IBM joins the OpenOffice.org community

By Tony Austin
Wednesday, 12 September 2007 02:21

Opinion and Analysis

On September 10, 2007, the OpenOffice.org community welcomed IBM as a community member. As well as immediate code contributions, IBM has pledged ongoing software engineering support to the community and plans to further leverage the open source technology in its own products.

I've been downloading and dabbling with the OpenOffice.org software suite for a year or two now, and liked what I saw but didn't adopt it because, like so many others, I've been using the Microsoft Office suite for so long that nothing more than sheer inertia stopped me from changing course.

"If it's free, how good can it be?" was also a question hovering around in the back of my mind. There's also the consideration that my main use is for editing text documents, with only occasional use for spreadsheets and other features. I used to use Lotus WordPro for a time during the mid-1990s -- remember that? Then Microsoft Word 97 came along and this offered me more than enough features, certainly all the essential ones to meet my needs, with the newer releases such as Word 2003 being icing on the cake rather than (for me, anyway) having essential new features.

So I've been happily using Word 2003 for three or four years, and -- not in any reactionary way -- frankly see no compelling need to upgrade to Microsoft's new wunderkind: Microsoft Office 2007, launched publicly along with Windows Vista on January 30 this year. The new graphical user interface, with the so-called Ribbon replacing the earlier menus and toolbars, certainly is innovative and not too hard to get used to, but is it worth the changeover costs?

That's a question a lot of enterprises are already asking, and I suspect that Microsoft will have it's task cut out to convince them to upgrade. Right now I'm doing some work at an organisation that still has Windows 2000 and Office 2000 deployed, and frankly they are perfectly adequate for the job in hand. It's the perennial marketing dilemma: how to persuade your existing customers to purchase next year's bright, shiny new model when last year's model is still meeting nearly all of their needs.