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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."
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.
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.
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.