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OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @05:53AM from the imaginary-markets dept.

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.)

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Re:Troll... by icebike · 2013-02-12 06:41 · Score: 5, Interesting

This.
It's been years since most people ever saw any training on MS Office, if ever, and the sands have shifted under their feet. It has become more obtuse every release.
At work we switched totally to Office Libre, and haven't looked back. There is a wealth of How To information on line, making the training available on par with anything Microsoft provides.

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Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Re:It is a good alternative to Microsoft Office by Belial6 · 2013-02-12 06:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

I would go farther than that and say that Libre Office has 100% of what the typical user needs. Google Apps has 99%. The Office App requirements haven't really changed much over the last 15 years. The last must have word processing feature MS added was real time spell checking. My accountant pal couldn't get buy without Excel, but the typical user isn't even coming close to bumping their head on the OO/LO spreadsheet.

The one thing MS does still have on OO/LO is that it looks prettier.