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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."
So to avoid locking our data into a Windows-only proprietary format, we'll lock it into a Windows-centric Microsoft-owned cloud? Oh yeah, that's going to work much better.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I don't think that's the full reason for the decline, but it didn't help. At first we were pushing Open Office at work, and then one day we had to start pushing Libre Office. So, people would say "What's wrong with Open Office?" and then you say "It's complicated... blah blah blah." And then they say "Okay, we'll just use regular Microsoft Office then."
Office 2003 is alive kicking and screaming as almost 1/3 of companies and governments still use it
I still use Microsoft Office 2003 and the reasons are simple:
- It works. Creating a document today isn't any different today than it was in 2003 or 1983. You type stuff onto a page. I have yet to encounter a situation where Office 2003 can't do exactly what I need. Newer versions of Office simply add extra bloat.
- Microsoft's god awful "ribbon" which has rendered all newer versions of Office unusable.
- Office 2003 has none of Microsoft's "activation" bullshit.
Want to stop the decline? Make a version of LibreOffice or another FOSS odt/odt editor that works on my tablets.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Have you tried Office 2010? Try the ribbon for a week? Afterwards you will see you can preview changes with just a mouse hovering over items. Hit the alt key and you have smart tags showing all the shortcuts with it which is nice with a laptop.
Office 2010 is much better. I saw the research back then and was exciting to learn something new as real scientist had data to show it is better and statistics back them up with real usage. It is not Metro by a longshot or pushed by marketing folks unlike Windows 8.
Office 2003 is old and it is a horrible pain in the butt to get to a custom function and will be very insecure after April of next year. I do not want to go back to that release.
Want a reason to switch? How about file compatibility? You think the .docx of 2013 is compatible and a future manager will be able to read your resume in a few years when Office 2014, 2015, come out? Think again.
http://saveie6.com/
There, I said it.
I work with documents frequently.
The open source alternatives are not as good.
Further, pretty much anything can read/write to .docx format, which is XML-based, so you're definitely not locked in.
There's just a discernible difference in quality and when you're trying to make a good impression on the job, that's important.
Futurist Traditionalism
None of my clients use open source software, and it has nothing to do with Forrester.
The fact is, if your business is in an industry where you have to share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc), then you kind of have to stick with Microsoft Office. The free stuff just doesn't do a very good job of reading doc and docx formats (and spreadsheets are unusable if they have any macros in them). Yes, a company *could* go with free software and just take a little extra time with formatting and training, and it wouldn't be an issue for most of what they do.
But why bother? It's just easier and cheaper for them to buy Office and move on with actual work. For that to change, entire industries would have to change, or at least the biggest players in the industries would.
One of the failings of all these free Office suites is that they try to be MS Office and basically if they can be distinguished as being not office then they have failed. So my suggestion is to pretend that there are no existing office suites; what do people want to do? Then you move forward from there. A good start in that direction would be a product that I use called Bean. It is a very simple Mac word writing tool. The focus is on just writing words. It is fast to load, clean of interface, and doesn't do much in the way of formatting. Another good product is Scrivener; this product focuses on what you need when writing a complicated document such as a book.
Google docs isn't too bad and brings the whole cloud thing to the table fairly well but I just don't see your average document generating office drone begging their IT department to help them with the switch.
Here is a simple set of examples. Years ago I worked in an office where the secretaries used Word Processors. That is they used machines with big 8 inch floppies that could only do simple 80 characters per line word processing and print it to a printer that was basically a modified typewriter. In the office there was a shiny new IBM machine with Word Perfect and a sort of good quality dot matrix printer. The secretaries were super happy when I got it working and almost immediately were fighting over it. A few years later I witnessed secretaries demanding to upgrade to windows and Word for windows because it could make the new laser printers dance. The key there was that Word Perfect 4.2 for DOS liked to display things in 80 monospaced characters. But a laser printer could do around 132 characters per line and thus a WYSIWYG interface was a huge leap. Keep in mind that all of the above secretaries were very very good at using their previous systems and thus these switches were painful but there was something they wanted so they demanded it and learned it.
So fast forward to the present and present your average Office user with Open Office. What is the win for them? For most people there is only a loss as things like the bad dictionary, and the slightly different interface will just be a pain. Maybe the CFO is happy with the lowered cost of operating but that is not how you win the hearts and minds of the average user.
So the key to getting people to switch over to Open Source non Office environments it to offer them something that they really want. The reality is that they will give up many office features and put up with other pain if they are getting something super cool. So matching MS Office feature for feature is not needed in the winning product.
This is where I come up empty. As I say the simple products like bean are good enough for me. Maybe the solution lay in a cool way to accomplish the work presently being done in the MS office suite using your mobile? Something where all the existing might of MS doesn't get them very far. Plus something truly innovative would no doubt be initially dismissed by MS as "missing the point".