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.)
potentially worth... (Score:5, Insightful)
...people are downloading it for free so they're not necessarily paying customers...
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Cite?
I've never seen Microsoft talk about piracy at all. At least not since they added the activation system.
That is not a copy (Score:2)
But what is that in theoretical dollars? (Score:2)
There are people worth more than 21 million on Youtube in theoretical dollars [southparkstudios.com]. Maybe one of them can just buy Office from MS outright.
Re:potentially worth... (Score:4, Insightful)
...people are downloading it for free so they're not necessarily paying customers...
And, more importantly, the number of downloads has no real correlation to the number of users -- which is what the paid products are based on. I've downloaded OpenOffice probably fifty times since its inception. I've bought Microsoft Office once.
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The figures in the article are based on downloads of a single product version, 3.4.1, since August 2012. How many times have you downloaded OpenOffice 3.4.1?
Re:potentially worth... (Score:5, Informative)
And how many of those who downloaded 3.4.1, also had 3.4.0 before? Even MS makes minor updates available for free...
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, Insightful)
How many people in this list would pirate instead of pay. How many of these downloads represent aborted downloads that are retried (it is a large download). How many of these would have been covered by the home license (I believe you get up to three computers with the normal licensed product -- as opposed to Student edition or other licenses). etc.
You missed the most important question. Out of those 138,928 downloads per day, how many people actually continued to use Open Office and how many used it briefly, discovered that it is crap and downloaded a pirated copy of Microsoft Office.
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Re:potentially worth... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, the biggest assumption being that anyone would use OpenOffice or LibreOffice if they had to pay the same price as MS Office.
Re:potentially worth... (Score:5, Informative)
The summary also notes this is savings to the end user. If I don't need all the features found in MS Office I shouldn't need to buy it. If I get what I need and pay $0 I've saved $150.
That's the whole point of the summary. Some segment of the public are getting what they need to get their "office productivity" tasks done for less cost.
Re:potentially worth... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:potentially worth... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most OO or LO users would switch to something like Google Docs or AbiWord if they had to pay the same price as they would for MS Office. Personal observation, yadda yadda, but the majority of Office users don't actually need Office, they just need Word, and for *most* of us, AbiWord will quite happily serve their needs.
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Ironically, you can use Openoffice to fix broken Word documents.
You open them, then resave them as a word doc and that often fixes them.
If not- look for overlapping grey lines around images and text boxes. Changing it so the lines don't overlap often fixes crashes.
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I've never had trouble with mail-merge in either OO or LO, but the result are blah to me, Word borders on ugly; if your going to do that and want good looking results it's hard to beat writing a Perl script to query the database and generating real LaTeX documents and compiling those!
Re:potentially worth... (Score:5, Informative)
You are applying the logic of a corporation to a non-profit. This is like applying classical mechanics to massless particles. It doesn't work. The price/demand curve is based on competition. Nonprofits are not competing. They are giving it away for free, regardless of the value. There is no price/demand curve for them.
TFA is talking about the "value" of OpenOffice to the world, the value provided by a nonprofit organization.
If a group of doctors volunteer their time and work in a clinic and treat the poor, pro bono, are they not entitled to claim the value that they provide is based on their normal rate? Same question for lawyers who provide pro bono counsel to those who cannot afford it. Can't they claim the value they produce per their normal hourly rates?
No one would argue that the value of their volunteer efforts is zero because their "customers" would not pay the prevailing rate. That is irrelevant, since no one is asking them to pay that rate. It is a charitable act.
The article merely applies the same logic to professionals in the engineering field, whose public service is in the form of publishing open source software.
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Re:potentially worth... (Score:5, Insightful)
To look at the analogy another way, MS Office charges you a higher rate so that it can turn up in a gay robe and wig, whereas Open Office rocks up in jeans and t-shirt but does 99% of the same things for far less money.
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Then there are people like me that download it once and install it across 20 machines.
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Or, how many of those people purchased Microsoft Office and found out it was complete crap, so they had to install some alternative? They already gave money to Microsoft, so they shouldn't be included either.
Most Microsoft Office users don't even pay for office. They get it free with their jobs.
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I hate the new style of Office, but from the perspective of people looking for an office-like suite of tools, MS Office is damned good compared to what I've seen as alternatives.
I'm certain that there are a few tasks which would result in Word/Excel/Powerpoint being complete crap, but for the general tasks of 'edit document', 'use spreadsheet', 'generate slides', I don't think that any honest person could call Office complete crap.
I've not encountered any alternative which beats Office at those tasks, and e
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Microsoft Office may be a lot of things, but comparing it to LibreOffice/OpenOffice and calling MS Office crap in comparison is ridiculous. I actually ended up buying MS Office (for my mac) because Open/LibreOffice is so shit. I've tried to love it for a long, long time, but it's slow, it's bloated, it's buggy as hell and I just got tired of trying to overlook its blemishes.
MS Office's blemishes are much more bearable, in my opinion. The price isn't cheap but not having to screw around and waste my time is
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Microsoft Office may be a lot of things, but comparing it to LibreOffice/OpenOffice and calling MS Office crap in comparison is ridiculous. I actually ended up buying MS Office (for my mac) because Open/LibreOffice is so shit. I've tried to love it for a long, long time, but it's slow, it's bloated, it's buggy as hell and I just got tired of trying to overlook its blemishes.
MS Office's blemishes are much more bearable, in my opinion. The price isn't cheap but not having to screw around and waste my time is worth something, too.
And I find the complete opposite, even more so after MS went to the ribbon. I've used Libre Office and/or Open Office for years now. It is far more integrated and for what the vast majority of users (even business users) need, it does everything that is asked. I've certainly never found a necessary feature missing in LO/OO that is available in MS Office. Maybe there are some gimmicks available, but I doubt one in a thousand users needs them. I don't see how you can call LO/OO bloated, then go on to say you
Troll... (Score:5, Insightful)
And while the free Office products are sufficient for most people's normal use (i.e. homework),
That's a subtle troll. Well done.
I love how you dismiss everyone who doesn't need vastly complex features (LO has some pretty involved ones) and their work by comparing it to nothing more than schoolwork.
If you need more complex features on a semi-regular basis, it's worth paying the price (but if all you do is type in text and change the font, stick with free).
I'll clue you in on something from the world of "real work"(tm) where people do "real things" for "money" which makes it much more important than "schoolwork": almost noone knows how to use word beyond changing fonts and typing text.
Actually this is one of the things that aggravates me about people who refuse to conemplate the idea of moving to another system because "they know word": almost always they don't even know how to use it beyond the absolute basics.
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:Troll... (Score:4, Insightful)
For God's sake.
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He sent it out it OOXML.
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This doesn't sound like someone that spent any more than a few minutes with Office ribbon. Most people have much more direct access to the common features, combine that with the fact that since 2010 you've been able to customize this experience I can't help but wonder why you try to pretend like you can't. Most people I've seen set down in front of it and just go. Some more obscure functionality is sometimes hard to access but that is largely due to prior training. After a few years with it I still find mys
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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.
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No one is allowed a personal database without IT approval?
Re:Troll... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. In my office we've standardized on OpenOffice (or LibreOffice). We write reports, produce spreadsheets and give presentations without problem. The only time I ever need access to MS Office is when somebody sends me an Office document that for whatever reason doesn't render correctly. It's not because the information isn't available. It's always a disagreement between the two programs as to how to render. OO and LO interchange nicely. The Apple iWork suite works as well. In my experience Office is the odd-man out.
At this stage of the game Office productivity is mostly a solved problem. The feature set is known. Now we're dickering over file formats and presentation.
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Yeah a while back I downloaded AFPAM 47-107v1, a pdf and it was ugly as sin. I moved it over from my windows laptop to my Linux desktop and opened it in Okular, still ugly as sin, but okular's title banner said "Microsoft Word - Front Cover.doc"! The military had written a 594 page book in Word then converted it to a PDF. The difficulties encountered are mind-boggling.
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...Actually this is one of the things that aggravates me about people who refuse to conemplate the idea of moving to another system because "they know word": almost always they don't even know how to use it beyond the absolute basics.
Couldn't have said it better myself. It is frustrating to watch a corporation blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on licenses because it would be too expensive to retrain the masses when 95% of them don't even know how to use more than 5% of the features in any given MS Office application.
OO and CSV files (Score:2)
I use OO at the office for important various forms of CSV-style (though not always comma-separated, often it's a pipe etc) data.
It tends to work better in Excel in that if you have a bunch of stuff in your data file that's within a column but separated by a carriage-return, then you end up with a cell having several items on different lines.
In Excel, trying to import the same data file just crams all the data together in the cell (no line separation).
I sometimes build references of servers/group membership,
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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... (Score:5, Funny)
I pirated Open Office just on principle.
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How many people in this list would pirate instead of pay.
Not just pirate. I only use MSO for looking at funny PPT/PPS I get by email or some *.doc file once a year. I'd never have installed any office suite if it cost me anything at all.
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Seriously, I don't know how in the hell you can even slightly say it's worth paying full price for it.
People who say stuff like this usually don't think in terms of what people cost to employ, particulary expensive, well-trained, capable people. After you figure in salary, benefits, overhead, etc you can get over $1 per minute pretty quick. Even if I like open office, and use it every day, if MS Office has a handful of jobs that make it much easier for some tasks, you probably buy it. If it saves me a net 2.5 hours over time, then it's worth $150 dollars.
Writing this post cost my employer about $3.00 .
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"Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does."
Groucho..
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Actually it's a quite interesting topic as it highlights the deficiencies of economic measures like GDP. Measures that could take into account all value created in society, ranging from pro-bono work to free software to the value of free time would be far more useful to maximize the wealth creation in an economy as a whole.
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people would download OpenOffice if Microsoft Office was free?
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How many people would download OpenOffice if Microsoft Office was free?
And there you have identified the real problem that nobody wants to admit.
Linux, Open Office and GIMP are free. And yet, every day, all over the world, millions of people choose pirated copies of Windows, Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop instead.
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I agree lack of marketing is a huge problem, that is what you meant right?
Nice try, kid. (Score:2)
I agree lack of marketing is a huge problem, that is what you meant right?
No, that's not what he meant.
But you knew that already, didn't you?
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OO and LO has issues opening simple ad and subtrac sheets.
I want my software to have issues opening ad sheets,
Ah, but it is "free" -- Free as in cracked. (Score:3)
How many people would download cracked versions of Microsoft Windows if Linux were free?
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people would download OpenOffice if Microsoft Office was free?
How many people would download OpenOffice if it wasn't free?
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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.
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Interesting analogy to the BSA's piracy figures (Score:5, Insightful)
Every year or so Microsoft and the BSA roll out an updated report on the financial cost of software piracy. They make a similar argument, that someone who uses a pirated copy of MS Office would have otherwise bought an MS Office license. So they estimate the loss to the economy as # pirated copies * retail price of MS Office.
So it is interesting, and a bit of poetic justice, to apply that same logic to show the value of open source in the economy.
Certainly one could quibble with the exact figures, but it does show that the impact of open source is huge. But we already knew that, right?
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So if there were no OpenOffice or other free alternative, what would you do at home? Nothing? Or pay for MS Office? The fact that you use OpenOffice at home rather than MS Office shows that it is an adequate substitute for your home use.
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Every year or so Microsoft and the BSA roll out an updated report on the financial cost of software piracy. They make a similar argument, that someone who uses a pirated copy of MS Office would have otherwise bought an MS Office license. So they estimate the loss to the economy as # pirated copies * retail price of MS Office.
So it is interesting, and a bit of poetic justice, to apply that same logic to show the value of open source in the economy.
No, it just means that the open source people are now using the same bullshit lies as Microsoft and the BSA to greatly over-inflate the "value" of their software.
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Every year or so Microsoft and the BSA roll out an updated report on the financial cost of software piracy. They make a similar argument, that someone who uses a pirated copy of MS Office would have otherwise bought an MS Office license. So they estimate the loss to the economy as # pirated copies * retail price of MS Office.
So it is interesting, and a bit of poetic justice, to apply that same logic to show the value of open source in the economy.
Certainly one could quibble with the exact figures, but it does show that the impact of open source is huge. But we already knew that, right?
So you have one application? Congrats. :)
Considering MS Office isn't recorded by downloads it would be interesting to see how many of these downloads are upgrades versus new users. Multiple downloads in the same household shouldn't count twice either because the Office license grants 2 installs in most cases. As it stands this raw data is fairly meaningless.
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1. Microsoft charges full price for Office updates.
2. The article uses the Microsoft price for single-user versions of Office 2013.
My MS Office replacement is skydrive (Score:3)
It's free-ish and fully compatible.
Openoffice is just too slow, on my Linux box I use google sheets and gnumeric.
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Openoffice is just too slow, on my Linux box I use google sheets and gnumeric.
Speaking as someone with a slow computer (eee 900), what computer are you running???
I've tried FF and Chromium and there is no way that those hogs + a huge ajaxy web 3.2.4-beta page is faster than LO.
But yeah, I usually use gnumeric even on bigger machines because it's fast.
But LO is acceptable on an eee 900. Not super snappy but not terrible either.
It is a good alternative to Microsoft Office (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:It is a good alternative to Microsoft Office (Score:5, Insightful)
So to each their own, if you need the features of Microsoft Office, more power to you. I'm sure many here though will chime in that for the majority of users, Open or Libre Office have 99% of what the typical user needs.
Home user, yes. Office? I'd say yes, if you leave out Outlook. And, you could probably use some sort of web-based or other mail client and some other mail server if in some cases, but there's more to Exchange/Outlook than a simple mail program. IMO, the thing that most makes Microsoft Office "sticky" in corporate environments isn't Word or Excel, its Outlook.
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:It is a good alternative to Microsoft Office (Score:4, Informative)
This exactly. I have had MS Office docs that simply would not open in Office. Attempt to open, useless error message, then nothing. All data lost. Try again in LibreOffice, and it opens it. Some corruption, but at least the data was still there. Fix the file, save it and hand it back to a VERY happy manager, who opens the file in Office and gets back to work.
Wrong way to see it (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite... $150 hides the true costs. (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people download or use Open Office because it is free?
Probably a large percentage of them since that's one of it's redeeming features. Now if OO had the same price as MSOffice, I bet that number would drop dramatically.
If you take the product acquisition cost out of the equation you're now left with acquisition costs which might not be in OO's favor.
Cost to retrain people
Cost to migrate existing systems/processes/applications to OO
Support costs (IT, support vendors etc..)
$150/seat might not be much if you have business critical applications like telephony/voice/chat that are integrated in with your office suite.
Re:Not quite... $150 hides the true costs. (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people download or use Open Office because it is free?
I bet that even if it was $5, the numbers would be much lower. How many people will download it several times after re-installing or on different computers just because they can't be arsed to find the installer? Or just to try it out for ten minutes before going back to MS Office? Take for example the TPB AFK movie that was featured here on slashdot, I got it because it's free and legal. I haven't watched it yet, haven't even decided if I will but what the hell, I grabbed it anyway because I didn't need to make any cost/benefit decision, I could just put it on download now and decide if I want it later. The whole question of "Why should I spend money on that?" becomes "Why not, it's free..."
Goofy numbers (Score:4, Informative)
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I bought an Office for Mac 3-pack for about $125. That's not exactly the same as $150 each. I'm not a Microsoft fan but I do try to stay credible when possible.
Its only fair to have Goofy numbers when its a Mickey Mouse article.
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What Office tools did you get with that?
Did it come with Powerpoint? Did it come with Vizio? Did it come with other stuff? Quite likely (since the same package is available here), that's the Student & Teacher edition, which comes with Word, Excel, and OneNote (which LO doesn't have, but which is of limited use for most of us). Apples to Apples, and all that... you need to compare it to the MS Office version that has all of the tools that LO comes with.
That being said, most of what LO comes with is usel
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Do you talk the same way you write? Just curious.
Who still buys Office? (Score:2)
I haven't bought a copy of office since 2006 or so. Openoffice and then Libreoffice have filled my needs nicely since then. I have friends and co-workers that are content to just use Google Docs. I could see if you're one of the small percentage of people that use some obscure feature only available in the M$ product, but for most people the free alternatives are perfectly fine.
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but for most people the free alternatives are perfectly fine.
That's the operative word. For many large corporate installations, all sorts of macro suites, plugins, weird data feature usage, etc, are all wound up in being MS Office specific. It's too entrenched to toss it for another platform.
(in before "corporations are people LOL")
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.
Office 365 changes the numbers further (Score:2)
"Some holes in the argument?" (Score:2)
Some holes? It's an argument that consists of nothing but hole. Pointing out actual holes would be missing the forest for the cellulose molecules.
"OpenOffice is really popular, and millions of people use it." That's all you had to say. If you felt the need to speculate to earn your blog hits, you could add, "Perhaps there's a way to monetize it, though obviously as with everything else open source that's fraught with difficulties, which I shall now recite as if they were novel observations."
Double standards are GO! (Score:2)
Counting the full value of a paid product as the "value" of a free download: Reprehensible and dishonest if you're talking about "pirated" software, music, or movies. Totally acceptable and obviously fair for open source projects.
Did they say every pirated copy is a lost sale? (Score:2)
Yeah, right...
And those other people said every pirated copy is a lost sale...
What about I-T consultant costs? (Score:2)
$21 million in retail price savings is easily blown on I-T consultant costs to setup an OpenOffice system, train the users, and respond to their never-ending help requests.
The truth is, the cheapest office workflow is on iPad. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers cost $10 each, run on all your iOS devices, have only the features that 90% of users need and want and understand, require almost no training, and run great for 10 hours straight on an iPad mini in your coat pocket. These are apps in which you get a ton of
Fundamental Considerations for Development...Value (Score:2)
bargain bin junk (Score:2)
if openoffice were commercial proprietary software, it would be marked $4.99 in the bargain bin with the smashed jewel cases of DOOM II.
Lies, damn lies and statistics. (Score:2)
Microsoft's Home Use Program makes Office Pro a $10 download for many users.
The price goes up a little (and you'll likely be paying S&H on the media) if your employer has you based in some god forsaken outpost like the Pitcairn Islands.
Office 365 University is $80 for a four year subscription and two seat license. You'll need student ID but this is not the same product and dirt-cheap academic pricing you'll get from the campus-wide agreement.
Microsoft positions the MS Office suite as part of an office
Re:Not as good. (Score:4, Insightful)
As for TFA, you're using RIAA math here, guys. That's just stupid. Downloader != potentially-paying-customer. At least get that part right.
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One of those very specific use cases is called a "spreadsheet", which Calc handles with the grace of a drunk puppy.
[citation needed] ...as "a spreadsheet".
OK, let me save you some time. You're going to cite one of the very specific use cases I mentioned. "A spreadsheet" is not one of those cases. I use Calc more than any other app in the suite and it works just fine, for me,
Re:Not as good. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, LibreOffice Calc has an array check box for operations that return arrays. Nothing like Excel's intuitive F2 Cntl-shift-enter.
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OpenOffice and LibreOffice are certainly better than Microsoft Office on Linux. I can't even get Microsoft Office to work using Wine and VirtualBox.
It's not that simple. Both have weird quirks. (Score:3)
Maybe, but it's not that simple. Both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice/LibreOffice have many weird quirks.
Last week I tried to copy some text using the latest version of LibreOffice from one place to another, and the last sentence of what I copied was always made bold.
People say not to use the latest version of Microsoft Office if you have a document longer than about 30 pages, because then the formatting will be
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billion has different meanings in different countries
Billion may refer to:
In numbers:
Long and short scales
1,000,000,000 (number), one thousand million, 109, in the short scale
1,000,000,000,000 (number), one million million, 1012, in the long scale
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No English-speaking country uses the long scale anymore; it's only pointed out by pedants in the comments section of Slashdot stories.
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Perhaps, but as the map in the TFA shows, the users of OpenOffice are not all (or even predominately) in English-speaking countries. So some aid for the non-native speaker is thoughtful.
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more likely she used Open Office at home before being exposed to the new MS Office with it's ribbon interface and can't find anything.
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I am in the minority apparently, so I am curious as to why so many hate it.
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Gotta admit that I agree on that. I've been using some Office variant since the mid-90's, and about 6 months ago got upgraded to Office 2010 at work.
The ribbon took a little adjustment, but I've found that the "it puts the most commonly used features in the ribbon" argument generally holds true. A few times I've had to dig a little bit to find the particular formatting option I was looking for, but generally an F1+search, or a google search will bring me right to it within a few seconds. In general, I've
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, i agree its beyond stupid that we ended up with two different definitions of billion in wide use.
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You are trying to apply the logic of a business to a non-profit. No wonder it doesn't make sense to you.
An analogy: If a group of doctors volunteer their time and work in a clinic and treat the poor, pro bono, are they not entitled to claim the value that they provide is based on their normal rate? Same question for lawyers who provide pro bono counsel to those who cannot afford it. Can't they claim the value they produce per their normal hourly rates?
I don't anyone would argue that the value is zero beca
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And where can you get the real Office for $150? There is the no-commercial-use version for $140. The cheapest commercial-use version is $220. At least, previous versions of Home and Student did not permit commercial use.
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You are trying to apply the logic of a business to a non-profit. Apache publishes software to the public at no charge. That is their mission. Counter-factuals about raising the price is pointless. It ain't going to happen.
What the article talks about is value. With perfect competition price syncs up with value. Economics 101. But when a non-profit has a mission to provide software for free, then your model breaks.
An analogy: A group of doctors volunteer their time and go into a poor neighborhood and