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

rbowen of SourceForge writes with an interesting way to look at the value of certain free software options: "Apache OpenOffice 3.4.1 has averaged 138,928 downloads per day. That is an average value to the public of $21 million per day, as calculated by savings over buying the competing product. Or $7.61 billion (7.61 thousand million) per year." (That works out to about $150 per copy of MS Office. There are some holes in the argument, but it holds true for everyone who but for a free office suite would have paid that much for Microsoft's. The numbers are even bigger if you toss in LibreOffice, too.)

Re:potentially worth...

[Belial6]

How many people in this list would pirate instead of pay.

True, Open office make several million dollars a day in profits for Microsoft.

Re:potentially worth...

[Beardo the Bearded]

I pirated Open Office just on principle.

Re:Not as good.

[colinrichardday]

Yeah, LibreOffice Calc has an array check box for operations that return arrays. Nothing like Excel's intuitive F2 Cntl-shift-enter.

Re:potentially worth...

[symbolset]

They are missing out though on the cyclic obsolescence that has come to characterize what office document suites are for. Without this how will they know when it's time to update their PCs and operating systems, discard and re-buy their printers and server-side support systems? Without the periodic need to update one's office suite to support the features required in documents received from users of the new version there is no cue. They would keep using the same PC for far longer, and update their servers only when the hardware innovation provided true value-add and ROI. LOB applications and third-party plugins would continue to work indefinitely. End-user data would no longer go out of format support. This is anarchy!

Re:Troll...

[Anonymous Coward]

He sent it out it OOXML.