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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...
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?
Except that "as good" is a very slippery term. There are certain, very specific, use cases where MS Office is clearly "better". If one encounters enough of those cases, the value provided by the pay-to-play tools is higher. Outside of that, your assertion is false. In other words, I use OpenOffice (Symphony, actually) every day. It does everything I need it to do. Being free, it is of almost infinitely higher value than MS Office. But that's just me.
As for TFA, you're using RIAA math here, guys. That's just stupid. Downloader != potentially-paying-customer. At least get that part right.
It's free-ish and fully compatible.
Openoffice is just too slow, on my Linux box I use google sheets and gnumeric.
No English-speaking country uses the long scale anymore; it's only pointed out by pedants in the comments section of Slashdot stories.
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.
"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.
How many people would download cracked versions of Microsoft Windows if Linux were free?
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.
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.
but for most people the free alternatives are perfectly fine.
That's the operative word. For many large corporate installations, all sorts of macro suites, plugins, weird data feature usage, etc, are all wound up in being MS Office specific. It's too entrenched to toss it for another platform.
(in before "corporations are people LOL")
One of those very specific use cases is called a "spreadsheet", which Calc handles with the grace of a drunk puppy.
[citation needed] ...as "a spreadsheet".
OK, let me save you some time. You're going to cite one of the very specific use cases I mentioned. "A spreadsheet" is not one of those cases. I use Calc more than any other app in the suite and it works just fine, for me,
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are certainly better than Microsoft Office on Linux. I can't even get Microsoft Office to work using Wine and VirtualBox.
Yeah, LibreOffice Calc has an array check box for operations that return arrays. Nothing like Excel's intuitive F2 Cntl-shift-enter.
You are trying to apply the logic of a business to a non-profit. No wonder it doesn't make sense to you.
An analogy: If a group of doctors volunteer their time and work in a clinic and treat the poor, pro bono, are they not entitled to claim the value that they provide is based on their normal rate? Same question for lawyers who provide pro bono counsel to those who cannot afford it. Can't they claim the value they produce per their normal hourly rates?
I don't anyone would argue that the value is zero because their "customers" would not be able to afford paying that rate. That is irrelevant, since no one is asking them to pay that rate. It is a charitable act. It is a social contribution.
The article merely applies the same logic to professionals in the engineering field, whose public service is in the form of open source software.
"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.
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.
Gotta admit that I agree on that. I've been using some Office variant since the mid-90's, and about 6 months ago got upgraded to Office 2010 at work.
The ribbon took a little adjustment, but I've found that the "it puts the most commonly used features in the ribbon" argument generally holds true. A few times I've had to dig a little bit to find the particular formatting option I was looking for, but generally an F1+search, or a google search will bring me right to it within a few seconds. In general, I've found that the stuff I use most commonly is easier to find, and often right there in the main ribbon.
All the people who whine about the ribbon seem to be bitching mostly because "they changed something," not because it is actually worse, in practice. If you're an IT professional, and you've spent more than about 15 minutes of your life "adapting" to the Office ribbon, you're probably getting way too hung up on a cosmetic change.