Ian Lynch wrote: >>From an OOo marketing point of view, being allied to an open format is a > good selling point while the main competition is on a closed format but > if OOo starts to become the dominant office suite, an open format would > be less good (from the OOo marketing point of view) because it would > tend to promote competition from other software that also adopts the > open format. I guess some people would say that would be good as a > driving force for improving OOo and it would probably ensure that OOo > was never as dominant as MSO is now.
Great to see Google support OOo file formats for their 'View as HTML' feature. In case you missed it, there's been a Google Desktop plugin for OOo for some time: http://desktop.google.com/plugins/indextheopenoffice.html I don't believe that a product supporting open standards cannot be as dominant as Microsoft is today. If the product works, has good support (free or paid), is secure, and supports most of the features people need, then there's no reason it cannot dominate the market. Apache more or less dominates the web server market. It has been able to maintain its dominance because the quality of the product discourages (or obviates the need for) those who might develop an alternative. The difference between Apache's dominance and Microsoft's is that the former is based mostly on merit whereas Microsoft's dominance is helped by billions of dollars of marketing and monopolistic pressure. The latter dominance is very difficult to break whereas apache's dominance is only as good as their next version and recent track record. Given the current and growing reach of OpenOffice.org, I believe OOo is on track to dominate the office suite market. If Linux/BSD ever gets a foothold on the desktop, OOo will be a huge beneficiary and is likely to dominate. But OOo must do its part to stay on track. Security may be the most important element of keeping users (and IT decision-makers) happy. That's the biggest reason Sendmail's market share has been eroding for years to Postfix and Qmail. That's why wu-ftpd has been supplanted by proftpd and vsftpd. Some attribute Firefox's recent gains to IE security issues. It seems to me that Microsoft has finally gotten macro viruses under control. But is it possible for OOo to claim that it's more secure than MS Office? If so, we should be marketing the hell out of that. :-) IMO, nothing moves software better than security issues. Regards, Ed --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
