Another point is that MS has had a hard time pushing out MS Office 11 and
has gotten only 15% of it's current customers to do so. It will further
dilute the effect by pushing MS Office 12 out onto the shelves soon, too.
A few years ago, something less than 68% of MSO sales come from OEM sales.
That's got to be much less now with the flat economy and flat PC sales.
Historically, MS has relied, in part, on gaining enough marketshare with
the new versions that a threshold is crossed where the users of older
versions are inconvenienced by not being able to read the newer, slightly
incompatible formats and have to knuckle under and replace their software.
[1] Between MS Office 11, MS Office 12 and OOo, MS may not be able to
cross that threshold again and then trying to force a slightly
incompatibly file format will backfire.
A lot more people would use OOo, if they knew about it. Like I've said
before, whenever I show it or other F/OSS packages, people ask, "why
aren't we being told about these?" A non-English case in point is the
Swedish schools which have free access to StarOffice, yet no one (almost)
has even heard of StarOffice there and some schools are even removing
their computers because MS is too hard to maintain and they've never heard
of *anything* else.
If we could get more articles in mainstream newspapers or even mainstream
PC magazines, that would go a long way. Bruce Byfield writes well, but it
would help in this case to get an old name or two like Langa or Dvorak or
Pournelle. Someone has sent official, complementary CDs to them, right?
-Lars
[1] Of course there are other factors. One I used to notice was the
status of having money to burn on new purchases, basically a new
incarnation of the potlach.
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Software patents harm all Net-based business, write your MEP:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep6/owa/p_meps2.repartition?ilg=EN
On Sat, 30 Jul 2005, Ian Lynch wrote:
One person's opinion and not that well-informed. Linux has several years
head start so its not too surprising that it is further along the
publicity road. The desktop is a much bigger mountain to climb so it
will inevitably take longer. I doubt Microsoft consider OpenOffice.org
as no real threat. In fact since OOo came out MS Office prices have
fallen in schools - coincidence? Maybe, but I doubt it.
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