis, and I love it. However, it's still dog-slow and clunky in some parts, unfinished or unpolished in others, and buggy here and there. You have to get to know its individual quirks. I tried getting my Microsoft Office-loyal boss to use it for a while, and he gave it up pretty fast. He found a number of things that he was used to doing in Excel that he couldn't do in OOo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the project or the efforts of its contributors, nor can I stand up and say that I've contributed code or money to it. What I am saying is, they haven't reached the level of completeness that Firefox had reached before the Firefox ad came out. Couple that with a typically glacial development and release process, and you'll get hordes of new users checking it out
And, yeah, ditto the "holy cow, that's an ugly ad" comments, too. It looks very amateurish to me.
NeoOffice doesn't require X11, works with OS X's native fonts and printing system, supports all OS X's text input methods (Japanese, Chinese, etc.), and is much more attractive and snappy as of 2.0a.
How about adding something about how OpenOffice is the first app to support the newly standardized Open Document Format? That's seemed to have worked a few times for me.
- I would expect 99% of Linux users are already well aware of OO, and including the word "Linux" might scare a few people off.
You miss the point. Of course Linux users know about OOo, the point is to tell people that it runs on all sorts of platforms. This incrases the value of the package as a software platform. I hardly think Linux would scare anybody away. Especially not in combination with Solaris, Windows, MacOS-X, FreeBSD.
BTW, Why are there no seagulls, and why is it yellow instead of blue and white. If you do an add you should use your logo and company colors. That way you strenghten your brand. Whenever sombody sees some one else open OOo they should be able recognize the logos in splash screen from the add.
Why not mention that ODF is the new iso standard for Office documents, why not mention that you easy can share documents with other popular office suits
Besides, I think promoting it on MacOS-X is a bit premature. Most Mac users don't have X11 installed. and will not think of it as a real Mac program as things like menus and fonts will look weird to them.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Ya know, Doc Searls of the Linux Journal once said that "open source is what happens when the demand side supplies itself." That's quite true, IMHO.
This is a total grassroots effort. Neither Sun Microsystems nor IBM nor Novell or anyone else has "officially" given a dime so far to this OOo ad campaign. YOU own this ad campaign, just like YOU own OOo and every other Free Open Source Software project.
I'm sure you've heard this joke. Microsoft says, "Where do you want to go today?" Apple says, "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FOSS says, "Are you coming, or what?"
So, what are you going to do? Just sit back and complain? Or do something positive and help with this ad campaign?
I dont have anything against openoffice.. but comparing openoffice with Microsoft-office.. it still has looong way to go (you are free to disagree).. where as firefox beats Internet-Explorer quite easily.
Indeed. I convinced my project to use OpenOffice. I did this purely to satisfy my anti-Microsoft ideology. I convinced the others via cost and demonstrating how well it handled Office files. Two months later, 2/3 of the people were complaining about how bad it was, and the rest were admitting that it wasn't so good. 1/3 of the people had installed Office, knowing that the rest of us would still be able to handle their files. The rest of us continue to use openoffice because of ideology, apathy, or laziness.
Basically, only the spreadsheet has worked to our satisfaction. Text documents are passable, but unpleasant. Presentations are completely inadequate. The migration to Office was mainly triggered by the need for PowerPoint.
I still tell people about OpenOffice, and that we (mostly) use it for our project. But I only recommend it to people who have to do simple things, like short reports or billable hours.
On the other hand, all of us independently decided to use Firefox. And nobody except me realized that there were all those extensions and themes---they chose it because it just worked better "out of the box".
Have you ever seen Metro? It's a cheap (quality-wise; we know it's free), informationless tabloid that's handed out (and usually refused) in the New York City subways. It does not represent a "young, affluent, and savvy demographic" -- it represents people slightly above those who read the supermarket tabloids, and who would like not know how to download and install OOo.
As for calling the proposed advertisement as bad as a "high school design project" -- that's a bit of insult to high school design projects. I was creating more professional stuff back in 9th grade.
They do say "Free software for a free people" and "independence" - both implying (to me anyway) that this is an appeal to the "spirit of liberty" that one assumes to be prevalent in NYC. (Seeing that they've got that nifty French statue and all.)
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
If the target market is "people who can't afford Microsoft Office", then perhaps a cheesy in-your-face ad is the most appropriate.
When you see those ugly, poorly designed ads for used cars, home financing, rodent removal, and so on, the cheeze is purely intentional because the target market tends to avoid marketing that looks like its too classy for them. Just because the ad is ugly doesn't mean it will be ineffective.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
My own OpenOffice.org mockup ads , see if you like them.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Just last week a couple of friends (non technical people) mentioned to me that they'd switched to OO after powerpoint let them down badly - apparently Powerpoint runs presentations at different speeds on different machines and requires the same fonts installed so when they took their expensively produced presentation and decided to use it for an important meeting on a different machine it looked like complete crap and ran at 10* normal speed (it was synchronised with a soundtrack so needed to be *exactly* the same speed).
Importing to OO fixed it, but messed up the colours slightly. It was still usable though.
I heard about it when they started cursing Microsoft... These aren't the people I would normally have expected to know what OO was and definately not the standard slashdot types.. but they all (well, a group of 5 of them) switched to it because Office let them down at a crucial moment.
Of course this is a place where backward compatibility doesn't really matter - documents are produced for the moment, so ODF is fine.