Solveig on MSO 2007 vs. OOo, and French OOo Study
Solveig writes More Brilliant People Saying that Office 2007 Is A Whole Different Program, So Why Not Just Use OpenOffice.org?
Indeed. She quotes a blog by Baslow, who writes, “Faced with the prospect of tackling Microsoft Office 2007, many users may opt to move to OpenOffice.org; it will feel quite familiar to users of Microsoft Office prior to the 2007 version, it is well documented and it’s free.”
Supporting Baslow, Solveig rhetorically asks, “So why upgrade to MS Office 2007? Pay nothing, and switch to OpenOffice.org, instead. You retrain for both, but the cost of OpenOffice.org is hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions of dollars less than Microsoft Office, depending on how big your organization is. Saving a lot of money is, well, really good. It lets you spend that money on something that’s actually important: education, cure for cancer, better pizza, or whatever your business or organization is about.”
They are both right. And to prove that many others are not just thinking about switching to OpenOffice.org, but actually doing it, Ismael’s blog (from France) posts a Report About OOo’s Adoption.
He summarizes a French report that uses demand for software training as a proxy to measure demand for the software (what a clever way to determine real interest in open source programs).
Ismael writes “Their study is based on the demand of training instead of the number of licenses sold, which is more interesting for this type of software and which allows to measure the interest of companies and administrations for them. This report points out that OpenOffice.org use has increased by 30% in one year (2005 to 2006), like Linux. The best progression is for MySQL (+50%). For the others: PHP +20% and Java +5%.”