Intel heavy support to LibreOffice. Is Microsoft threatened?
blog.documentfoundation.org
blog.documentfoundation.org
For casual/light consumers of office documents, however, I think that Libre/Open office has very much arrived. I'm starting to see it in the default-install on my customers' machines.
In the longer term perhaps that will prove to be the thin end of the wedge.
And as a bonus, LibreOffice has a ``collage'' program in the form of LibreOffice Draw, the vector drawing program. Microsoft Office doesn't have that.
There were of course cases when more complex text documents were required, I had suggested Latex but others were not familiar with it and didn't want to spend as much time on formatting as is necessary for using Latex. They chose Adobe bundle. My central point is, as collaboration tools become more and more advanced, the need for packages like Libre/Open/MS Office will die down and web based tools and much more advanced packages like Adobe's will replace them.
Excel on the other hand, it is still irreplaceable unless people can make a REALLY intuitive UI to something like Matlab.
Boy, would I love to see that. Wasn't their a program out there a while back that, in somewhat that spirit, aimed to provide a Python backend to spreadsheet calculations? (Imagine if you used that Python backing to interface with SAGE ….)
And remember that thin client/thick client has always been a cycle. A linear prediction toward everyone using services such as Google Docs is probably wrong.
Also, open source software for non-geeks seems to be on the rise as its usability has improved surprisingly in the last 5 years. I wouldn't say it's a direct threat for Microsoft though as their important customers are big enterprises...
(and desktop programs could implement security features such as encryption, and/or use peer-to-peer protocols, preventing third-party privacy issues)
What if MS Office or LibreOffice eventually bake these in to their applications? There's no need for cloud storage for real time collaboration.
Has this ever happened with Google Docs? It doesn't sound unlikely that this will happen eventually, but I don't think it already has.
Google Docs may not be the end all, but I seriously doubt the future swinging back to documents living on a local client.
Why other? Microsoft has "web office" as well.
I wish LibreOffice had the slick minimal look and feel of GDocs. (and more akin to Apple's Pages). This would make it a competitor for average consumers who are generally not interested in MSFT's glut.
People complain a lot about the GUI of LibreOffice. But in fact it can be an advantage because it is much closer to Office 2003 than the new Office versions. And it seems that Office 2003 is still the de-facto standard in a lot of corporations. So moving to LibreOffice might in fact require less training than new versions of Microsoft Office.
There are other alternatives like Google Docs etc.
Therefore it is a threat to Microsoft. Will LibreOffice/Google Docs etc. kill MSOffice in the next Years/Month/Hours? Of course not. But it will have an impact on Office sales and MS would be stupid not to consider it a threat.
And of course there are still some technical issues. E.g. a missing alternative to MS Exchange. I know that there are some commercial open source alternatives. But there is not the one true alternative on the horizon. Another problem of course is backward compatibility, SharePoint, etc. But all of that can be fixed in the long run and will be with more support from companies like Intel.
When people discuss Windows or Office, we often dismiss the natural monopoly aspect of these products. There's a real level of momentum here because people don't want to bothered with things rendering funny or not having the same feature-set as their colleagues and clients. Every IT guy knows this because half the helpdesk tickets are "How can I open this .pages thing?" "They sent us the powerpoints but all the audio files are missing exentions!" etc thats common with basic OSX to Windows office issues, let alone a entirely different office suite. Sure hackers and computer nerds can do this stuff with ease, but remember, offices are all about the lowest common denominator.
OO and LO are nice for basic tasks and when interoperability isn't very important. Once you enter the realm of business, suddenly track changes needs to work and images not being aligned properly is suddenly a big deal.
LO and OO are almost identical products. OO has been at the stage its at now for 5 years. If it hasn't hurt Office by now it probably never will. I suspect OO is yet another "year of the linux desktop" that always 2 or 3 years away.
/ITguy
This is so true. Office IT is driven around 96% case of their users... the bottom 96% I believe. Power users are not the segment office IT cares about (or likes caring about IME). I wrote to the hg mailing list recently about a particular feature set, and I want to snip a certain statement I made, which is generalizable out to other tools besides hg.
""" Do note that any time someone has to consciously do something, e.g., hg push -B, pull -B, a large segment of users will not do that, even though (1) man pages say to, (2) their boss says to, (3), the program itself suggests it - in red letters, (4) training materials say to. This means that hg bookmarks will not work as a workflow for these users out of the box, because errors will constantly come up. """
You have to keep in mind that the decision makers don't care about the tools. What they care about is making sure the worker bees stay productive. To do that, they are averse to disrupting the environment by doing things like switching the productivity suite. To them, it's worth the license fees to not experience the inevitable drop in productivity (and rise in help desk costs) that a switch would drive.
When it comes to their core business of operating systems and productivity software, Microsoft won. They have no real competition.
Edit: looks like there's a web version coming out, based on the web version of GTK: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/10/libreoffice-coming-to-the...