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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."
A market with two companies is still better than a market with only one. And a market with two products is not as efficient in the short term, but it is healthier in the long run.
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.
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.
.. and at risk of being modded a Troll and losing any rep.
Office 365 is a good piece of software. Okay, so it's complete shite to use but it's not just an office suite, it's a platform on which you can run your business. IMO for the first time in 20 years, Microsoft has actually come up with a good piece of software. They've certainly leveraged their proprietary format lockin in order to get businesses to use the platform, but using the platform isn't any particular problem.
The platform itself provides the fundamentals of what businesses need to get up and running. It's pretty stable and not horribly expensive. There are other competing platforms out there (some even much better) but they still don't fully support Microsoft's proprietary format. So Microsoft leverages that format but creates something that not only provides the tools you need, it empowers small business. They've done an excellent job to keep the Office brand running and kudos to them for that.
Any open source competitor will need to be hosted, provide better facilities, have a clear migration path and have format compatibility for any hope in the future.
Office 2003 was the last truly good version of Office (in my opinon at least). It worked properly then; without the quirks of Office 2000 (and still works perfectly now, having full compatablity with the new Office file formats via an update), didn't have the deliberately obtuse ribbon user interface - which steals a large chunk of screen space, and if hidden to reclaim that space, requries more clicks than simply having a toolbar did. I fail to see any good reason to switch, as unlike the move from XP to 7, no new features of any consequence have been added, and no (positive) updates in speed or behaviour have been made.
I cannot speak for OpenOffice, as the last time I used it was ~7 years ago - and at the time OpenOffice felt like something from the Windows 3.1 era.
I also cannot speak for LibreOffice, as I have never used it.
The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction [...]
How is this good news?
Posting that here is like someone on Moveon.org hyperlinking an article from www.redstateblog.com (or whatever the hell the right wing version is).
I read Neowin as well. I like balance.
I notice they have things like Windows Server 2012 R2 launch details that slashdot feels is not important. But if it is Linux related, I feel a link from there is like reading a link here about a non-baised spin about IE and Windows on slashdot if you know what I mean?
I wonder if those statistics include governments that tried to use it but went back due to users hating change? Or used an ancient version of OpenOffice that was not as compatible as MS Office?
As much as I love free software I admit I paid a lot of money for Office. It is the only thing that I know that works when making critical documents that must look write and be editable. No replacement for Outlook as well sadly (I HATE OUTLOOK). I feel it is kind of like the old Gimp vs Photoshop debate all over every article comes out.
People need a reason for change. Being just as good wont cut it. Better different and better will. Windows CE and blackberry were untouchable in 2007 ... the iphone redefined the standards and crippled both. No one could stop IE. It wasn't until Firefox was freaking fast and secure before anyone wanted to leave though Mozilla did exist prior. I think making a better LibreOffice wont help as clouds and having your documents anytime and anywhere are taking over as evident with Google Docs and Office 365. An open source web based office suite that is cloud based and works anywhere might be where the FOSS can really shine and give somethign different.
http://saveie6.com/
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
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.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Joe Sixpack doesn't give a shit whether his security holes are fixed or not... he just wants to use his software.
It's true that he *should* care - but he doesn't.
Worst. Signature. Ever.
...and managers don't know any better.
The reason is simple: most managers don't have a clue about IT. To them the financial success of MS and its ubiquitous products mean that they are the best. It also gives them accountability, if something goes wrong. Who do you pass the blame to when something breaks? They love to call vendors or contractors and scream at them to fix something. With OSS there is no one to scream at and who the fuck is the apache foundation anyway, some kinda hippie native american powwow? To them open source is unprofessional because there isn't a guy in a suit with billions in the bank to prove its success. They live in a different world where success is measured by money and status. OSS eschews that mentality and is looked down upon because of it.
My manager once told me that he wished MS made all of the software we needed: ERP, CRM, CAD/CAM etc. He just liked how everything was tied together and interoperated. Another thing that annoyed me was once our router crapped out, a Netgear business router with VPN and dual WAN ports. I quickly hacked together a router using PFsense and a bunch of NIC's in an older P4 desktop which worked out quite nicely. My manager saw the setup and didn't like it. Why? Because how can a computer be a router? He just couldn't get his head around it and called in our IT contractor who installed another shitty Netgear router. Even fucked up my secure automation network that was isolated from the other networks and the separate wifi network. When things broke and he asked me why I told him to call the contractor and complain to them because they broke the system I had installed. Nothing was done because as doing so would admit that he was stupid. Thankfully he no longer works for us and I relieved myself of most IT duties.
As usual bad stats are meaningless. So they polled how many companies had office installed? 1/3rd of them had office 2003? So that translates into open office failing and MSFT winning? wtf?
Maybe, just maybe, the days of business being done in word documents and spreadsheets are fading and we're now moving towards business getting done in specific applications and instead of documents we're storing things in a database. My current job is maintaining a Database and CRM. We basically get contacted by some department whos business processes are a mess, they've been using Excel and word to do everything for 10 years, and we build them a front end for the companies database. Now records are stored forever, or less, depending on the need. Required fields are actually required. We don't have one off versions of documents stored on someones hard drive only to be lost when they leave the company. We've even done away with most email. Federal regulations that specifically target email are nasty. Simply giving giving employees chat clients let them do their normal human chit-chat without leaving a messy legal trail should a court case arise. Now requests and such are logged IN the CRM. It's clear to the person using it that they shouldn't put their Banana bread recipe in there, so they go to chat.
If anything I'd say the stat regarding people using Office 2003 is very telling. They're only keeping it around for legacy purposes. It's not that open office is dieing, it's the entire concept of "documents as files" that is dieing.
That's because people no longer need Word file format capability. The new lingua franca is PowerPoint. And Impress renders PowerPoint files differently enough (and vice versa) that people are back to relying on authentic Microsoft Office again.
People use what works best for them. Open Office an Libre Office are not the only alternate office products out there. There is that crap that people try to pawn of on other in Apple products (Pages I think), and Corel's kick at the can, and KDE's stuff, and likely a bunch of other commercial stuff. Even Microsoft's light version of office that they put on home computers, that no-one uses if they have to. And out of all of them MS Office, for better or worse, is the king. Everyone in software knows that if you make a new product for people to use at work, and it sucks, they will figure out how to do what they need to do using something else. The corollary is that if you give them something to use that works they will use it. People use MS Office and not other office software.
The point is, Microsoft has somehow hit on an office suite that people can use easily enough to do 99% of what people need in business and home. If Open Office and Libre Office want to compete, they need to make their suites match the ease of use level. They need to stop differentiating themselves so much from MS Office and figure out what it is that MS Office does that people like, then do it themselves.
I personally find OOo stuff and LO to be clunky. Clunkier than MS Office. No I don't like everything about MS Office, but I do like it better than any other product out there. And I've used a lot. Hell, I even wrote a third of many thousand line manual for operating a smelter using Wordstar... when it wasn't WSIWYG... i.e. you needed to embed control codes in your docs. Figure out what the market wants then make it. And don't be so friggin stuck on being different.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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
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".
It's not the document format. It actually IS the UI. Office 2010 was fucking amazing. I'll say that as a windows, linux (ubuntu, fedora, and zorin os user). It's all about the ribbon yo. If you want linux on the desktop you have to copy that ribbon mentality. if you don't...welll continue listening to the anti microsoft crowd. BTW, the sidebar in OO and LO sucks, just like Windows 8.
A very minor not pick - the standard for law is Word Perfect. You said "share or read documents that other people send to you (such as anything in contracting, law, real estate, medical, etc)".
More significant is the claim "share or READ". I've found that LibreOffice is MORE reliable for reading files from various versions of MS Office then MS Office itself is. For collaborative editing, sending a complex document back and forth, sure you'd want to both use the same version of the same software, if you forgot that much better collaborative platforms are available, such as Google Docs.
For collaboration, working on the same document via Google docs really works better than emailing different versions around and changes. That actually leaves a pretty narrow set of circumstances for which MS Office is actually the best choice. You realize that when a newer version of Word comes out that doesn't handle your existing Word 200x format documents properly.
My son's school has a "use whatever you want as long as you can collaberate" policy so of course I encouraged my son to use OOo and LO... He found it practically impossible to work with fellow students with Microsoft Office... So unfortunately, it's a non-starter.