Microsoft Admits OpenOffice.org Is a Contender

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Microsoft has unwittingly admitted that OpenOffice.org is a rival, by launching a three-minute video of customers explaining why they switched to Microsoft Office from OpenOffice.org. Glyn Moody writes: 'You don't compare a rival's product with your own if it is not comparable. And you don't make this kind of attack video unless you are really, really worried about the growing success of a competitor. [Microsoft] has now clearly announced that OpenOffice.org is a serious rival to Microsoft Office, and should be seriously considered by anyone using the latter.'"

Comments

I predict more are going to jump ship from Microso

[Corporate Troll]

There is the price, but then there is the horrible Ribbon interface. I have yet to meet someone IRL who *really* likes it. I recently installed Microsoft Office 2010 to recover emails from a corrupted system (Needed to open PST files, copied the mails to an IMAP server. No more Office needed... That what Trial Versions are great for!). Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.

Interestingly, when installing 2010, it asked me whether I wanted to enable OpenDocument formats. I was torougly surprised by that. That's another admittance of Microsoft that OpenOffice is a treath.

Except...

[xtracto]

Except that MS should focus on LibreOffice now... didn't they got the memo?

Or is it because they know Larry Ellison hates Microsoft...

Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr

[xtracto]

Funny, I have yet to find anyone (except me...as I just hate it) in my workplace (research institute) who does not like the new ribbon interface.

Frankly, it comes over even more toyish, more "Please treat me as a dumb user". It's aggravating.

Well... that might be for your self aggravating ego; for the majority of users it means an interface that gets out of their way.

quoting from TFA:

After doing a little digging, we found that these quotes are actually from case studies and press articles from the last four years,

What I would really like to hear is equivalent quotes of companies who successfully migrated from MS Office to OO.o. Is there any? (no, not /. pseudonym-"in my office"-anecdotes, but real company names)

What is this Office of which you speak?

[Andy Smith]

I'm not an open source zealot, don't use Linux, have no particular dislike for Microsoft, but Office hasn't really been on my radar for a long time. I used Word for years, but when I got a new computer a few years ago it didn't come with Office installed so I downloaded OpenOffice to see what it was like. Never went back -- there didn't seem to be any point. I'm sure there are many, many things that Microsoft Word, Excel etc can do that OpenOffice Writer, Calc etc can't do, but personally I've never hit that hurdle. Office may still be required for some business tasks, but for my own business and personal use, OpenOffice will do me fine. Thank you to the wonderful people that made it and released it for free!

90% of the people don't use 90% of the features

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Any coder who has profiled his/her code knows that a few lines, a few functions use most of the CPU time. Same way of all the features you find in an office suite, some 10% of it gets used very very heavily and another 20% of it would play spoiler in interoperability. Rest of the features are essentially bells and whistles meant to be used as bullet points in presentations made to top clients by the salesmen.

Typically Microsoft would keep messing with file formats, binary blobs dumped into the files, fonts/menus etc in every release to keep increasing the "spoiler" features and increase costs to OpenOffice and other competitors who are trying to keep up with the interoperability.

I have not seen any new feature in the last 5 years in MsOffice that is a must have feature or a killer feature. And most of the core functionality that could be saved and restored in Office97 format cleanly in MsOffice is done equally well in OpenOffice. Though it won the battle in getting OOXML certified as another "standard" format, the battle raised the visibility of interoperability issues and a few customers started actually separating "microsoft compatibility" from "interoperability". So they are setting the default save format is Office97 even on newer versions to keep their escape avenue open.

Another important strategic mistake it made was ignoring the web based office tools. Microsoft knew there were millions of pirated copies of MsOffice is being used everywhere. It turned a blind eye to it thinking, "these guys would never actually pay for an office suite. If we crackdown they might go to OpenOffice. So let us keep them in the tent, as a way to deny market share to the competition". When the web based office tools started coming out, they saw it as a pathetic little pipsqueak not comparable to the full power of a desktop Office tool. But it siphoned off a large portion of the bootleg users who were looking for a legal option to do simple editing without having to pay for a full price MsOffice suite. Now compatibility and interoperability with these web office tools is an issue and it is tying down Microsoft. It is not able to play the usual, "make enough changes to the file formats and the api and the look and feel and leave enough bugs in there to make everybody look bad compared to the defacto standard microsoft ".

Finally the software costs have soared. It used to cost 50$ for MsWord and 1900$ for a desk top in 1995. Now it is 100$ for a decent desktop and 300$ for MsOffice (more if you want these ultimate, professional versions). The hardware has become very powerful and a virtual machine running an WinXP 2005 image in a protected sandbox actually runs faster than the original machine it shipped with. People are recyling their old Microsoft Windows licenses and Office licenses using VMware.

I think Microsoft will still milk a few more billions of dollars from MsOffice. But it is not going to grow as fast as it did. If they suspend all new development on it and just milk it for profits, they might actually make more money than trying to add more bells whistles and hidden mines and bombs to thwart interoperability.

Re:Change names just as it's getting popular

[maztuhblastah]

Sun owned the trademark before, it didn't hinder development then.

Oh yes, it absolutely did. Sun proved to be a major hinderance to the development process -- so much so, in fact, that a fork was created and actually became the go-to choice for some Linux distributions.

It was called go-oo, and if you've installed/used "OpenOffice" in Debian, Ubuntu, or a few other distros, you actually used Go-OO without realizing it.

Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr

[q-the-impaler]

My office of approx 50 people is about 50/50 OO.org and MS Office. The more technically-minded people took to OO.org. We still save in the MS format for compatibility. For the most part, the MS Office users have not migrated simply because they "think" it's going to make their jobs harder. There have only been a handful of incidents where there was a compatibility issue. Culturally, the two camps feel they are superior to each other, so it is an interesting social experiment and mimics the dichotomy you see on /. posts.