OpenOffice: Worth $21 Million Per Day, If It Were Microsoft Office 361
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.)
Wrong way to see it (Score:4, Interesting)
False equivalence (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some obvious problems...
1. It is free. If it costed $150 per download the numbers would obviously be quite different.
2. How much of this is the same person upgrading a current version or reinstalling on a new computer? If it were office this activity would not register as a new purchase it would be closer to inserting the installation DVD.
3. OpenOffice is not feature competitive with MS office. While it does not necessarily need to be to be in order to be relevant and useful to a great many people... for $150 it actually kind of does.
Re:Troll... (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
It's been years since most people ever saw any training on MS Office, if ever, and the sands have shifted under their feet. It has become more obtuse every release.
At work we switched totally to Office Libre, and haven't looked back. There is a wealth of How To information on line, making the training available on par with anything Microsoft provides.
Re:It is a good alternative to Microsoft Office (Score:5, Interesting)
The one thing MS does still have on OO/LO is that it looks prettier.
Re:Troll... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've argued to our licensing team that all the extra features in office are BAD. How many idiot managers do we have out there running their own personal databases out of excel and access without IS oversite? How many times does someone leave, we find one of these, then have to migrate it to a real server... all the while finding huge errors in their methodology and implementation? Do away with the nonsense.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
How many people would download OpenOffice if Microsoft Office was free?
How many people would download OpenOffice if it wasn't free?
How many people would pay hundreds of dollars for MS Office if their company wasn't picking up the tab?
We could do this bullshit all day man, but this isn't even a get-what-you-pay-for argument here, nor should it be who is the superior product. It should come down to what product gets the job done for the best price, since most users only use 5% of the features in any given suite.
Since business is rife with software corruption, this logic almost never comes into play.
Re:potentially worth... (Score:4, Interesting)
There, I fixed it for you.
Download doesn't equal use, and use doesn't equal a willingness/ability to pay, and a willingness/ability to pay doesn't mean they would pay the same price as MS Office charges (the estimated $150/user).
Re:potentially worth... (Score:4, Interesting)
I would go one further and admit to installing LibreOffice *alongside* a full MS Office installation at work. The ribbon interface in recent Office version just drives me completely nuts, and the versions of Office that do not have it yet are getting so outdated that they have serious problems opening files from the newer versions (even with the converters installed). Whereas LibreOffice generally doesn't. The formatting may be slightly off, but at least I can get to the content.
The company I work for has a full MS subscription so it's not about saving money. It's just that in recent version Microsoft made the interface so atrocious to use, while continuing to ignore long-standing, over a decade old formatting/style and image movement bugs that you run into with even the most trivial of documents (say, a few page design doc with some screenshots), and which type of problem I remember noticing since Office 97, that even LibreOffice is starting to look attractive by comparison. And yes, I fully agree that is saying something.
Yes, I seriously tried using the ribbons for a while, I just *cannot* bear it. Too bad they had to force this on all Office users, since it's holding me back from using quite a lot of nice new features (major improvements in Powerpoint, say) in recent versions.