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Forrester Research Shows Steep Decline in Free Office Suite Stats
An anonymous reader writes that although many Linux users (and others) are at home with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, typical organizations are as addicted as ever to MS office formats. In 2011 13% of organizations had OpenOffice variants installed on some computers. Today that number has dipped to 5% according to Forrester Research. ... The poll included [shows totals] over 100% as many organizations have multiple versions of offices installed. Also surprising, Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it even though EOL for Office 2003 ends with XP on the same date! The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction with Google Docs and Office 365 which are not so tied to Windows on the client."
This isn't really a survey of businesses, just people who buy Forrester Research products.. I wouldn't say it's a representative sample of much of anything.
I wanted to read the full report. You can too if you go here:
http://www.forrester.com/Market+Update+Office+2013+And+Productivity+Suite+Alternatives/fulltext/-/E-RES102262
$2495 for a fucking survey? Get fucked Forrester. Now there's no way for me to verify if the survey is legit or not.
No there isn't any such possibility. You can export your data eg. from Excel as a read-only view but you can't export from Office 365 to anything. Office 2010 "is supported now" but it won't be forever, you can't use OpenOffice or similar to access your O365 content.
Adobe right-out says their cloud solution is not backwards compatible with their desktop products, once you convert you're stuck in it. Microsoft says "Although the full Office applications go into 'reduced-functionality mode,' you can still use them to read and print your Office documents."
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Well you can blame that whole debacle on Oracle. As another responder said, they were going to close-source OpenOffice and only have some shitty "lite" version for Free, and as a result, all the devs quit and forked the project. This isn't a bad thing, it's one of the big strengths of open-source software: if some shithead gets control of the project (e.g., Oracle or David Dawes) and does something unacceptable, other interested parties can fork the code and continue development instead of having to start from scratch. The only downside is they can't forcibly take over the name, so they have to come up with a new name, which may or may not be as catchy or memorable. "LibreOffice" is a little odd-sounding to the ears of an English speaker, but can you come up with anything better?
Adobe right-out says their cloud solution is not backwards compatible with their desktop products, once you convert you're stuck in it.
Huh? Adobe's "Cloud" is just a stupid marketing term for their subscription service. The only thing that is remote is a couple of gigs of storage you get to synch your application settings and to act as a half assed Dropbox clone. The applications are run locally. And most of the Creative Suite applications are pretty backwards compatible for at least two or three versions. That is the same problem that everybody has - software developers have this annoying tendency to try to improve their products which occasionally means that files created in older software will have to be changed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Not quite. The Oracle-paid devs stayed working at Oracle (until they fired them all six months later), but most of the non-Oracle and non-IBM contributors got up and left - that is, the people who'd spent ten years giving OpenOffice a public reputation at all. Then Oracle threw it to IBM to do Apache OpenOffice, which is ridiculously behind in development (and is now wondering on its mailing list how on earth it can actually get any outside developers interested). (AOO partisans will deny both points, but those links are to the Wikipedia articles, which have ridiculous quantities of citations to this effect.)
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