The future of OpenOffice.org
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.
Reading about OpenOffice (and OpenSource at large) and ‘marketing plans’ I often wondered whatever happened to the development strategy and marketing plans of that network back in the 80s …I think it came to be known as The Internet 🙂
Some unplanned things (e.g. The Internet) just …happen; some planned things (e.g. universal B-ISDN) just …don’t. If the Federal Government decides to buy OpenSource products, it might as well drop any anti-monopoly actions against Microsoft – they will be unnecessary.
TCP/IP was anathema to both IBM and the big network companies at a time; it was NOT in GOSIP; it was untouchable. It only took a couple of major procurements which ‘bent’ GOSIP for TCP/IP to become de facto standard, despite its known technical shortcomings, before anybody had a marketing plan for it.
The GOSIP comparison is interesting, but not that appropriate, GOSIP at the time did not have 95% market share. I think perhaps OpenOffice.org’s simple XML file format, by comparison with Microsoft’s very complex XML file format with support for custom schema’s may be the better example. Already there’s discussion on making the OpenOffice.org format an ISO standard and competing Open Source office tools are planning to adopt it as their standard format as well. The EU in a recent study favoured the MS Office XML approach, but their track record in picking winning technologies is not that impressive!