5 ms·

OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office

16 points by caffeinewriter 14y ago

fleitz 14y ago
Yes, and if a Chevy Malibu could be sold for what BMW 5 series sells for then GM wouldn't have gone bankrupt. Also like the 'street value' of drugs quoted by cops, no one ever pays retail for MS Office so the number is even more meaningless. I'm really not sure what this savings number means because for anyone who uses office to make money open office is most certainly not equivalent to MS Office. You only save money with open office is your needs are very limited, your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might ever send a document to is also using OpenOffice. I'd gladly pay $150 for MS Office just so my documents are readable. Yes, I know that if only everyone switched to OpenOffice etc than all would be well, but the problem is people who write big cheques use MS Office, therefore if your document looks like shit and a competitors looks good you don't get cut a big cheque.
- jsight 14y ago
  "You only save money with open office is your needs are very limited, your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might ever send a document to is also using OpenOffice." You do make some good points, but this sentence doesn't fit at all. There are quite a few scenarios where LibreOffice can be a $$$-saver, and it certainly doesn't require your time to be "worth nothing".
  - fleitz 14y ago
    For sure it's a bit of hyperbole, but I think its essentially true. Lets say you make min wage, or $10/hour... Lets say Open Office costs you 5 minutes per day in horrible interface, making docs work with office, etc. Lets say MS Office actually costs $150... ($150 / ($10 / hour)) / (5 minutes) = 180 days Basically after 1 year you've paid for MS Office.
    - delano 14y ago
      The quality and compatibility of Open Office has improved a lot since it's inception. So what you're advocating is a sliding scale of value which is reasonable. What you have not included is the TCO for MS Office which includes a lot of the same things like UI issues, work lost due to crashes, compatibility with other services (including Google docs), etc. Open source often lags behind, but it gets better over time and also often exceeds closed-source equivalents.
      - gecko 14y ago
        I'm no MS fanboy. I have eight computers in my apartment. Exactly one runs a Microsoft OS, and it has an XBOX logo on its DVD drive. OpenOffice and LibreOffice come absolutely nowhere close to Microsoft Office in functionality, speed, UI, interoperability, customizability, or anything else. Since there's a pile of posts on the front page right now about how Excel is supposed to stink for business apps, let's turn to the logical alternative for trivial-to-create internal applications: Access. To which the Libre/OpenOffice alternative would be...okay, I guess Base? But is this thing a front-end to existing database systems, or is it its own database system? HSQL seems like the default; can I email this around? Why are the functions with this different than with the one Greg made that isn't on HSQL? And how do I script this, exactly? I'm used to VBA; can I use Python? Looks like maybe I can from my Ubuntu laptop, but then the guy down the hall on the Windows box can't? I could've pulled up similar examples from the word processor or the spreadsheet. LibreOffice Pivot Tables (formerly called something like Data Navigator or Data Pilot) are slower, vastly harder to use, and horribly underfeatured compared to Excel's Pivot Tables. The layout quality of LibreOffice's word processor compared to Word's is almost as bad as Word's to TeX's, which unfortunately also translates to the presentation module, making it easy for me to see from a mile away whether someone used Keynote, PowerPoint, a custom HTML/CSS solution, or LibreOffice. Open source improves, but ultimately, non-commercially-backed open-source improves in ways that make the developers' lives more interesting. You're looking at something that people work on in their spare time. If it's not scratching an itch, then why bother? And a lot of the user niceties that come in Microsoft Office are not things people want to work on in their spare time, because you or I, faced with a pivot table problem, will instead write a Python script, skipping the office suite entirely in the first place. If you don't need MS Office, great. More power to you. And there are many people who do not, so you've got good company. If you do need MS Office, then LibreOffice is a horrid substitute.
- olegbl 14y ago
  "Yes, and if a Chevy Malibu could be sold for what BMW 5 series sells for then GM wouldn't have gone bankrupt." This is probably the best product quality analogy I've ever read. I remember the days of using LibreOffice on Linux. I always gave up after 5-10 exceptionally frustrating minutes and just went to Google Docs instead (though now, MS Office Web Apps would likely be my choice on Linux).
- Shorel 14y ago
  "Note: There are various ways to estimate value. The commercial value of alternative goods, which we used above, is only one approach. But it is the same approach used when estimating revenue lost to software piracy, when they assume that if users did not use software illegally they would pay for commercial licenses at the prevailing rate. So there is some justification for using the same approach here."
davidw 14y ago
Ah, another open-office thread. I'm always amazed at the quantity of people that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project. Granted, OpenOffice may well never surpass MS Office, but to even be playing in the same league is a victory of sorts, given the incredible disparity of resources behind both projects. And for your average person writing a letter, trying to calculate something with a spreadsheet, or put together a simple presentation, they absolutely are in the same league. For me, OpenOffice wins hands down, because it runs on Linux, which is the OS I choose to use, and is much more versatile and repurposable, being open source. I use bits of it for LiberWriter.
- brudgers 14y ago
  Open Office falls short compared to Office for the average user in the same way that Linux falls short for such non-technical people - poor documentation and support. My mom can go to the public library and choose one of several books. She can even take classes on Office at the senior center. The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person. The bookstore has shelves of books on Office. When there are three books on LibreOffice, I'll consider buying a lottery ticket. I wish things were different. But they aren't.
  - davidw 14y ago
    There's a difference between saying that for many things, MS Office wins and some of the spittle-flecked rants about OpenOffice that one sees.
    - brudgers 14y ago
      For the average person they are not in the same league due to the differences in the support ecosystems. OpenOffice and LibreOffice simply are not robust in that regard. And that's where the average person's needs are - not in a code repository.
  - lumberjack 14y ago
    >The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person. Actually I've found the exact opposite. FOSS tends to have very active and very engaging communities that actually provide answers. Whereas on most win/ms software forums, there are usually a ton of people who are just parroting each other without understanding how completely far of they are from the crux of the problem. Of course this is all just a bunch of anecdotes.
jiggy2011 14y ago
Does the downloads number include people who pulled it out of the Ubuntu repo? People who got it preinstalled with their distro? What about people upgrading from one version to the next?
trbs 14y ago
(This should be obvious without saying it.) As the first commend on /. mentions, there's no point in trying to make an accurate estimate of a free piece of software's worth because it's FREE. Everyone that is interested will download it, but you can't tack on a competitor's value to that download because they didn't pay for the download.
mmanfrin 14y ago
Some sincerely hopeful numbers there.
xentronium 14y ago
This is typical RIAA/MPAA accounting logic in action. If OpenOffice cost actual money, it'd be probably worth somewhere about zero because nobody would use it.
- iso-8859-1 14y ago
  There are always people that will mistakenly pay for something they don't have to pay for. See http://flightprosim.com/ http://flightprosim.com/
frozenport 14y ago
Question: is 21*365=7665 smaller or greater than MS Office revenue?
testimoney2 14y ago
I wouldn't spend 5$ on OpenOffice!

Yes, and if a Chevy Malibu could be sold for what BMW 5 series sells for then GM wouldn't have gone bankrupt. Also like the 'street value' of drugs quoted by cops, no one ever pays retail for MS Office so the number is even more meaningless. I'm really not sure what this savings number means because for anyone who uses office to make money open office is most certainly not equivalent to MS Office. You only save money with open office is your needs are very limited, your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might ever send a document to is also using OpenOffice. I'd gladly pay $150 for MS Office just so my documents are readable. Yes, I know that if only everyone switched to OpenOffice etc than all would be well, but the problem is people who write big cheques use MS Office, therefore if your document looks like shit and a competitors looks good you don't get cut a big cheque.

jsight 14y ago
"You only save money with open office is your needs are very limited, your time is worth nothing, and everyone you might ever send a document to is also using OpenOffice." You do make some good points, but this sentence doesn't fit at all. There are quite a few scenarios where LibreOffice can be a $$$-saver, and it certainly doesn't require your time to be "worth nothing".
- fleitz 14y ago
  For sure it's a bit of hyperbole, but I think its essentially true. Lets say you make min wage, or $10/hour... Lets say Open Office costs you 5 minutes per day in horrible interface, making docs work with office, etc. Lets say MS Office actually costs $150... ($150 / ($10 / hour)) / (5 minutes) = 180 days Basically after 1 year you've paid for MS Office.
  - delano 14y ago
    The quality and compatibility of Open Office has improved a lot since it's inception. So what you're advocating is a sliding scale of value which is reasonable. What you have not included is the TCO for MS Office which includes a lot of the same things like UI issues, work lost due to crashes, compatibility with other services (including Google docs), etc. Open source often lags behind, but it gets better over time and also often exceeds closed-source equivalents.
    - gecko 14y ago
      I'm no MS fanboy. I have eight computers in my apartment. Exactly one runs a Microsoft OS, and it has an XBOX logo on its DVD drive. OpenOffice and LibreOffice come absolutely nowhere close to Microsoft Office in functionality, speed, UI, interoperability, customizability, or anything else. Since there's a pile of posts on the front page right now about how Excel is supposed to stink for business apps, let's turn to the logical alternative for trivial-to-create internal applications: Access. To which the Libre/OpenOffice alternative would be...okay, I guess Base? But is this thing a front-end to existing database systems, or is it its own database system? HSQL seems like the default; can I email this around? Why are the functions with this different than with the one Greg made that isn't on HSQL? And how do I script this, exactly? I'm used to VBA; can I use Python? Looks like maybe I can from my Ubuntu laptop, but then the guy down the hall on the Windows box can't? I could've pulled up similar examples from the word processor or the spreadsheet. LibreOffice Pivot Tables (formerly called something like Data Navigator or Data Pilot) are slower, vastly harder to use, and horribly underfeatured compared to Excel's Pivot Tables. The layout quality of LibreOffice's word processor compared to Word's is almost as bad as Word's to TeX's, which unfortunately also translates to the presentation module, making it easy for me to see from a mile away whether someone used Keynote, PowerPoint, a custom HTML/CSS solution, or LibreOffice. Open source improves, but ultimately, non-commercially-backed open-source improves in ways that make the developers' lives more interesting. You're looking at something that people work on in their spare time. If it's not scratching an itch, then why bother? And a lot of the user niceties that come in Microsoft Office are not things people want to work on in their spare time, because you or I, faced with a pivot table problem, will instead write a Python script, skipping the office suite entirely in the first place. If you don't need MS Office, great. More power to you. And there are many people who do not, so you've got good company. If you do need MS Office, then LibreOffice is a horrid substitute.
olegbl 14y ago
"Yes, and if a Chevy Malibu could be sold for what BMW 5 series sells for then GM wouldn't have gone bankrupt." This is probably the best product quality analogy I've ever read. I remember the days of using LibreOffice on Linux. I always gave up after 5-10 exceptionally frustrating minutes and just went to Google Docs instead (though now, MS Office Web Apps would likely be my choice on Linux).
Shorel 14y ago
"Note: There are various ways to estimate value. The commercial value of alternative goods, which we used above, is only one approach. But it is the same approach used when estimating revenue lost to software piracy, when they assume that if users did not use software illegally they would pay for commercial licenses at the prevailing rate. So there is some justification for using the same approach here."

davidw 14y ago

Ah, another open-office thread. I'm always amazed at the quantity of people that show up on these to piss all over what is a pretty amazing project. Granted, OpenOffice may well never surpass MS Office, but to even be playing in the same league is a victory of sorts, given the incredible disparity of resources behind both projects. And for your average person writing a letter, trying to calculate something with a spreadsheet, or put together a simple presentation, they absolutely are in the same league. For me, OpenOffice wins hands down, because it runs on Linux, which is the OS I choose to use, and is much more versatile and repurposable, being open source. I use bits of it for LiberWriter.

brudgers 14y ago
Open Office falls short compared to Office for the average user in the same way that Linux falls short for such non-technical people - poor documentation and support. My mom can go to the public library and choose one of several books. She can even take classes on Office at the senior center. The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person. The bookstore has shelves of books on Office. When there are three books on LibreOffice, I'll consider buying a lottery ticket. I wish things were different. But they aren't.
- davidw 14y ago
  There's a difference between saying that for many things, MS Office wins and some of the spittle-flecked rants about OpenOffice that one sees.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    For the average person they are not in the same league due to the differences in the support ecosystems. OpenOffice and LibreOffice simply are not robust in that regard. And that's where the average person's needs are - not in a code repository.
- lumberjack 14y ago
  >The support for FOSS alternatives just doesn't compare in terms of diversity or ease of use for a lay person. Actually I've found the exact opposite. FOSS tends to have very active and very engaging communities that actually provide answers. Whereas on most win/ms software forums, there are usually a ton of people who are just parroting each other without understanding how completely far of they are from the crux of the problem. Of course this is all just a bunch of anecdotes.

jiggy2011 14y ago

Does the downloads number include people who pulled it out of the Ubuntu repo? People who got it preinstalled with their distro? What about people upgrading from one version to the next?

trbs 14y ago

(This should be obvious without saying it.) As the first commend on /. mentions, there's no point in trying to make an accurate estimate of a free piece of software's worth because it's FREE. Everyone that is interested will download it, but you can't tack on a competitor's value to that download because they didn't pay for the download.

mmanfrin 14y ago

Some sincerely hopeful numbers there.

xentronium 14y ago

This is typical RIAA/MPAA accounting logic in action. If OpenOffice cost actual money, it'd be probably worth somewhere about zero because nobody would use it.

iso-8859-1 14y ago
There are always people that will mistakenly pay for something they don't have to pay for. See http://flightprosim.com/ http://flightprosim.com/

frozenport 14y ago

Question: is 21*365=7665 smaller or greater than MS Office revenue?

testimoney2 14y ago

I wouldn't spend 5$ on OpenOffice!