
OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office - caffeinewriter
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/02/12/1753224/openoffice-worth-21-million-per-day-if-it-were-microsoft-office
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fleitz
Yes, and if a Chevy Malibu could be sold for what BMW 5 series sells for then
GM wouldn't have gone bankrupt. Also like the 'street value' of drugs quoted
by cops, no one _ever_ pays retail for MS Office so the number is even more
meaningless.

I'm really not sure what this savings number means because for anyone who uses
office to make money open office is most certainly not equivalent to MS
Office. You only save money with open office is your needs are very limited,
your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might ever send a document to is
also using OpenOffice.

I'd gladly pay $150 for MS Office just so my documents are readable. Yes, I
know that if only everyone switched to OpenOffice etc than all would be well,
but the problem is people who write big cheques use MS Office, therefore if
your document looks like shit and a competitors looks good you don't get cut a
big cheque.

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jsight

      "You only save money with open office is your needs are very
      limited, your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might
      ever send a document to is also using OpenOffice."
    

You do make some good points, but this sentence doesn't fit at all. There are
quite a few scenarios where LibreOffice can be a $$$-saver, and it certainly
doesn't require your time to be "worth nothing".

~~~
fleitz
For sure it's a bit of hyperbole, but I think its essentially true.

Lets say you make min wage, or $10/hour...

Lets say Open Office costs you 5 minutes per day in horrible interface, making
docs work with office, etc.

Lets say MS Office actually costs $150...

    
    
      ($150 / ($10 / hour)) / (5 minutes) = 180 days
    

Basically after 1 year you've paid for MS Office.

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delano
The quality and compatibility of Open Office has improved a lot since it's
inception. So what you're advocating is a sliding scale of value which is
reasonable.

What you have not included is the TCO for MS Office which includes a lot of
the same things like UI issues, work lost due to crashes, compatibility with
other services (including Google docs), etc.

Open source often lags behind, but it gets better over time and also often
exceeds closed-source equivalents.

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gecko
I'm no MS fanboy. I have eight computers in my apartment. Exactly one runs a
Microsoft OS, and it has an XBOX logo on its DVD drive.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice come absolutely nowhere _close_ to Microsoft Office
in functionality, speed, UI, interoperability, customizability, or anything
else. Since there's a pile of posts on the front page right now about how
Excel is supposed to stink for business apps, let's turn to the logical
alternative for trivial-to-create internal applications: Access. To which the
Libre/OpenOffice alternative would be...okay, I guess Base? But is this thing
a front-end to existing database systems, or is it its own database system?
HSQL seems like the default; can I email this around? Why are the functions
with this different than with the one Greg made that isn't on HSQL? And how do
I script this, exactly? I'm used to VBA; can I use Python? Looks like maybe I
can from my Ubuntu laptop, but then the guy down the hall on the Windows box
can't?

I could've pulled up similar examples from the word processor or the
spreadsheet. LibreOffice Pivot Tables (formerly called something like Data
Navigator or Data Pilot) are slower, vastly harder to use, and horribly
underfeatured compared to Excel's Pivot Tables. The layout quality of
LibreOffice's word processor compared to Word's is almost as bad as Word's to
TeX's, which unfortunately also translates to the presentation module, making
it easy for me to see from a mile away whether someone used Keynote,
PowerPoint, a custom HTML/CSS solution, or LibreOffice.

Open source improves, but ultimately, non-commercially-backed open-source
improves in ways that make the _developers_ ' lives more interesting. You're
looking at something that people work on in their spare time. If it's not
scratching an itch, then why bother? And a lot of the user niceties that come
in Microsoft Office are not things people want to work on in their spare time,
because you or I, faced with a pivot table problem, will instead write a
Python script, skipping the office suite entirely in the first place.

If you don't need MS Office, great. More power to you. And there are _many_
people who do not, so you've got good company. If you _do_ need MS Office,
then LibreOffice is a horrid substitute.

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davidw
Ah, another open-office thread. I'm always amazed at the quantity of people
that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project.

Granted, OpenOffice may well never surpass MS Office, but to even be playing
in the same league is a victory of sorts, given the incredible disparity of
resources behind both projects.

And for your average person writing a letter, trying to calculate something
with a spreadsheet, or put together a simple presentation, they absolutely are
in the same league.

For me, OpenOffice wins hands down, because it runs on Linux, which is the OS
I choose to use, and is much more versatile and repurposable, being open
source. I use bits of it for LiberWriter.

~~~
overgryphon
Could you explain what about Open Office makes it a pretty amazing project?

The entire mission of the Open Office suite seems to be to copy Microsoft
Office as much as possible. It isn't trying to change the way people think
about document editing, or provide more meaningful ways to express ideas.
Microsoft created Visio, so let's go make Draw. What is the point? What value
does recreating successfully developed and supported applications provide?

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trbs
You make it sound like rewriting MS Office is a bad thing. At its core, MS
Office is a very solid piece of software, so why spend resources and divert
focus to try to improve on something Microsoft has already made near-perfect?
And rewriting it under the GPL license (so it's free) adds value to the
project as well. Not to mention that by rewriting it, you make it easy for
people to pick up your project easily.

~~~
overgryphon
Microsoft hasn't made Office perfect, that is the point. Why is Open Office
spending all of their considerable resources on mere copying, instead of
producing something valuable all of their own?

Open Office is inferior to Microsoft Office because their mission is to be
Microsoft Office, rather than to surpass it. They can never be a perfect copy.

~~~
trbs
Saying that Open Office isn't as good as MS Office because it's trying to
imitate them is a very ambitious statement. Especially considering that the
developer base for the two are different in many respects.

More importantly, let's say that Open Office does try to blaze a trail to an
extent that you mention. I would wager that it would probably come out like
Blender, where Blender tried to make the ideal 3D creation toolkit (compared
to say Maya). Blender's great! It's very powerful, it can do ALL kinds of
things. However, before the v2.5 UI overhaul it was incredibly goddamn hard to
learn and so it was only useful to a small section of their potential
interested users.

By avoiding this, Open Office tries to cater to what people are familiar with
so they can use it right after installing it. They don't have to waste time
trying to adapt to a new piece of software.

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xentronium
This is typical RIAA/MPAA accounting logic in action.

If OpenOffice cost actual money, it'd be probably worth somewhere about zero
because nobody would use it.

~~~
iso-8859-1
There are always people that will mistakenly pay for something they don't have
to pay for. See <http://flightprosim.com/>

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jiggy2011
Does the downloads number include people who pulled it out of the Ubuntu repo?
People who got it preinstalled with their distro? What about people upgrading
from one version to the next?

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trbs
(This should be obvious without saying it.)

As the first commend on /. mentions, there's no point in trying to make an
accurate estimate of a free piece of software's worth because it's FREE.
Everyone that is interested will download it, but you can't tack on a
competitor's value to that download because they didn't pay for the download.

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mmanfrin
Some sincerely hopeful numbers there.

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frozenport
Question: is 21*365=7665 smaller or greater than MS Office revenue?

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testimoney2
I wouldn't spend 5$ on OpenOffice!

