June 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In response to Steve Ballmer’s prognostication that newspapers will be dead in less than 10 years, Bill Virgin of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer counters with a prediction that Microsoft will be dead in 10 years.
Ballmer’s original statement was: “There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network,” Steve Ballmer told The Washington Post. “There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
Bill Virgin finds such sweeping statements tiresome, and strikes back, writing “A far more compelling and convincing business case can be built to support the view that Microsoft will be kaput in 10 years than to expect the extinction of the American newspaper in a decade.”
He elaborates: “Even the core business could wind up being a bit shaky. Windows still dominates in personal-computer operating systems, but even Microsoft isn’t thrilled with Vista; Apple is slowly moving from a few niches to greater acceptance in the corporate world and Linux or something similar could grab more market share.” And their forays into other businesses have been mostly unsuccessful, requiring significant subsidies to continue operating.
In short, it seems more and more likely that Microsoft’s influence will wane and perhaps even disappear, so Bill Virgin’s prediction isn’t all that crazy at all. And he doesn’t even mention OpenOffice or OpenDocument Format, and their emancipating effects on the industry!
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Seattle P-I vs Microsoft
June 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Neelie Kroes is an EU bureaucrat well-known to the open source and tech communities, because she is the relentless force bringing Microsoft’s monopolistic abuses to justice:
“Ms. Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the last four years, accusing the company of defying her orders and fining it nearly 1.7 billion euros, or $2.7 billion, on the grounds of violating European competition rules.”
The New York Times reports on Kroes’ recent suggestion that businesses and governments use open standards and avoid being tied to a single software supplier:
“Her comments were the strongest recommendation yet by Ms. Kroes to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.
“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”
She also encouraged the Netherlands (her home country) to continue moving toward open standards, and praised government agencies in Germany and France that have already done so (by migrating to Linux and/or OpenOffice.org).
The EU is fast escaping Microsoft’s orbit, and they may leapfrog the USA in this round of global techno-competition. Their large-scale adoption of open source will strengthen many software projects, and that will benefit software users around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Neelie Kroes on Open Standards
June 9th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
IBM Lotus Symphony is IBM’s office suite derived from OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. The same tools are also available as a part of Lotus Notes 8.0+, but Symphony is the standalone version of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications that use ODF as their native file format.
The first betas of Symphony were released in September 2007, and have been downloaded over one million times. With the release of version 1.0, IBM’s business strategy has also been revealed: the software is free, but support options are available for companies who’d like to pay.
LinuxWorld interprets this move as a direct challenge to Microsoft’s ‘heartland’ in its article “IBM Releases ODF-Based Office Killer.”
Ebizq sees it as an indicator that ODF has reached maturity, with its already widespread implementation in OpenOffice now augmented by an enterprise product from one of the world’s largest IT companies: “Open Document Format (ODF) comes of age today as IBM announces the commercial-grade, general availability of Lotus Symphony, a suite of free, ODF-based software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.”
IBM is also using Symphony as a core part of a new stack of Lotus software aimed at small businesses called IBM Lotus Foundations, which looks very interesting itself.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 Released
June 6th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The highly irregular and foolishly mistaken decision of the ISO to approve Microsoft OOXML as a standard does not appear to be over yet. Groklaw is following the aftermath, in which already four countries are appealing OOXML’s ISO approval.
Groklaw quotes ZDNet: “After the two-month appeal period, we now have four appeals — Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela,” Jonathan Buck, the director of communications for IEC, told ZDNet.co.uk on Monday. “The appeals are now with our CEOs, IEC General Secretary Ronnie Amit, and ISO Secretary General Alan Bryden, who have a 30-day period to make sure appeals conform to directives.”
Other countries, such as Denmark, have found problems but their standards bodies did not make formal appeals.
Quite possibly, we’re in the midst of a market shift as ODF continues to gain traction globally while MSOOXML stalls and sputters.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on ISO Battle Isn’t Over
June 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Andrew Ziem, of OpenOffice.org Ninja, writes about OpenOffice’s upcoming PDF importing and hybrid PDF capabilities.
The capability will be delivered as an extension and will let you open and edit any PDF. It also supports a new format called a Hybrid PDF, which can be displayed by PDF viewers but edited by ODF editors.
Ziem gives credit where it’s due with regard to editing PDFs: “OpenOffice.org did not pioneer PDF import—not even in the open source market. Some of the work in OpenOffice.org is done by xpdf, a PDF viewer. To import PDFs, open source alternatives include pdftohtml, Abiword, KWord, and Inkscape. Adobe Acrobat Reader includes a text extractor and an image scraper, and there are a host of commercial applications. What makes OpenOffice.org stand out is hybrid PDFs.”
Hybrid PDFs provide the best of both worlds: consistent display anywhere via its PDF component, and editability via its ODF component.
“Most applications (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) ignore the ODF bits and treat the whole hybrid file as a normal PDF. Presentation is pixel perfect. Wait. That’s not all. OpenOffice.org 3.0 with this extension treats the hybrid as a normal ODF, so the ODF document opens in Writer, Impress, Calc, or Draw according on the original. (You didn’t just expect Writer, did you?) Now you have lossless, editable, round-trip PDFs.”
The extension is still in development, but will be available on the OOo Extensions site when it’s ready for mass deployment.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Import and Edit PDFs with OpenOffice.org
June 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Kazunari Hirano mentions this week’s OpenOffice Migration of the Week: the Aizuwakamatsu City Government in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, which is moving 850 computers from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
The city expects direct savings of 15 million yen over the next five years, and anticipates the benefits will spill over into the private sector, as citizens will also be able to adopt open source instead of expensive applications at home:
“The Mayor said that they can not only cut the cost but also accommodate the long-term preservation of their documents: “We often met problems with the latest office software to open and read our documents created in the past. But now we can use the international standard file format, ODF, so that we will be able to use and preserve our documents over many years.”
“It happened that our citizens had to buy the office software when they received documents from the city government.”
“ODF, which can be used from the free software, OpenOffice.org, will help reduce the burden on our citizens,” he said.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Migration of the Week: Aizuwakamatsu City, Japan
May 29th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lots of open source and open standards tech people, including me, have long anticipated this, but now a mainstream financial site, Motley Fool, is predicting “The Fall of Microsoft Office.”
Microsoft has publicly announced it will support ODF in its Office suite. If implemented honestly (a big question for Microsoft), this throws open the doors to competition in a way MSO has never had to deal with before.
“I can’t say that Google or Sun or anybody else just won a bigger share of the office software market, and if they did, it won’t help their revenue or profits directly anyway. But it’s clear as day that Microsoft just took a serious hit, and the impact may take a long time to make itself felt but it will come.
“The company’s biggest revenue generator may be a shadow of its former self in a few years. I just hope that Microsoft has some alternative business prospects on tap — and no, tackling Google’s search hulk head-on doesn’t count.”
Microsoft’s Office is going to lose marketshare, and Motley Fool sees this as having a big impact on Microsoft’s core profitability.
From the perspective of open source users, it means Microsoft will have less money to spend on attacking us, which is a good thing.
From the perspective of all computer users, especially small businesses, it means costs will decline as the $400 price for Microsoft Office is no longer a required expense–using the free OpenOffice.org instead will be an easy alternative.
With OpenOffice 3.0 coming this fall, it’s time to expect another big jump in its user share. Let’s watch!
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Motley Fool: “The Fall of Microsoft Office”
May 1st, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Developed in Hungary, EuroOffice is a suite derived from OpenOffice.org with the addition of several custom features.
The project is working hard to address specific market needs while playing nicely in the OOo development ecosystem:
“Since it is open-source we hope that these additions will be considered improvements by our users and adopted in the future by OpenOffice.org developers. We have signed the JCA, so nothing stands in the way of adoption.”
Some of its unique features include a dictionary toolbar, map chart, solver and adaptive interface. EuroOffice looks like a solid product.
“EuroOffice is developed by MultiRacio Ltd., a Hungarian firm with a past in economical statistics and of course office application localization and development.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on EuroOffice: An OOo-Derived Suite
April 30th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Colin Charles notes the government of Malaysia has progressed in its path to OpenOffice and ODF adoption in his post “OpenOffice.org and ODF adoption in Malaysia – thumbs up!”
“MAMPU, the Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit, decided that they were going to go OpenOffice.org and go ODF, and dump Microsoft Office by year-end 2008.”
The story gets even better, as many of Malaysia’s federal and state government agencies have already migrated to OpenOffice over the past few years, and more are planning to do so this year.
Colin Charles writes, “Now, you can hold them to their word, as they update a Wiki page, informing you about how many agencies are moving to OpenOffice.org. Big wins, once all of the Malaysian government related agencies are on OpenOffice.org (open source software in general). Again, read OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption!”
Note the links in the above paragraph all point to the same location, but it’s well worth a visit to see the list of agencies that have rolled out OOo to hundreds or even thousands of their employees across the country.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice.org and ODF Adoption in Malaysia
April 25th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Many countries are likely to follow its path, as South Africa has chosen ODF for its national document standard.
However, a national standard does not automatically mean the government will migrate all its data to the format: “While Jolliffe points out that ODF has been made a national standard and not yet a government standard, he says the DST is trying to initiate the conversion process in government. “As far as possible, we should ensure that file format standards used in government are national standards.””
Migrating to ODF for data storage does not necessarily require a shift in software that government employees use day-to-day. (Although a separate, yet sometimes overlapping, group of open source advocates does make the case that open source software is a better tool for governments to use.)
“Jolliffe has challenged Microsoft to stand by its interoperability strategy and provide support in its own products for ODF. “We would like to see Microsoft interoperate with ODF.””
(There is a third-party plugin to let MS Office users read and write ODF documents.)
Posted in Free Culture, ODF | Comments Off on South Africa Chooses ODF as National Standard