Free, at a price
Developers have released a beta, or test version, of the new OpenOffice.org, the most serious rival to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office suite. Version 3 has some compelling new features, and can’t be beaten at the price. So why isn’t the suite making headway?
I’ve used OpenOffice.org on and off since it was released at the turn of the century. It has made significant progress in that time. Whereas versions 1.0 and 1.1 were unstable and lacked basic functionality, version 2.0, released three years ago, was a competent alternative to Office. OpenOffice runs on more platforms than Microsoft’s product and, best of all, it’s completely free of charge.
It has its origins in a product called StarOffice, developed by German software company StarDivision. Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision in 1999 and, a year later, released the software code to the open-source community to develop the product further. Then CEO Scott McNealy, who was known for his anti-Microsoft hyperbole, was determined to stick it to the software maker. What better way to do so than to give away a rival to Office, one of the pillars of the Microsoft profit machine?
However, nearly 10 years after Sun bought StarDivision, Office still dominates the desktop productivity market. It’s hard to know exactly how many people use OpenOffice — the software is available from a range from peer-to-peer networks, making it impossible to know the number of times it has been downloaded — but Microsoft Office is still the de facto standard in business.
Fact is, though, that the vast majority of computer users don’t actually need Office. OpenOffice provides all the tools they’d ever require, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and database. So why don’t more people use the software?
I think there are two main reasons:
* They don’t know about it. One of the biggest problems with open-source initiatives is that they lack the marketing muscle of commercial software enterprises. Microsoft spends hundreds of millions of dollars advertising its products each year, but software projects such as OpenOffice, developed by volunteers, rely almost exclusively on word-of-mouth marketing. Take, for example, the Mozilla Firefox Web browser: despite Firefox being the superior product, rival Internet Explorer, which ships with Windows, still dominates the browser market.
* But the biggest barrier to OpenOffice’s adoption is compatibility, or lack thereof, with Office. Because the world has standardised on Office, other productivity software simply has to interoperate seamlessly with it. That means the ability to save documents created in OpenOffice in a format that can be read in Office and the ability, similarly, to open Office documents in OpenOffice. That’s easier said than done. It is particularly difficult to ensure that a complex presentation, for example, retains its correct formatting when transferred between the two suites. Though the developers behind OpenOffice have done good work with their file conversion tools — converting simple documents works well — the software is still not great at handling complex documents.
This is enough of a shortcoming for most people to stick to Office, despite its relatively high price. Unfortunately, the developers still seem to be struggling with this key aspect of the office suite. Version 3 includes support for Office Open XML, the new default file format that Microsoft uses in its latest version of Office, released last year. But it falls well short of the mark, making a hash of saving anything but the most basic documents to Open XML. Let’s hope the developers fix this before the final version ships in September.
Without excellent interoperability, OpenOffice will struggle to make headway against Office, despite people not having to shell out a cent to use it.
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