Hi Bill, I have read your post with great interest. More comments in line...
On Monday 18 April 2005 17:57, Bill Wilken wrote: > I do believe, however, that the sponsors of OpenOffice would do > well to remember how Microsoft succeeded in displacing > WordPerfect as the market leader in word processing. Among other > things, they made certain that users could import complex > WordPerfect documents into Word with very little disruption in > formatting. The competition of OpenOffice.org (OOo) versus Microsoft Office (MSO) is quite different from the competition between Word and WordPerfect (WP). IMHO, Word succeeded in burying WP by being integrated into Microsoft's distribution channels. That competition was what Clayton Christesen would have called a "competitive battle", meaning that it was a titanic struggle over the distribution channels. (As opposed to a disruptive battle between OOo and MSO). Both WP and Word were offered by market leaders in their respective industries. When WP was dominant, MS's revenue stream was tied to MS-DOS. MS had not yet entered the applications market in a big way. MS leveraged it control of the desktop to pressure OEMs to package sell Word, and later MSO, with the operating system (OS). In any event, the struggle at that time was primarily a developed world struggle over control of what Clayton Christensen calls the upper market tier, comprised of customers who are willing to pay a premium for the latest and greatest features. WP and Word were what Christensen calls "integrated architectures" in that the state of the art was still not really "good enough" for modular solutions to bloom. OOo, by contrast, is a modular architecture being offered by a market entrant (Sun is not a market leader in end user software, Sun has in the past focused more on the plumbing). Sun's strategy is not to make a frontal assault on the opponent's position, as was the case with the "competitive battle" between Word and WP. Sun is part of a community which is seeking to disrupt the market leader from below in market tiers where Microsoft's business model does not work. Microsoft makes money by selling end user desktop software. Microsoft does not make any money by selling into the kinds of lower end market tiers where OOo is booming. I am producing a movie called "The Digital Tipping Point" about this topic, and so we visited the favelas (slums) of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where we saw heavy usage of OOo and absolutely zero usage of MSO. In a pattern that we saw repeated over and over and over again in the places where we filmed, we saw that OOo is making huge inroads into places where people access computers and the Internet not at their homes, but rather, at community centers or other shared computing places, like a place in someone's business that is open to the public or public libraries. http://www.digitaltippingpoint.com In an interview that will be published soon on MadPenguin.org magazine, Sun policy wonk Simon Phipps said that Sun monetizes Java (and by implication, OOo) by creating a commons where multiple companies can compete. Other companies, he said, compete by creating corrals where they can close off fertile ground for their own exclusive control. http://www.madpenguin.org In other words, you are correct in saying that it is important for OOo to improve compatibility with the Microsoft Office standards. However, that is only half the story. The other half of the story is that Sun is beating Microsoft to deployment in the part of the world which will be experiencing the greatest market growth over the next 10 years: the developing world. Only 1 billion of the world's six billion people live in countries with annual incomes in excess of $10,000.00 USD per average. Competing for sales in that top of the pyramid is important. But Sun is following hockey great Wayne Gretzky's advice to "skate to where the puck will be," (the developing world) rather than skating to where the puck currently is (the developed world). The competition between OOo and MSO is, in some ways, a competition between apples and oranges. MSO cannot succeed in the favelas of Sao Paulo. It simply can't. No one there can afford it. At the same time, OOo is still way behind MSO in terms of integration into the vast business network of users and vendors who depend on being able to move data from MSO into other third party applications such as lawyer desktop software, etc. I'm a lawyer, and I simply cannot find a single vendor who will integrate OOo with calendaring software. So I just do without, and accept that shortcoming as part of the trade-off that I get for no viruses, no license hassles, etc. But if OOo follows in the footsteps of other disruptive technologies such as the telephone, which destroyed former market leader Western Union, then OOo will steadily increase in performance and adoption, and the day will come where there will be a competitive battle between open source vendors and strictly proprietary vendors such as Microsoft. The Bells buried Western Union; Sony buried RCA; Honda buried Harley Davidson in the mass market; and if history is any indication, Microsoft should be worried, because it has absolutely no plans that I can see for getting into the open source space. By the way, the telephone's disruptive influence started in 1870, and is still continuing on today. The biggest growing device for computing in Asia is the cell phone. Many of them run Linux. Havard Biz Prof Clayton Christensen thinks that this migration of clients to the tiny device could kill Microsoft, if it doesn't buy or build a Blackberry type device in a big fat hurry: http://news.com.com/Advice+to+Microsoft+Learn+to+love+Linux/2100-7344_3-5411843.html Here's a link to Clayton Christensen: http://news.com.com/Advice+to+Microsoft+Learn+to+love+Linux/2100-7344_3-5411843.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
