Can OpenOffice be a player in the office? The release of OpenOffice 2.0 has a lot of folks believing that the open source suite can now be a real competitor for Microsoft Office. But in their comments on a recent story, several readers expressed doubts that OpenOffice, however competitive it may be from a technology perspective, can ever supplant Office in the corporate market.
One reader admitted that he would be afraid for his job if anything went wrong in implementing an open source project. "Implementing something that doesn't work, especially if it's high profile, can ruin a career," the reader wrote. "I've thought several times about moving to UNIX on my home PC along with Open Office, Firefox, etc. But when I think about the possibility of being totally 'out of business' and having to find someone who can fix it, I lose the courage to do so. Add to that the question of whether certain specialty software I have will work with it. Now, magnify that by thousands of users and you get a sense of what the CIOs and MISs are dealing with."
Some companies may be intimidated from using OpenOffice by the companies they do business with. "In addition to the career fears -- which I have definitely seen in action -- there are also inadvertent restrictions imposed on some types of small business," another reader wrote. "We have a small/mid sized company which contracts with various big companies. Without fail, these big companies will use MS Office products to send out their request for proposals and they expect the same file format back in response. Until these open source products will read in, without fail, the Office documents and spreadsheets and additionally write them back out to Office exactly as I want them to look, using any other product will put my company at a severe disadvantage. I can't take that chance when these documents are used to control if we get a project or not. It doesn't matter what I like personally."
Some readers even doubt that OpenOffice is robust enough for the job. "I attempted to use Open Office about 4 months ago and found it worth using for the basic user but not ready for prime time," a reader wrote. "It is a nice system of programs but does not have the richness required to do much more than simple letter writing, primitive tables, and simple spreadsheets. Open Office is so deficient for serious power users that one might easily conclude that the file structure associated with it is not capable of expanding into a full-featured office suite without major redefinition. What is really needed to kick off Linux into major use is for a few major application developers to port their stuff to Linux. There is absolutely no way for these major developers to consider their applications to be considered open source but without them, Linux will always be relegated to 'hobby' status. Linux itself is deserving of wide acceptance as a serious OS but the currently available applications are not."
But others expressed the opinion that the real problem OpenOffice or any other free software has to overcome in the corporate market is the false perception that it's not supported. One reader recalled his experience when he proposed his company use a shareware product rather than going the Microsoft route. "The Powers That Be took one look at this, and said, aghast, 'We can't use shareware in our projects!' the reader wrote. "The reasoning, as far as I can tell, was something along the lines of shareware being not very well supported, and hence if it broke, we would be in trouble. Never mind that we could get a source code license and probably fix the problem far faster than most vendors would -- we "couldn't" use it. What I'm getting at is that corporations care about being able to get support through methods they understand. Never mind that getting support from Microsoft is like pulling teeth, and that open source software will usually give you better support faster; it's about the perception that a company selling software will stand behind its product. There's also the perception -- right or wrong -- of compatibility. It's not Word, therefore it can't be 100% compatible, therefore we can't use it. Never mind that even Word isn't 100% compatible with other versions of Word."
What's your opinion? Can OpenOffice be a viable competitor against Microsoft Office in the corporate world? Post your comments on my webpage or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
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