Daily Archive: September 27, 2004
OpenOffice.Org have published their marketting plan. ZDNet UK has a good article on the topic. The full plan can be found online here. I particularly liked the following quote:
“Microsoft, our major competitor, has a marketing budget of five to 10 billion US dollars, while we have 25 cents in a PayPal account,” said McCreesh.
OpenOffice.org have identified the following target markets:
According to the OpenOffice marketing plan, the main markets for the office suite are government offices; education establishments; public libraries; small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); not-for-profit organisations (NFPs); own equipment manufacturers (OEMs) building PCs with pre-installed software; and Linux distributions looking for an office suite to bundle.
Although StarOffice has more ambitious target markets. Overall the plan targets OOo having a market share of apprximately 50% by 2010.
Everyone knows that Linux is flavour of the decade, so I found this blog post very interesting as it explained why its not easy to replace Solaris with Linux or to merge Solaris capabililities into some future version of Linux. It also illustrates one of the challenges faced by theOpen Source community in general, how to you coordinate major changes that affect hundreds of files, distributed architecture and design seems more difficult than distributed development. The main guts of the post follows:
The main reason we can’t just jump into Linux is because Linux doesn’t align with our engineering principles, and no amount of patches will ever change that. In the Solaris kernel group, we have strong beliefs in reliability, observability, serviceability, resource management, and binary compatibility. Linus has shown time and time again that these just aren’t part of his core principles, and in the end he is in sole control of Linux’s future. Projects such as crash dumps, kernel debuggers, and tracing frameworks have been repeatedly rejected by Linus, often because they are perceived as vendor added features. Not to mention the complete lack of commitment to binary compatibility (outside of the system call interface). …
One of the researchers who works for my company produced a great guide on the uses and abuses of cummuication and collaboration technologies a few years ago. When I first read it I was impressed but at the same time depressed at the neglect that most companies have of their basic (common) business processes. I have continued to be interested in how companies can extract maximum advantage from simple IT infrastructure technologies by focussing on how to use their tools to best effect.
The following post therefore caught my eye – seven rules for e-mail – it would be great to see a best practice debate on how the phone, SMS, email, syndication, IM and conferencing technologies should be used. The seven rules above provides a good but limited start.
As an illustration of such a debate in action, albeit on a slightly different subject, there is no better example than the getting things done forums.
