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Why Microsoft Is So Scared of OpenOffice

Posted by samzenpus on from the run-for-the-hills dept.

GMGruman writes "A recent Microsoft video on OpenOffice is naively seen by some as validating the open source tool. As InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues shows, the video is really a hatchet job on OpenOffice. But why is Microsoft so intent on damaging the FOSS desktop productivity suite, which has just a tiny market share? Rodrigues figured out the real reason by noting who Microsoft quoted to slam OpenOffice: businesses in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe that aren't already so invested in Office licenses and know-how. In other words, the customers Microsoft doesn't have yet and now fears it never will."

35 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. Obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This was obvious. Word has such domination in Western markets that an ad campaign against open office would be 100% gaurenteed to damage microsoft's market share in both short and long term. Having read the previous article, I thought it must have to do with Eastern Europe where open source alternatives are more widespread, otherwise I could only think that the genius behind this campaign had something against his employer; attacking its most valuable LOB.

    1. Re:Obvious by einhverfr · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Whether or not this is obvious, there's an interesting point here. This ad will be circulated far wider than its original target market. This suggests that this will help Open Source here in the US.

      Indeed, one of the key uses I have for this sort of thing is SELLING FOSS. My approach is to look at this carefully and determine how one can use it. While this is less useful than the old Get the Facts campaign, it does provide some fodder for FOSS consultants. First, the fact that Microsoft is attacking it is significant. Secondly, the problems discussed are real ones for some customers. Understanding the problems and how to avoid them is key to make a migration work. Saying "don't let this happen to you. Use MY services!" is a very powerful thing.

      Moreover it addresses a number of issues, including "who will fix it?" ("I will if you pay me to!")

      --

      LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
    2. Re:Obvious by scdeimos · · Score: 4, Interesting
      On the "who will fix it" I found this quote FTA interesting:

      "I need something I can rely on. If an open source based system breaks, who's going to fix it?" -- Jeff Cimmerer, Director of Technology, Pittsford School Districts

      The whole idea of Open Source is that it's open for anybody to fix it. If you've got the skills you can fix it yourself. If you're a business with a genuine interest in the FOSS you think is broken, but don't have the skills to fix it yourself, you can at least log a bug report if not hire someone to fix it for you if you consider it urgent.

      Yes, you can also log bug reports with Microsoft for their software. But you're still at the mercy of Microsoft to actually get it fixed - trawl support forums about Microsoft's ClickOnce deployment system for .NET Framework 2.0 or later and you'll understand that Microsoft is quite willing to acknowledge the presence of bugs (and anti-features) and, strangely, also willing to publicly acknowledge that they have no intention of fixing them. Ever.

      I've logged the same bug on Windows Find/Search since Windows NT 4.0 and yet it still isn't fixed in Windows Vista/7. (You can get search matches from unicode text files using the command line find tool, but Windows Find/Search cannot find those same matches - it only understands ASCII/ANSI test files.)

    3. Re:Obvious by ThePromenader · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Right on.

      Don't forget that MS owes its fortune to its 'educating' the western world to its products while it was an emerging computer market - but, different from today, users then had little choice - the 'first' (later, 'most popular') product out there is most likely to be learned first, a trend that led to the 'interoperability market lock' MS has over western users today. Emerging computer markets today, on the other hand, do have other choices: this is what scares MS, as if they can't use their initial 'educate, majority rules' marketing strategy that has worked so well until now, they will fail - and utterly. Today new users can and ~will~ compare products for their capabilities, and make the most economic choice. Throw into that MS' dear price and OpenOffice's 'free-ness' - and go figure. In short, for emerging markets, and perhaps for the first time in its history, MS can depend only on the performance of its product to justify its price.

      Which also brings into question our way of determining the 'value' of software - On one hand we have MS and its 'old market' values ("here's the tool, this is the price"), and on the other we have the Open Source movement giving their products out 'for free'. I see fault in both - the first depends on a consumer's 'tech ignorance' to take as much money as they 'can' from him (the software's price is not determined on how much work it took to create it), and the second... well, I see the value of the system as a whole (development, de-bugging, feature requests & updates), but I don't see how they can make money enough to keep it going, especially as it grows. So here as well, an emerging market user's choice is a confusing extreme: overpriced or free.

      So, if MS is trying to sell into a market where it doesn't already have inter-operability dominance, and there exists a similar product for free, I can see reason for their fear - especially before shareholders expecting continuously increasing profits: the western world is saturated with MS products already.

      --

      No, no sig. Really.

      ThePromenader
    4. Re:Obvious by 16K+Ram+Pack · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was working on a site that had a Sharepoint problem and there was a bug which was reported to Microsoft and open for like 6-9 months.

      This "corporate support" thing is nonsense. Some of the best support I've ever had has been on Wordpress, because you hit the forum and find someone who has had the problem before, delved into the code and worked out a fix. If I got stuck with something from Microsoft, I'd post soemthing on superuser.com or stackoverflow.com before I started talking to Microsoft.

  2. OpenOffice on Android mobile phones by G3ckoG33k · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The OpenOffice market share is not bad at all: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Market_Share_Analysis

    And, Ballmer has the right to be concerned about the 300 million pc market is eaten by both Apple and Linux:

    "I think depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more. And a point of market share on a number that's about 300 million is interesting. It's an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think, but we're very focused in on both Apple as a competitor, and Linux as a competitor."

    and

    I assume we're going to see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones. We'll see Google more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before. The seams between what's a phone operating system and a PC operating system will change, and so we have ramped the investment in the client operating system.

    And, OpenOffice runs on Android mobile phones: http://www.alwaysonpc.com/aboutOpenOffice.php. That is something for Microsoft to be sleepless about.

    OpenOffice on Android mobile phones. Mmmmmm. Sweet.

    1. Re:OpenOffice on Android mobile phones by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The only application that MS Office still has as a killer app is PowerPoint.

      Indeed, Powerpoint has probably killed more people than any other Microsoft application (Columbia's last crew, for example). I'm not sure that's an argument for using it though.

    2. Re:OpenOffice on Android mobile phones by Stratoukos · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The only application that MS Office still has as a killer app is PowerPoint. For presentations PowerPoint for Mac is still king in my book.

      Really? I'm not in a position to judge, since I'm not a heavy PowerPoint/Keynote user, but my experience is the exact opposite. I use Keynote maybe 5 times a year for presentations not longer than 10-15 slides and I've found Keynote to be much better for my needs. Since I don't require any of the advanced features, the aesthetics of the default templates and the fact that keynote behaves like a Mac application are enough for me to use it. Same thing with Word/Pages. Very casual user, so the little things won me over. Since I use spreadsheets much more heavily (no VBA though), Excel is the only application for which I favor MS Office over iWork.

      Just out of curiosity, what makes PowerPoint the killer app for you?

      --
      It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
  3. Classic "skills" FUD by Compaqt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The MS video features this gem: "New employees lacked OpenOffice.org applications' use skills that significantly increased employees' adaptation period and adversely affected their operational efficiency." -- Igor Gentosh, Head of Systems Integration Department, Kredobank JSC

    Uhhmm ... so is that the reason you went and changed the entire interface in Office 2007 to the ribbon? If anything OO preserves skill investments.

    OO is basically Office97+, which was a great version. OO is just fine for the non-templated letters that pass for "Office suite" use in most offices. Not that it doesn't have better templates (and page formats, too).

    The only major deficiency is the non user-friendly macro system.

    --
    I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
  4. Re:Open office != MS Office by SudoGhost · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The ONLY thing I've seen Office do better than Open Office is macros. I'm a huge D&D nerd, and HeroForge won't work with Open Office.

    But that's a very specific thing, and other than that I haven't come across anything, so I just don't sue HeroForge. That isn't accurate of the general population I'm sure, and others may find faults with Open Office that I haven't, but that's just my personal experience.

  5. Re:Microsoft talking smack business as usual by orin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Windows administrators are cheaper because Microsoft pursued a strategy of ensuring that there was a training infrastructure for their products. There is a whole ecosystem of books, online material and courses created by Microsoft to facilitate people learning their product. No such infrastructure exists for open source products. It may not even be possible to create such an infrastructure.

  6. Blood from a turnip. by zenwarrior · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The bottom line is whatever Microsoft says or attempts as a fear tactic, it won't make any difference whatsoever to a very large number of those consumers. They simply cannot afford Office at any price Microsoft would offer it--other than free. When you have no money, free (or theft*) is the only alternative. Given that reality, Microsoft is jousting at windmills and trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.
    * Might we next be seeing not-so-subtle threats in those emerging markets about using illegal copies of Office? Betcha we will.

    --
    /.'s Psychic-in-Residence: Psychic to the Geeks
  7. Re:Less piracy from by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Gimp used to be cool, 10 years ago. Now Gimp sucks, at least on the Mac. I can get better (if not more processor-efficient) functionality from Inkscape, also for free.

    It's amazing to me. Today's mac-version Gimp almost seems designed to make things difficult. 6 different select tools, and not one of them lets you just select a single object.

  8. Re:Less piracy from by Dhalka226 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And you would still be in the minority.

    I know a lot of people in their teens or twenties who are extremely interested in, shall we say, the visual arts. They love making music videos and video editing, logo design, website design, etc. One of them is finishing up a degree in marketing degree, the other is finishing up high school now and is already accepted into a design school, another is younger than them (friends of brothers etc) yet highly interested in web development. Never has the word "GIMP" entered any of their vocabularies. Never.

    OpenOffice they are familiar with its existence, which it still didn't stop them from, for example, going out and buying the Mac version of Office when they bought their cool new Macs a year or so ago despite recommendations from me that they could at least wait and get by with OO for a bit while their wallets recovered from the purchase. And I don't mean clicked the "Sure, sell me Office too!" box, I mean literally drove to the store and bought it. (I was visiting one of them at the time.)

    Yes, it's anecdotal but it's also real. They don't care about ideologies; they want to use the tools they will use as professionals, and that is determined by business and not their own inclinations. So long as kids (and schools) continue to look to business to see what they should be acquainted with, businesses will have a ready-trained new workforce and little incentive to move away from what they all know.

  9. Re:Open office != MS Office by Grey+Ninja · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The company I work at has Office installed on everyone's computer. I generally use Excel, since that's the default for spreadsheets on my PC (too lazy/apathetic to change it). However, whenever I have to deal with some complex data, I will always use Calc. Why?

    I will log a bunch of program output from my software (such as memory allocations), and I want a simple way of sorting them by file and line number, then I can see the ones that I really want. I could write a tool for this of course, but I would rather take an extra minute to do it by hand, as this doesn't come up that much. But importing arbitrary data (not comma separated but separated by words/spaces/newlines/various) is a pain in the ass in Excel. It involves saving it out as a txt file then importing. Calc will simply pop up a box asking what your delimiters are.

    I've never had Calc crash on me, and I honestly don't know what the problem is. In fact, I've never seen any reason to use Office over OpenOffice. Granted, I spend more of my day in Notepad++ than Office, but still. People keep citing macros, but that just seems like an abomination to me anyway. Good riddance.

  10. Comments by zeraeiro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Have you checked the comments on the right side here: http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/US/details/faaf9eb8-77c6-4bed-bc08-c069a7bfbb04 Let's tell MS what we think.

  11. Re:They should be... OpenOffice has 10%-20% by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm an average user. My office-related activities consist of writing letters, short papers, and making the occasional presentation. OO.O does all of this just fine, and I hence have no need to shell out $100 for an Office suite.

    You are not alone. You are in fact a long, long way from being alone.

    Depending on the geographic location, OpenOffice has been measured as being installed on between 10% and 20% of machines.

    Unless you call this "tiny", the OP has it wrong.

    This measured 10% to 20% share correlates quite well with the number of copies of openOffice that have been downloaded.

  12. Re:Quite frankly, OOo is damaging itself just fine by 0123456 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not written in Java. It requires Java for some optional features, but believe it or not, it's slow, buggy and heavyweight even without Java's help.

    I was actually amazed recently when I discovered that Open Office _wasn't_ written in Java because I'd always assumed that was why it seemed so slow at many things.

  13. Re:I'd be scared too by BrokenHalo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Scared is the word. From the TFA, apropos Microsoft's video ad (Silverlight or WMV if you please): "However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion."

    That is completely wrong.

    There is nothing subtle about it. Unless you consider being bludgeoned by someone screaming "Give Me All Your Money Or I'll Go Broke" subtle, that is. Pretty much every statement made in it is at best a half-truth, and more commonly an outright lie. This kind of hysterical trolling is the kind of thing we expect from the losing side in a political campaign, and it's an ugly look.

  14. Re:Switching from Openoffice to MS Office... by Mashiki · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Probably has more to do with the fact the OO adheres to the document creation standards, and MS Office doesn't. Much like MS refuses to adhere to the HTML/XML standards while every other browser does, or has +95% adherence. All that means at the end of the day is MS is creating a market by not following standards that they said they'd adhere to.

    Big shock.

    --
    Om, nomnomnom...
  15. Re:Less piracy from by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I went to an animation/film/design school. I know of one person who used an open source program instead of pirating or buying a student copy of the commercial packages. But he had been using it since Jr. High and is a ideologue--and even then he would admit it sucked for actual work but liked to poke at it and try to improve it in his spare time. And even he wouldn't touch Gimp with a 10 foot pole.

  16. Re:Switching from Openoffice to MS Office... by randallman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is and will be true for any two different programs using non-native (more so for proprietary) formats. Word Perfect -> Word. Word -> Open Office. Even Word '97 to Word 2007. You've hit on one of the reasons that standard formats are needed.

    However, if formatting is that important, consider if you should even be sending word processor documents. Maybe you should be sending PDFs for review. Or maybe you're doing something that requires desktop publishing software.

  17. Re:Open office != MS Office by 91degrees · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, I've used both. I don't consider Excel to be superior because that would suggest that it's actually any good at all. However, it loooks like the OO guys decided to clone every single annoyane and limitation of Excel (e.g. arbitrary table size limits, rubbish sort dialog). I seem to recall the Calc equivalents of Pivot tables being a bit rubbish too but perhaps they've fixed that.

    If anyone thinks they're equivalent, they only want to do trivial things with their spreadsheets. This is actually okay. Most people do. For most people Calc is perfetly adequate.

  18. Re:MS may not have much to worry about here by Richard_at_work · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sideline them ... how, exactly? Seriously, this time last year Oracle didn't have an office suite and now they have a fully featured, fully developed office suite with full copyright assignment. How often does that really happen? How many fully developed office suites are there in the world, especially ones where you can buy the fully copyright to?

    Oracle haven't been sidelined at all, they've barely started.

  19. Re:Open office != MS Office by abigsmurf · · Score: 1, Interesting

    (Abritrary high percentage pulled out my ass)% of people won't ever have to use the spare tire in their car. That spare tire is still vitally important to have though.

    It's all well and good saying "you probably won't ever use that feature" but at some point you may actually need it. Heck your job may be very specialised and one obscure feature that 'no one' uses makes your job much much easier. It's better to have a feature and not need it than to need a feature and not have it.

  20. Who will fix it? NOT Microsoft by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This idea that MS will come around to fix your broken Word install is so ludicrous, so totally beside the daily reality you have to wonder how it ever got started.

    When you buy from MS, you are NOT buying from IBM. Yes, when you buy from IBM you buy a large amount of support (how large? just see how many of your accounts drop dead when the bill arrives). When you buy from MS... oh wait. You DON'T. You buy from Dell and your support comes from India and is "re-boot and re-install". MS barely acknowledges security threats that affect ALL its customers. The idea that they will an issue that only affects you on demand is insane. They won't. Never have, never will.

    Open Source, you got the code and developing software is NOT all that expensive. Not for companies that develop aircraft or build oil rigs. And you can coast on their efforts. And that SCARES MS. They live not just on the myth that they will fix your problems, but that software is hard and only a billion dollar company can do it.

    I have had a couple of discussions with open source developers about issues in beta code. NEVER EVER had a talk with a MS employee about the countless issues with MS software.

    Where is this mythical MS support? Is it the great manual that comes with Windows or Office? Is it the direct line to MS development or at least bug testing? Nah... it is through Dell or countless forums. Sure, most Linux support is through forums as well, but at least forums run by the Linux distro and I don't pay through the nose for my Linux software.

    And you know the strange thing. OpenOffice has become accepted, the days when you HAD to run MS office are gone at least in my field. Now the un-official company policy is that all documents must be readible by everyone and this includes people running Linux and OSX without jumping through hoops.

    This means using older formats and not all the bells and whistles and lockin of MS products... and that scares MS. A non-upgrading Word user is almost as bad as a FOSS user. MS gains the majority of its income from the endless upgrade cycle. It NEEDS this money to fund its numerous loss making programs. If that revenue stream dries up, it will loose the status of must have stock and have to actually economize on its spendings. That would very quickly end MS as it is. No more Vista's or ME. These failures would then wrack the company like they would a real company.

    MS fears Opensource. Not because it is better or even equal in its own eyes, but because it is good enough and an awful lot cheaper. And once enough switch, then its lockin breaks down for everyone else. No more "Needs Office 2050" if companies run into "resend that file, can't read it" to often.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

  21. Re:Less piracy from by abigsmurf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Some of the basic bugs and design issues in GIMP (for Windows) have me tearing my hair out.

    -Disappearing mouse pointer in the save dialogue when I have to click a random area to get it to re-appear (and hope I don't press a button doing so).
    -When I've selected the file type in 'Save As' that's the file type I want to save as, I shouldn't have to retype the extension.
    -Restoring from the task bar or switching between windows is a buggy mess. Sometimes the GIMP window appears/goes to the front, most of the time it fails to do so.

  22. Re:Less piracy from by digitig · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You obviously haven't been pirating all that much. I could have the latest version of MS Office on my PC in less than 5 minutes, fully operational. Pay for software that's worth its price.

    If it isn't worth the price, why would you bother pirating it instead of using OOo?

    --
    Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
  23. Re:Why computer training never actually IS by neumayr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Okay, I'm not reading this text right now, sorry.
    But I don't blame the users or the teachers for this fact. As a teacher, I was often met by people being so intimidated that there was no way to get any fundamental concepts into their minds. Same as with teaching math really, only worse - people can avoid solving math problems a lot better than avoid using computers.
    And I can understand their confusion. Many of the conventional UI concepts don't make sense, and if I didn't grow up with computers and those concepts I probably wouldn't get it either. What I feel is needed is not a better way to teach those (imho broken) concepts, but better user interfaces.

    --
    Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
  24. Re:Open office != MS Office by dropadrop · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Which is a good point. For some reason our company has 10's of photoshop licenses, mainly for people who just resize pictures occasionally. It would be very easy to do with gimp "but it's always been done with photoshop". Probably the main reason Adobe does so little to fight against piratism - if people where accustomed to using gimp at home (due to not being able to buy photoshop) most would find it adequate. Sure there will be some who are actually requiring the features in photoshop, but not very many.

  25. Re:Open office != MS Office by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not true. For a large percentage of Microsoft's customers, MS Office 97 did everything that they needed. The only reason that these people upgraded was that people kept sending them files from newer versions of Office that they couldn't open. I worked with one company that ended up upgrading over a hundred thousand users from Office 97 about five years ago for exactly this reason - they didn't need any new features other than the ability to open files that they had been sent.

    If OpenOffice becomes more popular then ODF becomes more popular and this makes it much harder to force people to move to Office 2015 to support its new file format. Sure, a few people will need the new features, but a lot of people use Word as a glorified typewriter - they don't need even a fraction of the features that the current version has. OpenOffice can quite easily skim these users away from Microsoft's market share. It doesn't have to be as good as the latest MS Office to do so, just as good as the last version that added a feature that they use.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  26. Re:Not really by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    you call those things special features? export to web?

    don't get me wrong, excel does better, than the office version but analysis is not an area where excel does better than anyone else.

    the rest of the openoffice suite is substantially better than the MS setup, and most importantly does not have a ribbon interface.

  27. Re:Open office != MS Office by gorzek · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thanks for pointing this out. I was wondering how so many people were bitching about this "missing" Excel feature. You can open any arbitrary text file in Excel, and yeah, it won't ask for delimiters--because it has the "Text to Columns" menu that lets you specify delimiters, fixed length fields, etc.

    OpenOffice can do the same, for that matter. The two programs are pretty much equivalent in terms of that little feature.

    (I say that as someone who prefers OO in general, though.)

    --
    Check out my world simulator thingy.
  28. Re:Open office != MS Office by design1066 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Word perfect had better WYSIWYG functionality that MS office at half the price. MS did the same thing to them they are doing to LO. They are intentionally programming incompatibilities within their software and using the monopoly power to lock other vendors out.

    You seem ok with this?

  29. Re:I'd be scared too by rwa2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Meh, I used OO.org for some graphs for my master's thesis and for work. Had lots of instability with graph formatting and consistent crashes with drop-down menus a few years back. Had to struggle to manually install the latest bleeding edge OO.org (3.2 at the time) that finally addressed some of these issues... the versions packaged for my distros were a tad too old. So I understand when people knock at OO.org .

    I can see where M$ is threatened by OO.org becoming the de-facto office suite, though. There's a lot of extra features (that are actually useful, like collaborative "track changes") in MS Office and some nice mail merge wizards that I still haven't seen in OO.org. But most people who do office style work have no idea how to use those features, and think I'm some kind of genius when I point out how they can simply autofilter a spreadsheet to generate different reports from one set of data.

    For my part, I do little office-style work and still prefer LyX / LaTeX + gnuplot/octave + make for the occasional serious report generation I do. WYSIWYG is fine for quick and dirty, but gets very cumbersome and unmaintainable after a few chapters.