October 24th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
“Linux and Unix Top News Blog” discovered information on Microsoft’s website in which the company seems to admit the feature set of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office are essentially identical.
Microsoft’s public stance has been that their product has more features, though it seems to me OpenOffice has the advantage here (with Draw, Base and a better equation editor, more file formats, greater language options, etc).
Could just be a semantics issue, but it’s a little bit of fun, anyway.
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on MS Admits OOo Matches MSO Feature Set
October 23rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The GullFOSS blog discusses some of the fruits of RedFlag’s participation in the OpenOffice.org community. A handful of new features will make their appearance in OOo 2.4, and it is planned for the process to accelerate from there.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on RedFlag 2000’s Contributions to OOo 2.4
October 19th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Most Linux distros (and the NeoOffice project) use a slightly modified OpenOffice.org with enhancements built by Novell on top of the standard Sun-compiled version (as well as customizations provided by their distro distributor).
Can Windows users access this slightly-different build of OOo? Indeed, you can get it from Go-OO.org.
See a summary of the extra features it includes.
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Go-OO.org
October 15th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Bruce Byfield cuts through some of the recent confusion about whether Novell is going to fork OpenOffice.org in “Novell is not forking OpenOffice“.
I am glad to see vigorous debate within the OOo community, as it means there are a lot of passionate concerned members who want the best for the project overall.
In general, in fact, it seems the OOo community has gotten a lot stronger recently, with new members IBM and Beijing RedFlag 2000, and Sun implementing new processes to better communicate with community members:
“According to Meeks, Novell is not stopping cooperation with Sun. “We contribute more than half our code to what we see as the core of OpenOffice,” Meek says, referring to bug-fixes and revisions of existing applications and subsystems. He also acknowledges that, recently, “Sun has really been improving how they deal with the community,” citing such improvements as an engineering steering committee that he says has resulted in “much faster patch turnarounds. So, on one level, that’s really encouraging.”
There is room for improvement in the way the community operates, but there is reason for strong optimism too, as the future looks ever brighter for the OpenOffice.org project.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Byfield on Rumors of a Fork
October 12th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
It’s considered common knowledge that Microsoft Office controls 95% of the global office suite market, but this number comes from an obsolete market analysis framework and can no longer be considered accurate.
Building on this assumption without questioning it, the W.P. Carey School of Arizona State University writes “To Pay or Not To Pay: The World of Office Suites Opens Up.” The first paragraph begins,
“The ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite claims an impressive 95 percent market share. The software giant’s business division, which includes Office, brings in annual revenues of $16.4 billion. Yet since 2000, a free suite of software that includes spreadsheet and word processing programs similar to Excel and Word has evolved, with potential to chip away at Microsoft’s market dominance. Created by an army of volunteers, the open source OpenOffice.org has attracted a lot of attention but still claims a small percentage of the market.”
A few weeks ago, their sibling site at the Wharton School provided a few key words that clarify the whole situation.
Wharton’s analysis reveals the fallacy that 95% of users (PC users or office software users, pick one market) use Microsoft Office. Instead, the oft-quoted number simply measures that 95% of the revenue collected for the sale of office suites goes to MS (according to International Data Corp.). Thus, free products including OpenOffice.org and Google Docs are not measured by this statistic at all!
If you measure marketshare as the number of computers with the software installed, as a percentage of all computers, then Microsoft has far less than 95% and OOo has a good slice: Microsoft claims to have about 400 million MSO users, and some estimates place OOo users at 100 million. With these simple numbers, MS has 80% marketshare and OpenOffice has 20% (obviously excluding other players and overlap; these numbers could be refined).
When potential users see that MS has 80% marketshare and OOo has 20%, it will be clear to people that MS is vulnerable and competitors are growing strongly and quickly. This will accelerate adoption of OpenOffice.org, as those who are afraid to use it because they fear it’s not widely used, will see it is in fact very popular.
More accurate measurement tells a different story than what has been propagated so far, and the entire evolution of the marketplace could change because of it.
Posted in OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
October 11th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Solveig writes a detailed introduction to the new features and functionality introduced in OpenOffice.org 2.3.
She begins with a list of major new features:
- “A bunch of new and enhanced features like restoring the user-defined movement path in Impress and applying better default print settings in Calc. Check the release notes for complete information from OpenOffice.org.
- A significantly different chart tool.
- New extensions provided by Sun and other vendors. You will need to run 2.3 for the extensions to work. Read more about the new extensions on the OpenOffice.org web site.”
Filled with screenshots and clear descriptions, this article is really valuable for users adopting or upgrading to OOo 2.3. It also covers the new chart tool and extensions capability very thoroughly to help us all get familiar with these two large feature upgrades.
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Solveig on OpenOffice.org 2.3
October 9th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
There has been a recent series of discussions and blogs about the relationship of Sun and Novell within the OpenOffice.org community, and the particular roles they play. Some writers have announced the Novell is going to produce a new “fork” of OOo, while others have indicated the current status quo is not going to change much.
Charles H. Schulz, longtime member of the OOo community, attempts to clarify the situation in a piece for Groklaw.
My own opinion is rather relaxed. Sun, the project founder, has discussed their expectation that different “distros” of OOo would emerge over time. In fact, IBM’s Lotus Symphony and Red Flag 2000’s RedOffice are two new distros announced in the past few months. If Novell builds another one, I don’t see a problem. Just as competition among Linux distros has been a major reason for their rapid improvement and encouraged differentiation to serve niche markets, the same will come from a multitude of OOo distros. If each variant can read and write ODF files, compatibility will be maintained and nothing will be sacrificed for the end users.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Sun and Novell and OpenOffice.org
October 4th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
As I learned at the OpenOffice.org Barcelona Conference, and mentioned a few weeks back, PC maker Everex endorses OpenOffice.org in a video released online.
John Lin, General Manager of Everex, appears in the interview. He informs us that traffic to Everex’s website tripled after the announcement it would include OOo on its computers, and that Wal-Mart itself has now requested OpenOffice.org be installed on every model of Everex PC it sells.
Posted in OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Everex’s OpenOffice.org Video
October 2nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Vietnam will migrate 20,000 of its government office computers to OpenOffice.org, abandoning Microsoft Office in the migration.
“The change from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org is set as a mission in the scheme to computerize operations of Party organs in the 2006-2010 period… Cost savings is only one of the reasons for this change. The major target of the replacement is to improve the ability of the Vietnamese IT circle because the use of open source products like OpenOffice will create a new market for Vietnamese IT companies, according to Mr. Loi.”
Migrations to OpenOffice.org are ever increasing in pace and geographic distribution!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 2 Comments »
October 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
DesktopLinux.com writes “All Macedonian students to use Linux desktops”
“All together Macedonia will deploy 180,000 NComputing-enabled workstation seats, enough to provide virtually every elementary and secondary school student in the nation with his or her own classroom computing device.”
This suddenly becomes one of the largest open source implementations yet undertaken anywhere.
“Besides Ubuntu 7.04, each NComputing server/PC comes with NComputing’s Terminal Server software and OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, and Wine.”
What a great stack of powerful, free and open source applications. Top shelf quality at a bargain price.
“NComputing claims that the Macedonia project is at the same time, the largest known thin client and desktop Linux deployment ever undertaken. “This project would not have been possible 5 years ago,” said Ivanovski. “Today’s least expensive desktop PCs are so powerful we use less than 10% of their capacity and NComputing’s technology puts this wasted power to work.”
Smart policies like this will help Macedonia and other developing countries leap to the technological forefront quickly, and will result in hundreds of thousands of open source-savvy adults in the coming years. All while saving huge sums of money over the alternative, proprietary software route. This is sure to pay dividends to the country’s economy for decades.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on All Macedonian students to use Linux desktops