Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office
rbowen of SourceForge writes with an interesting way to look at the value of certain free software options: "Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 has averaged 138,928 downloads per day. That is an average value to the public of $21 million per day, as calculated by savings over buying the competing product. Or $7.61 billion (7.61 thousand million) per year." (That works out to about $150 per copy of MS Office. There are some holes in the argument, but it holds true for everyone who but for a free office suite would have paid that much for Microsoft's. The numbers are even bigger if you toss in LibreOffice, too.)
...people are downloading it for free so they're not necessarily paying customers...
Except that saying OpenOffice or LibreOffice are as good as Microsoft Office is false.
If you had to pay for it, you wouldn't see that amount of downloads because it really isn't worth it.
I'm not sure if I would have understood what a billion was without that.
how many would have bought either if both charged...smells of MAFIAA accounting
Really? That's so much easier to understand than $7.61 Billion
A download is not a sale says Slashdot when the RIAA uses it for damage assessments. This "story" is nothing more than a calculation that a liberal arts major could do (with a calculator) in a minute or two. Why is this on Slashdot?
If was to cost even $10, what would the download rate be?
Try anything that's currently free on the internet, add a small charge, and watch the DL rate plummet.
OO is only acceptable since it is free. If someone was making money off of it, then they'd be expectations for things a bug fixes and support and in no time it will cost $150, and get a bad rap in comparison with some other free product.
... the Apache foundation is taking hints from the copyright lobby?
How many people would download OpenOffice if Microsoft Office was free?
It's nowhere near a drop-in replacement for the complete MS Office suite. It's fine if you just need to type up a letter quickly, but virtually none of those downloads can be considered a lost sale for MS Office Pro.
Utterly retarded. Next you'll be comparing Tux Racer downloads to the latest Forza game.
Every year or so Microsoft and the BSA roll out an updated report on the financial cost of software piracy. They make a similar argument, that someone who uses a pirated copy of MS Office would have otherwise bought an MS Office license. So they estimate the loss to the economy as # pirated copies * retail price of MS Office.
So it is interesting, and a bit of poetic justice, to apply that same logic to show the value of open source in the economy.
Certainly one could quibble with the exact figures, but it does show that the impact of open source is huge. But we already knew that, right?
It's free-ish and fully compatible.
Openoffice is just too slow, on my Linux box I use google sheets and gnumeric.
I've not gone back to Microsoft Office since switching to the Open Office (and other open source office apps) for nearly 10 years now and not one day do I miss it. I've helped many business and people switch to it. Whatever proprietary features that are needed in Microsoft Office, at least in my experience, is too minimal to justify the extra cost when a little bit of googling can basically make Open Office (or Libre Office) do whatever you want it to do. There are even some things that I can't do in Microsoft Office and had to use Open Office for (including repairing damaged Microsoft Office files). So to each their own, if you need the features of Microsoft Office, more power to you. I'm sure many here though will chime in that for the majority of users, Open or Libre Office have 99% of what the typical user needs.
Perhaps they would rather pirate MS office?
This is the same argument the RIAA makes with respect to losses due to piracy. People here regularly reject it as nonsense. Just because the context is different doesn't make it right.
"Microsoft Office worth $0 per day if it were OpenOffice" would be better. And wouldnt had to be a money loss. Services, support, personalization and so on around it, specially on how widely is deployed, could still do quite a profit, and the same should work for Open/Libre office too.
My daughter has been complaining all week that she is forced to use MS Office at school, she much prefers open office.
How many people would download cracked versions of Microsoft Windows if Linux were free?
A short list of things that don't exist in OpenOffice, not to mention integration with Sharepoint, SQL Server, Outlook, and so on and so forth.
OpenOffice is great unless you work in a large office with a complex workflow, and need it to do large office with complex workflow types of things.
How many people download or use Open Office because it is free?
Probably a large percentage of them since that's one of it's redeeming features. Now if OO had the same price as MSOffice, I bet that number would drop dramatically.
If you take the product acquisition cost out of the equation you're now left with acquisition costs which might not be in OO's favor.
Cost to retrain people
Cost to migrate existing systems/processes/applications to OO
Support costs (IT, support vendors etc..)
$150/seat might not be much if you have business critical applications like telephony/voice/chat that are integrated in with your office suite.
I bought an Office for Mac 3-pack for about $125. That's not exactly the same as $150 each. I'm not a Microsoft fan but I do try to stay credible when possible.
I would buy the real Office... I wouldn't pay half that for Open Office. Most of the reason people DL Open Office is that it is free. I dare say they wouldn't have 1% of their download numbers if it was $150 a pop. Propaganda post. Not that I don't support the OO effort, but this is about as good an article as a Fox News report.
This comparison makes absolutely no sense at all... Raising the price would lower the download count big time so it'd never be worth anywhere close to $21 million/day.
Currently people will take it for free, but only if you had an inkling of what you could sell it for would you be able to figure out what people are saving. Guaranteed if it cost $150 (same as Microsoft Office), that would make a lot of people either skip Open Office altogether or buy the common Microsoft brand.
I would even argue if it's free, looking at download count as a metric is almost meaningless. It's less likely that you buy and never use a product like Office, but I'm sure a boatload of those downloads are never even installed, or used.
I haven't bought a copy of office since 2006 or so. Openoffice and then Libreoffice have filled my needs nicely since then. I have friends and co-workers that are content to just use Google Docs. I could see if you're one of the small percentage of people that use some obscure feature only available in the M$ product, but for most people the free alternatives are perfectly fine.
You think that the average slashdot user is not equipped to appreciate billions?
And while the free Office products are sufficient for most people's normal use (i.e. homework),
That's a subtle troll. Well done.
I love how you dismiss everyone who doesn't need vastly complex features (LO has some pretty involved ones) and their work by comparing it to nothing more than schoolwork.
If you need more complex features on a semi-regular basis, it's worth paying the price (but if all you do is type in text and change the font, stick with free).
I'll clue you in on something from the world of "real work"(tm) where people do "real things" for "money" which makes it much more important than "schoolwork": almost noone knows how to use word beyond changing fonts and typing text.
Actually this is one of the things that aggravates me about people who refuse to conemplate the idea of moving to another system because "they know word": almost always they don't even know how to use it beyond the absolute basics.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
There are some obvious problems...
1. It is free. If it costed $150 per download the numbers would obviously be quite different.
2. How much of this is the same person upgrading a current version or reinstalling on a new computer? If it were office this activity would not register as a new purchase it would be closer to inserting the installation DVD.
3. OpenOffice is not feature competitive with MS office. While it does not necessarily need to be to be in order to be relevant and useful to a great many people... for $150 it actually kind of does.
I have tried Open Office several times, and the startup and interactive operation are decidedly slower. Therefore, the accumulated loss of time over the life of the product should also be considered.
It is unfortunate that this is the case. However, whether it is the use of Java or poor quality and development control, Open Office has always been significantly slower than Microsoft Office, and every attempt I have made at using is (at least 3) has resulted in an immediate uninstall.
"Except that saying OpenOffice or LibreOffice are as good as Microsoft Office is false."
Maybe, but it's not that simple. Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice/LibreOffice have many weird quirks.
Last week I tried to copy some text using the latest version of LibreOffice from one place to another, and the last sentence of what I copied was always made bold.
People say not to use the latest version of Microsoft Office if you have a document longer than about 30 pages, because then the formatting will be unstable.
A major problem is that Microsoft has, at present, a virtual monopoly. Once a large population has learned and accepted the quirks of Microsoft Office, it is difficult to get them to learn the quirks of something else.
We humans have not been very good at taking care of ourselves, apparently because those in power rarely have any technical knowledge, on any interest in learning. We need governments to put money into supporting a free office suite. We need legislation against proprietary file formats.
Microsoft is, in my opinion, very abusive. Customers of Microsoft pay close to a full price for new versions of software, even though many issues are not fixed. That can go on forever. Companies with virtual monopolies make more money if there are bugs and insufficiencies and proprietary file formats, because then customers have a reason to "upgrade".
There is a HUGE, fundamental problem, rooted in history. Originally, there were two kinds of programs, "word processors" and "page layout" programs. Only page layout programs allow sufficient control over how a page looks. Microsoft Office is a word processor. Microsoft Office does not have the necessary kinds of controls to take full control over the appearance of pages.
Adobe InDesign, for example, has the necessary controls, but, in my opinion, Adobe is a very badly managed company, and the InDesign user interface is poorly designed. Apparently Adobe has abandoned Framemaker and Pagemaker. Adobe software is extremely expensive.
It would be less expensive for everyone if governments paid to fix the problems of OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and that became a worldwide standard, open-source Office suite. That's what governments are for, to advance the common good. (Not killing people and destroying their property.)
It's just hard for me to give up Outlook. I know, it's lame. I DID download Open Office, but went back to my 10-year-old MS Office 2003 software... until MS released office on subscription. $99/year for up to five PCs/Macs/Mobiles. So numbers change again depending on how often you upgrade non SaaS productivity software. I waited a decade last time, but I like the subscription price so I'll stick with MS for now.
Some holes? It's an argument that consists of nothing but hole. Pointing out actual holes would be missing the forest for the cellulose molecules.
"OpenOffice is really popular, and millions of people use it." That's all you had to say. If you felt the need to speculate to earn your blog hits, you could add, "Perhaps there's a way to monetize it, though obviously as with everything else open source that's fraught with difficulties, which I shall now recite as if they were novel observations."
Counting the full value of a paid product as the "value" of a free download: Reprehensible and dishonest if you're talking about "pirated" software, music, or movies. Totally acceptable and obviously fair for open source projects.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Because clearly, every single download is a lost sale. There are no aborted downloads. Everyone who downloads Open Office is using and never uses another Office product (free or otherwise).
Why do we have to stoop to the level of Hollywood or the BSA? What a steamy pile of crap.
There are people worth more than 21 million on Youtube in theoretical dollars. Maybe one of them can just buy Office from MS outright.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I would correct that, its not worth 21million a day until they get a few things straight. It's not quite worth it if you want to copy and paste graphs between the spreadsheet program and the word processor. It's not worth it neither for its compatibility issues with more intricate docxs nor for lack of new collaboration features. Yea, its worth something, but they have a ways to go to be worth 21 million a day.
Yeah, right...
And those other people said every pirated copy is a lost sale...
If they charged the same as MS, how many copies would they sell? My guess is none. Half the price of MS? Some but not everyone. 10% of MS obviously more but again not everyone.
With OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) even the most minor of updates REQUIRES a full download.
Apparently writing a simple update API is beyond the scope of the project (or skill set of the programmers - take your pick).
So assuming that each download is a NEW user (and therefore counts as if they were buying a commercial office suite) is complete bullshit.
$21 million in retail price savings is easily blown on I-T consultant costs to setup an OpenOffice system, train the users, and respond to their never-ending help requests.
The truth is, the cheapest office workflow is on iPad. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers cost $10 each, run on all your iOS devices, have only the features that 90% of users need and want and understand, require almost no training, and run great for 10 hours straight on an iPad mini in your coat pocket. These are apps in which you get a ton of work done. And Keynote is by far the best presentation client in the world. Almost every world class speaker uses Keynote, for example Al Gore, Tony Robbins, and everyone at Apple.
If you can function as your own I-T consultant, then by all means, OpenOffice away. That is great for you. But the idea that OpenOffice should be inflicted on the long-suffering office worker is at best nerd elitism, a kind of father-knows-best attitude, and at worst is an ad hoc conspiracy to increase the number of I-T consultant jobs.
Am I the only one who thinks these large, monolithic office suites are a dying breed? I could be wrong, but it seems like Google Docs is the wave of the future. If I didn't work disconnected to the Internet usually that seems like it would be an ideal solution for a company. Come to think of it don't they have a version that you can run on a local network?
Yes, it has fewer features, but it's catching up. For the large majority of even corporate documents it can work. Easier sharing, no more worrying about compatibility, no separate installs, it seems like a winner as the features start to catch up.
I found OpenOffice to be better than Microsoft Office because OpenOffice doesn't waste resources by have a paperclip talk to me. But I'll admit I was happy when Sun was still in the picture.
I use OO at the office for important various forms of CSV-style (though not always comma-separated, often it's a pipe etc) data.
It tends to work better in Excel in that if you have a bunch of stuff in your data file that's within a column but separated by a carriage-return, then you end up with a cell having several items on different lines.
In Excel, trying to import the same data file just crams all the data together in the cell (no line separation).
I sometimes build references of servers/group membership, with the inner cells being group members on a given server. This comes out much nicer in OO. For others stuck on Excel, it does keep the proper formatting when exported to XLS.
That would likely depend greatly on how much it actually costs.
I've purchased a few "Office" (Word processor/spreadsheet/etc) apps on Android (which generally cost a fair bit more than your standard Android app/game).
If you were to explain to OpenOffice users that Oracle laid off all the programmers before handing the trademark to Apache, and their new team is legally unable to accept changes made by LibreOffice, more people would try LO. That disclaimer is currently not on the Apache website. It would also be a useful warning if they listed all the features missing from LibreOffice. The current full list is already mind-blowing (4.0, 3.6, 3.5, 3.4, 3.3), and they are just getting started (Easy hacks, GSoc).
I would submit that even considering how bloated the codebase to office is, it is better than the Open/Libre/[other derivative prefixes/first names] -Office in that it gets things done in a reliable and expected way, while the FOSS suite has very basic annoyances and errors that, for many people expected some better plumbing and polish, are unacceptable. Take errors like OpenOffice saving back-ups to temp files that are overwritten when the program starts: this is "boring" stuff that MUST be fixed, but forever wasn't (isn't? I stopped caring or following and just got MS Office to get shit done) because it is boring, they have other features to implement, there's work to make it run on new Java interpreters besides the official one...
Stuff that should just work, e.g. creating headers and footers, endnotes, changing styles throughout a document...don't work well at all; controls over these things are lacking horrendously...basically, it's junk with too many hack/work-arounds to be immediately useful for all but the most basic of tasks.
But then again, plenty of people just need uber-simple abilities, and they are being saved significant sums. I use Calc period because I find Excel unstable (after some MS Windows update screwed something), and for basic input of data into rows and columns for human consumption and orderly display, it's great: this means I don't have to shell-out for an upgrade on the next version of Excel that I wouldn't use for much more. Yet there is an opportunity cost: learning to use and gaining then sustaining familiarity with a de facto standard that everybody and their mother (including major Open Source promoters like Google) requires to hire anybody.
What is really needed is disciplined organizations--for profit or otherwise--to carefully and strategically develop these softwares, and not in the interest of a given or specific company to the exclusion of others.
Anyway, I write this stuff because...it's what gets at the issue of making this FOSS suite (and versions thereof) truly and widely beneficial with few opportunity costs to its use. There are other considerations that are needed; like increasing consistency, not removing "redundancy" when that means "exposing access to features from various directions that customers may expect so they don't have to learn one specific way of doing things that isn't necessarily intuitive to them",and "making it more intuitive for people in general, with behaviors that can be trusted/expected", and in general increasing actual reliability of supposed abilities that don't really work, they're just there so the makers can say they are there. This would also mean departures from some things that Word does.
I think anyone even semi-familiar with software development and different capabilities of different suites can see ways to start making up for deficiencies, correcting unwelcome behavior, increasing reliability, exposing more ways to control existing and means of control for features that should be there but aren't. Yet...it doesn't seem to happen. A really simple step can be elucidated with this question: why, with the bloat that WYSIWIG often puts into documents, and strange mark-up they make resulting from the fact they have to guess at what a user intends based on algorithms making assumptions, which often causes the editor to see in-line elements as broken into different paragraphs, evinced by things like styling them differently, doesn't every such editor have a "view mark-up" feature (which also lets you edit it by hand) in the way Corel WordPerfect does? This applies to MS Office just as well: ever get that annoying frickin' issue that it drops a line from one page to the next "just because", when the line wouldn't be in a margin if staid on the previous page, and you're desperate to cut your number of words to two pages and x number of words for college?
Anyway, enough rambling...
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
By the same logic, take the most expensive toll road in the US (think ~$1/mile on some privately run express lanes in California), the add up all the miles everyone in the US drives a day - wow, look at the tens of thousands of dollars the government is saving per car. I'm thinking a large percentage of people get more in "toll" worth from the government than they pay in income tax - 3 car family, 12K miles per year, $36,000 per year in toll benefits!
The counts appear to be based on downloads from Apache Open Office only. Adding in as some have, Libre Office downloads would increase the number - also true. But while I have used both Open Office and now Libre Office for a number of years, I and many more users are NOT included in either count! I have NEVER downloaded from either the Apache or Open Document Foundation sites. My software came from and is updated via my Linux distro. Add in all the Linux downloads and the install number used in his analysis is very under stated.
if openoffice were commercial proprietary software, it would be marked $4.99 in the bargain bin with the smashed jewel cases of DOOM II.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Microsoft's Home Use Program makes Office Pro a $10 download for many users.
The price goes up a little (and you'll likely be paying S&H on the media) if your employer has you based in some god forsaken outpost like the Pitcairn Islands.
Office 365 University is $80 for a four year subscription and two seat license. You'll need student ID but this is not the same product and dirt-cheap academic pricing you'll get from the campus-wide agreement.
Microsoft positions the MS Office suite as part of an office system that scales to an enterprise of any size and integrates solutions for the client, server and the web. Microsoft Office 365 for Health Organizations
It's a given that your home or small business accounting program will integrate with Office. The same can be said for any "productivity" app or resource you could name. If you are using MS Office at home it is because it is one of the standard tools of your trade or profession.
It is a semi-equivalent system.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You insensitive clod!
If by sh*t you mean the Ribbon then yes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I agree lack of marketing is a huge problem, that is what you meant right?
No, that's not what he meant.
But you knew that already, didn't you?
How many are upgrades since the operation of upgrading an install appears to be to download afresh. This means I've been counted as at least two dozen (possibly many more) people using the software, and I barely use ONE. That's per computer, currently I own two, and keep both reasonably updated.
I've at times had three different systems and so the numbers seem extremely suspect, and I'm a fan of OSS in general and LibreOffice (fork of OO.org) myself. I can't be the only one, so the numbers are almost certainly inflated by several thousand percent. Also, I would most certainly NOT have paid AT ALL for MS Office or any alternative since I really don't use 99% of the features so if there were no free alternative, I would still be using MS Works for Windows 95, and I'm not even fucking kidding, that's the last Office software I paid for.
No wait, I forgot, around 1998 I think I bought (or got a computer that came with) Lotus Notes or some such, so perhaps I would be using that. Mostly, what I do could be handled (on an MS Windows system,) by Wordpad, so I wouldn't pay jack-shit for Office, and if I were working with an installed Linux/Unix (Linux or FreeBSD, etc.) system, I would probably use VIM. No shit, I use VIM. It works, does what I need, and I know enough commands/key bindings to do what I need, and I know how to "$ man vi" and "/[command]"if I don't know how to do something.
So you can ignore the hype, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has been using OpenOffice since 1.something, and have been updating for years.
I understand LibreOffice just went 4.0, and there are supposedly a bunch of bug fixes and optimizations for start-up time and performance, so I guess you count me in for two more downloads, just realize that means I won't be using 3.x (whatever it is now) anymore once the updates are installed on my two systems. I am considering going to a dual-boot now that school is over, (just haven't gotten around for it,) since I need Windows for almost nothing now, (SolidWorks solidly failed to work under WINE for me,) so I can go back to Linux, and that means a THIRD install of LibreOffice. Don't count all of them.
So I can state confidently that that 21 million dollars a day figure is utter, absolute, 100% pure bullshit.
But how many if these are unique IPs? "5 million people install ms office each day. Almost half of them arent even just reinstalling!"
At home, all I have is LibreOffice. I used it through all of my time as a Computer Science major in grad school. The word processing and spreadsheet software was up to snuff for all the work I needed to do. The presentation software (Powerpoint equivalent), not so much. At work, I'm forced to use MS Office 2007/2010. I've been using it infrequently for a year but every time I see the Ribbon interface, I'm totally lost and frustrated. Doing things as simple as an Undo is a chore. I'll take LibreOffice over MSOffice any day, except when doing slide presentations.
If I didn't have OpenOffice, I probably wouldn't have paid for Word. At least not the latest version. I'd possibly find an ancient version, or find a cheaper rival. Maybe even gone for Wordpad. I don't need anything that has functionality much more complex than font styling, and possibly a spell checker.
Or I would have simply gone without. It's amazing how long I can go without needing to process words.
The assumption is each of those downloads are equivalent to a retail sale. Same BS argument pulled the MPAA, RIAA and so on. I wonder how many copies of StarOffice sold compared to the equivalent OpenOffice. That would be a ballpark estimate of how many people might pay for the product assuming it was for sale (e.g. a supported version).
> how many people actually continued to use Open Office and how many used it briefly, discovered that it is crap and downloaded a pirated copy of Microsoft Office.
And you know this somehow?
AccountKiller
Yup. And if I had wheels, I'd be a wagon.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
A) not many people pay full retail for office. B) lots of those downloads will be repeats or people who didn't keep using it. And will miss any larger organizations that download once and install many times.
100k + downloads is impressive. The dollar figure is just make up marketing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I download each version once, and install it on 16 computers.
And lots of people can get it for under $100.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
These.
Piss me off no end. Learn grammar and go back to Reddit.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
How can we stand idly by and allow OpenOffice to steal from Microsoft to the tune of $21M per day? I demand the American government put a stop to this grave injustice immediately.
Maybe I am in the minority here and showing my age, however, I actually owned/purchased a copy of StarDivision's StarOffice for OS/2 (StarDesktop?) and Windows back in the day. It was a half-way decent suite, and probably the best one I could get for OS/2 that ran consistently well. So, I think you could probably accurately guage OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice Sales based on the past sales of StarOffice.
The false equivolency of TFA is clearly a problem. Office is priced as it is, except for students, because it is a volume licensed product for business. Businesses/Governments pay for site licenses, seat licenses, etc. This probably covers all of their development costs on the product and then some. The retail versions are sold for gravy train purposes and priced at what the market will allow. That is why they can get away with selling to students for so little. OpenOffice or LibreOffice would have to be priced considerably less, and offer some pretty sweetheart deal for the folks in the CTO's office (think hookers) for it to get traction at this point. Is it doable, maybe. Microsoft did pretty much railroad WordPerfect, and Lotus123, but they leveraged their install base, existing sales force, ISVs, hardware vendor relationships, etc. Somehow the document foundation and apache probably don't have that much muster.
In any case, I use LO pretty exclusively, and only hit up PowerPoint when I get a pptx file with too much wizbang for Impress to handle. I usually simplify the ppt and then reopen in Impress. I donate to the document foundation so I guess that counts as paying.
Linux and other open source customers have shown the pay-what-you-want-or-even-nothing model works great.
If it were easy, I'd definitely kick in a couple bucks next time I downloaded OOo
Of course... I wouldn't really pay for MS Office.. I really only use it when my company/school/hardware vendor give it to me "free" under the Microsoft tax.
Pretty much use google docs/drive/whatever now anyway. When it has the feature I want.
As I said.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It's worth -$21 million per day in lost sales. Also you should probably say something about how open source software is bad for jobs and that it takes food out of the mouths of Microsoft developers and their families.
Also, when something bad happens like a war or a hurricane, you can talk about how the silver lining is that more jobs are created to deal with the situation. We must be always sabotaging what we have so that people can remain useful and be needed to rebuild things.
If you haven't figured it out yet the problem with GNU/Linux and 'open source' / free software isn't the price. It is technical people being cheap ass bastards and not recognizing the benefits to others and dare I say even themselves..
Buy from companies who are making a significant difference. ThinkPenguin is a perfect example of this. There the only company focused on hardware (for the desktop) that ships free software friendly hardware exclusively.
Or consider making a SIGNIFICANT donation (a few hundred to a few thousand minimally- or becoming a member) to the Free Software Foundation, LibreOffice, Trisquel (might not be your distribution of choice although is pushing the boundary of free software and 100% libre), or another free software project.
Office doesn't actually cost that much. I paid $11 via discounts through work.
What I hear is $21 million a day worth of developer jobs that don't exist. Annually that is around $750M -- or approximately 35000 high end jobs.
It's free to download so, literally, no buy-in from the customer. I've downloaded untold numbers of different OpenOffice distros and each time binned them shortly thereafter having had my suspicions confirmed - that it doesn't make the grade.
Maybe they should count active/activated licenses before making assumptions of value...
And what about the lost productivity trying to get OpenOffice to work correctly? My last encounter with the word processing program resulted in an endless fight with aligning bullets in a list. Never mind the wonky performance of spreadsheets and the lack of plugins for enhanced calculations.
Its great OpenOffice is free, because no one would pay for it given Google Docs is free and better and MS Office is simply superior.
I started using OpenOffice to print labels since Word would usually mangle them. Then I switched to using it mainly and now use LibreOffice after the Sun/Oracle SNAFU
In college, I bought Office 2007 for $10 through our subsidy program. I could have easily gotten by with Open Office, but at that price, why?
At work, I have Office 2010 on all my devices. I rarely use any specific MS Office feature, but my corporation provides it, so why not use it?
So lets say 10 years from now when all my MS Office DVDs are antiquated, I start my own business.
I'm no longer in school or part of a corporation and I need the variety of rich formatting features MS Office provides since I am doing everything on my own.
I would have to pay $150 for the software I previously always had access to, but never needed until now.
All that to say, if the majority of people get MS from work or school at next to no cost, and the rest pirate.
Why can't Microsoft lower individual purchasing costs when they're obviously making most of their money from massive enterprise purchases of MS Office.
Do they just like seeing my face when my parents tell me they once again purchases a full priced
copy of MS Office so they can type up store lists in Word and create the occasion budget in Excel?
I mean that's all it is right? It's a gimmick, no one in their right mind goes out and buys MS Office Full Retail unless they're incredibly ignorant or senile.
I literally feel like MS leaves the price super high just for the people dumb enough to pay it.
Saw sensationalist title, with non-news summary following it, in email.
Clicked expecting to see that it was posted by timothy. Oh look.
Another pile of crap Slashdot has published for some reason...
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"