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OSDL’s Kveton Blog on OpenOffice

Scott Kveton of the OSDL in Portland, OR, posts two consecutive entries about OpenOffice.

First, he writes OpenOffice Could Learn From Firefox. It’s all about customization!

“You can build something that meets, say 60% of users’ needs but you need a great deal of customization to really meet the needs of those other 40% of users. So why not leverage those people? Well, Firefox has. Head over to Addons with your Firefox browser and see what they have to offer. You can customize your browser to your hearts content. And all at little incremental cost to Mozilla (after all they did have to develop the XUL framework in Firefox and build the Addons site)…

If you had a simple framework, much like Firefox, you could enable all sorts of new tools and extensions for OpenOffice. This could help address the problem from above; getting new features and driving the product forward faster for the end-users. You would effectively be using the long tail to help drive adoption and use of OpenOffice. I think this could be the biggest driving force behind making OpenOffice the next killer app (and by killer I mean killing the incumbent).”

In his second article, The OpenOffice Value Proposition, Kveton discusses how a friend helped switch a company’s 100 desktops to OpenOffice:

“What if you replace that $350 copy of Microsoft Office with OpenOffice? Not only have you immediately saved $35,000 for the company you are still running Windows which saves you a lot of money in terms of transitional cost. All of those customer relationship packages your people use still work and they can even still open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

After talking with the CEO, my friend was able to make the value proposition above and convince him to go with just the transition to OpenOffice. They have saved money and will be able to leverage the new OpenDocument format (they will need to do this as they are in Massachusetts) to run their business.”

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