[ruediger]

Microsoft is threatened. Selling Office (and Windows) licenses is the backbone of Microsoft and that's what's financing all the other adventures. Large companies have to buy Office licenses for every workstation. Even with large customer discount they still pay millions on license fees. With LibreOffice now being independent of a large company it becomes a viable alternative for those large corporations. It's much cheaper to hire a LibreOffice developer or get a company like SuSE for contract work on it to do all the required customizations than buying MSOffice licenses.

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.

[drzaiusapelord]

Its not just things like the GUI, its interoperability between MS formats, common "advanced" features like track changes, the lack of enterprise support, and of course the political will for organizations to switch away from the de facto standard to something a little hairier for the sake of saving $300 per employee, which is peanuts in all the places I've worked at.

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

[pnathan]

> offices are all about the lowest common denominator.

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. """

[Czarnian]

Don't underestimate the power of institutional inertia. The large companies that make up Microsoft's market segment will resist change for the sake of resisting change.

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.