>What's of note here is not just the business about marketing programs and changing perceptions, but the fact that a key part of this “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” position is “engaging with Open Source communities and organizations”. This confirms what many of us have been warning about for some time: that Microsoft's new-found eagerness to “engage” with open source has nothing to do with a real desire to reach a pacific accommodation with free software, but is simply a way for it to fight against it from close up, and armed with inside knowledge.
I'm not really sure why this is hacker news. So Microsoft's hiring some marketers to look at OO? What did you expect them to do?
I hate how the author drags the old "they're infiltrating our open process" argument out again. Sun, IBM, etc., all profit from OSS and are given a pass.
To me, the real question is this: given that OO is free, so what if anyone uses it? Sun's strategy seems to be to come up with a reasonable clone to MS Office and give it away. I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish: they're not monetizing it, so why does it matter if they're taking marketshare away from MS? And they're not even very good at that: they're mostly behind MS's featureset every release. So what's the benefit for them? Corporate goodwill?
Maybe it will be in a few years when my generation has supplanted the current generation of decision-makers, but not now.
A short story:
My company has recently taken a liking to buying lots of netbooks for our roadwarriors. This is...fine, I guess. In my ideal world, they would all be running a stripped down linux distro with fvwm, thunderbird, firefox, and tn5250 (damn you, IBM)...but this is how the conversation went when I brought it up.
"Well...", the boss says apprehensively "I don't think so, they're not really familiar with that so let's just stay with what we've got"
"But there won't be anything different! I will make it look and feel exactly like what they're already used to. It will be faster, easier for me to fix when they're on the road and just simply better in every single conceivable way!"
"No...just leave what's on there on there."
"Fine...are they going to need MS office?"
"Yeah"
"Okay, you know that the license for that is like $300, right?"
"WHAT!?"
"Yeah, $300...as in more than we're actually paying for the netbook. Can I just give them thunderbird for mail and openoffice for office?"
"How much does it cost?"
"It's free."
"Free? Yeeeaaaaahhhhh....I don't think so."
/me facepalm
"Boss, do you understand that our mailserver, our fileserver, our firewall, our DNS server, our webserver, our database server, our VPN, and just about everything else other than the iSeries are all running on free software?"
"Just get office"
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So what is my point with recounting this little conversation I had? Openoffice might be a threat in the "college student looking for something to write papers with" market, but it isn't going to be a threat in the corporate world until it costs almost as much as MS office and changes its name.
People who don't know anything about a product will just look to the price. "This burger from McDonalds costs $1.29...the one from Applebees costs $12.99...the one from Applebees is surely better." and so-forth.
I really wish there was a version of OO that I could buy for $150...then I would finally get to start using it and wouldn't have to deal with Outhouse anymore.
I'm not seeing how A confirms B here.