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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.
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?
How many people would download OpenOffice if Microsoft Office was free?
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?
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.
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.
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.