MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-10-02 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Foot in the Door for Open Source?
|
Foot in the Door for Open Source?
By Michael Y. Park
Enterprise Linux IT
October 01, 2003
http://www.enterprise-linux-it.com/perl/story/22397.html
There is no question about it: As far as David-and-Goliath scenarios go, the
scrappy open-source office applications that have taken on mighty Microsoft
Office could not have picked a seemingly more invincible foe. Bill Gates'
silicon empire is just about as powerful and wealthy a corporate
organization as has ever existed. Next to it, outfits like OpenOffice,
StarOffice and Corel Office look like ragtag guerilla fighters and, frankly,
kind of puny.
But it is not necessarily wise to write off the skinny kid with the sling
quite yet. Though Microsoft's Office applications hold a lead in the
business market that would daunt General George S. Patton, open-source
office applications are doing better in the SMB (small to mid-size business)
markets than experts expected.
"The bottom line is that, where the market is right now, I don't see huge
traction for OpenOffice or StarOffice. But, that said, I think you will see
pockets where those products make sense," Jupiter Research senior analyst
Joe Wilcox told NewsFactor. || ||
Wooing Mom and Pop
And those pockets are in small and mid-size businesses -- those of 1,000
employees or less -- where paying top dollar for Microsoft's very expensive
productivity suite does not make much sense.
In conducting research for a new report, Wilcox found that open-source
productivity suites did "surprisingly well" in the mid-size business market,
with the OpenOffice suite alone claiming a share of about 6 percent.
Furthermore, he found that some 19 percent of small businesses ran Linux on
their desktop, and a whopping 26 percent ran Linux on their servers.
Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Word?
The figures surprised Wilcox, but for ebullient OpenOffice marketing project
leader Sam Hiser, they only justified the optimism he feels about
open-source suites' chances against Redmond.
"It's simply that it works great, it's coded better, and it costs less --
it's free," Hiser told NewsFactor. "There's no question that open-source
office suites are technologically true, robust and secure enough. Linux
desktops are about to explode."
And Microsoft knows it, he said -- "they're terrified."
Still Cool and in Control
If so, a Microsoft spokesperson did not show it when he gave a cool response
about his company's faith in the free market -- a safe bet when that company
owns over 90 percent of the market for desktop-productivity suites,
according to Wilcox's research.
"There has always been healthy competition in productivity applications,
which gives customers an array of options to suit their needs," Dan Leach,
lead product manager of Microsoft's information-worker product management
group, told NewsFactor. "When customers make their choices based on business
value, they have consistently chosen the Office suite because it gives them
the tools they need to be more productive, better able to create documents,
collaborate effectively and share information," he said.
Despite his relatively cheery news for OpenOffice and its colleagues,
Wilcox, for the most part, agreed that Microsoft really has nothing to fear
from them. In other words: Don't get cocky.
"Microsoft Office is a very entrenched competitor," he said. "Microsoft also
has benefits from its proprietary Office file formats, and businesses that
have a lot of documents in Word or Excel have some legitimate concern about
compatibility. If they do business with other people, they want to make sure
the documents they produce can be read by other people," he pointed out.
Technically, Microsoft Office 2003 does support the XML file format that's
been settled upon as a standard by most open-source applications and a
technical committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards -- a committee of which Microsoft is not a member. But
because Microsoft Office 2003 relies upon proprietary schema, its files are
essentially unreadable to other productivity suites.
Splashing Cold Water on Open-Source's Face
Hiser said that OpenOffice version 1.1, due this week, can translate
Microsoft files with an accuracy of 90 percent.
But anything less than 100 percent is not good enough, Wilcox noted. He also
pointed out that, even though OpenOffice boasts a six-percent share of the
desktop-productivity suite market, that does not mean that some of those
OpenOffice users do not also use Microsoft Office. Furthermore, though fans
of open-source applications brag that they are free, they often neglect to
mention ancillary costs, such as training and actually implementing the new
software. If developers of open-source office applications really want to
topple Microsoft, they have some work to do, he said.
"The bottom line is that open-source productivity suites need more parity
with Microsoft Office in functionality and [they need] to address the issue
of file formats," Wilcox said. "They need to develop better translators so
they can actually read or produce Microsoft Office's proprietary formats,
because that's what's most widely used out there."
But there is a huge threat that constantly looms over Microsoft, he added.
"OpenOffice isn't the threat. The threat to Microsoft is itself," Wilcox
said. "It has a huge problem getting companies, especially large companies,
to upgrade to newer versions of Office. So it's not OpenOffice they're
worried about -- it's the two- or three-year-old versions of their own
products many of their customers are still using."
Open-Source's Opening?
And that, Hiser said, is where open-source applications come in. Tired of
Microsoft products designed to become obsolete after a year, disgusted by
Microsoft constantly hectoring its clients into buying the latest upgrade,
users of all stripes have begun defecting to the openness of open-source, he
says.
"All the time, people look at OpenOffice and say, 'Good luck -- we've seen
them come and go,'" he said. "They don't understand a couple of things about
the environment today. People are really [angry] at Microsoft -- the way
they operate, the way they're really not true and don't care about the
customers. People are fed up."
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