Re: Open doc format

Subject: Re: Open doc format
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 18:10:56 -0800


John Posada wrote:

Define "the fastest growing user base."

How much of the user base is actually "let's see what this is" base. In a
way...I'm one of those statistics. I downloaded and tried Open Office. I
wasn't comfortable with it. Don't know why...just wasn't. Are there many
more like me? How would you know except that at some point, renewal or
updating activity slows.

I grant you, estimates of user bases are just that: estimates. That's true no matter who issues them.

There have been stories of people "moving away from Microsoft" since MS hit
the airwaves, yet it doesn't seem to slow.

I'm trying to be cautious here, because I don't want to sound like a blindly supportive advocate (or is it too late?).

However, I suspect that the current crop of stories represent something we haven't seen before. There's at least a dozen countries, including France, Germany, and India where large parts of the government are switching over to OpenOffice. In fact, in several places, they're passing laws forbidding the use of proprietary software unless there's a good reason. For example,last week, the head of a large Indian state told Bill Gates to his face that the state was switching, largely on the grounds that public business shouldn't be bound to proprietary software. Similar stories are being repeated in business. Taken individually, each of these stories might be a blip on the radar, but so many of these blips have been recorded in the last year that something unusual seems to happening.


Is it possible that many of these
stories are seeded by parties with agendas different than MS?

Well, they are certainly circulated by those with different agendas (hello! says he,staring into a mirror).

At the same time, the various trend watchers like the Gartner Group are also reporting similar tendencies. Many of these have reported on Microsoft's growth in the past in a way that caused some people to accuse them of bias, so I suspect that their current findings are probably trustworthy.

> Also...if I'm
staying with something, I simply stay with it. I don't broadcast "Hey! I'm
staying!"

The same is true of most of those who switch. They don't report it, either.

The important question is, and nobody but MS knows this, the
number of licenses that are not renewed.

Even that's not reliable. How many pirate installatins are there?

The question I can't answer in all of this is exactly how big the trend is. The Gartner Group suggests that over a third of users are actively looking for alternatives to Microsoft. Of course, not all those who look will actually adapt an alternative. But it's also true that when Microsoft drops support for earlier versions of its products in the next couple of years that more people might switch to alternatives.

I also note that, so far, these trends don't seem to be as large in North America as elsewhere, especially in governments. If that's so, then it's ironic, since much of the development of alternatives happens in North America.

Some of the supporters of alternatives joke, half-seriously, that their goal is world domination. I don't expect that, especially not any time soon. Still, if only 5 or 10% move away from Microsoft, that's still more of a change than we've seen for a long time. If nothing else, we might actually see some changes in Microsoft products in response - things like the master document feature working, for example.

--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield

"It is better to know where your luck lies than where your talent lies."
-Thomas Hardy, "A Laodicean"



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References:
RE: Open doc format: From: John Posada

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