Oracle start charging for Sun's Office ODF plug-in | Hacker News Reader

Oracle start charging for Sun's Office ODF plug-in

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15 pointskolektiv7 comments

Oracle is one of these companies that seems to have a corporate culture which finds it morally wrong to offer any product for free for which they can legally charge you.

If Java were not already open source, you can bet they would find some way to start charging for the JRE.

For them, it's just business.

Yes, you can argue that it makes no business sense to do this, nor to charge for the ODF adapter, but for them, business is making people buy a product, even if it costs them in the long run. It's almost like a mental block.

It seems that Larry Ellison ought to love OpenOffice. It's a really inexpensive way to constrain Microsoft's air supply.

When OpenOffice reached feature parity with Office 2003, Microsoft was stuck between a rock and a hard place. If it didn't do something semi-profound with the suite, it risked being compared side-to-side with a free competitor. However, if it innovated, it risked alienating those users who found comfort in the familiar. Could the 2007 "ribbon" have been a competitive response? Or, was it just a way to differentiate its next version so users might want to upgrade?

Also, because of OpenOffice, it's harder for Microsoft to extract high prices from Corporate America for Office. If it gets too greedy, CIOs will start to consider what the retraining costs would be to adopt OpenOffice.

What's the total development cost for OpenOffice per year? $50M? Its existence probably costs Microsoft $1B in lost revenue opportunity compared to a world in which no feature parity competitors exist.

The real threat to both OO and Office is obviously the web, but killing .doc and .xls as exchange formats will be as tough as killing off the fax machine. It's not like Oracle cares if OO dies -- as long as MSOffice dies along with it.

If Oracle has any desire to popularize ODF, this is about the dumbest thing they could possibly do. It doesn't even seem likely to result in much short-term profit.

Random guess #1: If some Oracle insiders are saying "we don't care about ODF, and this makes us no money - kill it," other insiders who want to save the plugin may respond with "people want this, sell it!" as a delaying tactic. Expect the plugin to die in six months after nobody buys it.

Random guess #2: Sun already had some contracts that require it to support this plugin for some time, but Oracle doesn't truly want to encourage further adoption.

My guess: some VP decide this could be a way to reach his targets.

Any company must be acutely aware of execs sacrificing long-term survival for a quick buck.

Not that I think the ODF plugin is important for Oracle's survival, but, if left unchecked, this kind of attitude is very, very dangerous.

Yeah, whether they mean it to be or not, this could easily be the kiss of death for ODF.

Now, if you save in Word's native format, you have to buy a copy of Word (which is a sunk cost to most people anyway). But if you use ODF, you have to pay for Word plus $90 for a plugin.

Whatever theoretical advantages ODF might offer, it's not going to be $90/user worth to most people, or worth using OpenOffice instead of Word.

Too bad; it was a neat idea while it lasted.

Well, that kills that.

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