Hi Alexandro, All, 2010/4/11 Alexandro Colorado <[email protected]>
> I was recently pull in an article talking about Open Office is no > longer free. The article talks about Oracle new direction and it also > cross with another annoucement of Oracle kill of opensolaris project. > > It seems the information is very contradictory but then again, I do > wonder what is the official push of oracle since they killed > StarOffice and then turn to Oracle Open Office which adds a lot of > confusion to the market now. > What I understood from Oracle's FAQ's about Oracle Open Office: StarOffice en StarSuite will no longer be the brand for the commercially supported distribution. Instead it will be replaced by the brand "Oracle Open Office" and not just "Open Office". Since the last one is a registered trademark in certain European countries like Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg. This is why OpenOffice.org uses the ".org" to make a separation between those two brands. So basically, "Oracle Open Office" is just "StarOffice", the commercial product of OpenOffice.org, but than renamed. Why it releases again a commercial distribution again so short after ditching StarOffice, this raises definitely some questions here. Most people use the term "Open Office" when they really mean > OpenOffice.org, so turning a 'typo' into a commercial brand sounds > like a pretty low hit to the market. If you dont pronounce correctly > the .org then it means you are talking about a commercial brand now. > Similar to what Novell did with Go-Oo (does anyone actually say > that?). > Novell does not promote their distribution of OpenOffice.org under the Go-Oo label. Instead, it is promoted as "OpenOffice.org Novell Edition". The Go-Oo is just a collaboration between some Linux-focused companies like Canonical, Novell and IBM. It provides some small changes that are necessary to be stable and fast enough with up-to-date patches for their respective distributions of Linux. (Something to do with the upstream development if I'm correct). Some other minor differences are the icon set, application buttons and file icons. But the product is just branded as OpenOffice.org. The only exception is IBM that uses the software under the Lotus-umbrella. > This fragmentation of the brand could really break the marketing > efforts of the community. Branding should take notice about this treat > as opposed to trying to control the OpenOffice.org brand so much but > rather work with this forks to rebrand themselves into a less fuzzy > term of their name. > I agree with you, but let's be hounest, If you would compare Lotus, NeoOffice (or Oracle OO) with OpenOffice.org branding you will see immediatly which brand looks more professional, and it's certainly not the last one. So those companies want to promote a product with a strong visual identity and create thus an entire new brand. But this is a different discussion which involves the new branding initiative (that, according to a lot of people, probably will fail). There are already a lot of topics about this "miscommunication from Sun/Oracle" and "the not consulting the community prior changes". (Not to mention that their is a discussion going on the French mailing list to boycot the next release by not validating their local builds until Oracle clarifies a thing or two here. Apparently, the community's input is being ignored.) To come back on-topic: I think that StarOffice was a much stronger brand than OpenOffice.org (and OracleOO), just because of all the trademark problems that occurs at the moment. Like using .org instead of just "Open Office" and in Brazil they use "BrOffice" instead of OpenOffice.org. In my personal opinion, not every open source project needs to incorporate the word "open" in their brand name. If Oracle wants to ditch StarOffice as a commercial brand name, why not use it instead for the open community? Oracle, Novell, Canonical can then just use "StarOffice Pro" (by company-name) to promote their builds. That way, there is just one brand to maintain and it can create a broader recognition. But again, that's just my personal view. The fragmentation is already done a long time ago, it's now up to Oracle and the Marketing team to actually consult the entire community including UX and locals to actually try to make this brand strong and make it work (as one). I'm not saying that it is possible to please everyone. But creating bleached icons that causes a serious visibility problem, even those for whom having a perfect eye-sight will not solve this. Instead linux distributions like ubuntu will just adapt the entire thing to make sure it integrates with their policy and branding of what is a user-friendly user-experience oriented, both in terms of product and branding. So the entire effort of this branding will be useless if issues like these are not resolved. With kind regards, Ismaël Grammenidis
