Microsoft Office users ready to jump ship: poll

Stan Beer
Thursday, 27 April 2006 12:41

IT Industry - Development

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Microsoft may want to rethink its intention to inundate users of pirated versions of Office with unwanted alerts. A recent poll shows most users are likely to defect to the free open source equivalent, Open Office.org, rather than pay for Office 2003.

An iTWire poll taken in the past day asked the question: “Would you try Open Office.org instead of buying MS Office 2003?”  Of the 441 respondents which voted in the space of 18 hours, 381 (86.4%) voted yes while just 60 (13.6%) voted no.

Microsoft believes it will be able to convince pirate Office users to pay to upgrade to legitimate versions through its proposed Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program. OGA, modelled on the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program, which Microsoft claims has been a success over past months, identifies users of pirate copies of Microsoft software when they download the necessary critical security updates. Once identified, Microsoft sends continual alerts nagging users to chuck their illicit software and pay for the real thing.

While WGA may have been a success, however, there is one big difference between sending users verbal barrages to pay for Windows and sending similar alerts to Microsoft Office users.  The difference is that Microsoft Office 2003 users can easily download Open Office.org 2.0 and be up and running with a similar product, with a similar look and feel and all their data and functionality intact, for absolutely free. So most would prefer to give that a try rather than shell out hundreds of dollars for MS Office.

With Windows, however, the story is radically different. To date, there has been no viable alternative to Windows XP that would enable users to switch painlessly to an equivalent operating environment – the efforts of Novell, Red Hat and others notwithstanding. Thus, the only choice is to receive continual alerts or pay up for a genuine copy of Windows.

This of course presents a huge problem for Microsoft because about one third of its revenue comes from MS Office sales.  No doubt with Office 2007, which Microsoft has promised will be radically different to the point that it will involve a learning curve, the software giant hopes that it will once again convince users to open their pockets. Whether it succeeds is open to question. Until then, however, users appear to be unwilling to part with money when something similar can be had for free.