Microsoft unwittingly admits OpenOffice.org is a threat

Open Office is after many years of hard work still not up to snuff when compared with Microsofts suit.<p>In part that's still due to the document formats not being really open (so there will always be implementation issues, some of the docs literally say 'do this like word 3 did it' or something to that effect).<p>Another part is that it is simply a huge undertaking.<p>The biggest advantage MS has over OO is Excel vs the Open Office spreadsheet, it's not even close.<p>In spite of all that I don't use Microsoft stuff any more. The amount of features that I use in these packages is small enough that I can get by with a lesser program and not being locked in is an advantage as well, what sealed the deal is that microsoft does not sell a version for linux ;)<p>Personally I think that the microsoft office suite has more to fear from things like Google Docs than from Open Office in the longer term.

The OpenOffice site has a list of major deployments [1], and considering how long it's been available as an MS Office alternative, the list isn't that impressive.<p>Several years ago the local school district switched to OpenOffice. I happened to notice it during a teacher conference, so I asked the teacher how she liked it. I was pretty surprised by how much she hated it (<i>I mean, she really hated it.</i>). Of course, that's just an anecdote, but what's more telling is that the school district is back to using MS Office.<p>[1] <a href="http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.or...</a>

The video is pretty cringeworthy, but everything in it is true from my experience. Open Office as it is just isn't viable in a corporate environment. Staff members will despise it, poorly formatted documents from others won't display properly, training costs go up, it's a mess.<p>Sure, most of it may be Microsofts fault for their .doc format or whatever, but fact remains, Microsoft Office is king in the corporate world. Not sure that this video was really necessary, but I guess it could be good for I.T. guys to show to their boss when he decides they should swap to Open Office.

Hmmm. I don't think the comparison with GNU/Linux is 100% clear cut.<p>At that time Linux was making huge inroads into the server market and anyone not recognising that was going to be laughed at. Microsoft doing so was probably not the biggest driving force in subsequent growth.<p>The modern equivalent would be not recognising how much of a "threat" Google Chrome is to the other browsers with its brand and growth.<p>Now, Open Office. I am not convinced that it is a viable threat to Microsofts corporate sales. I know personally of very few (big) corps who could reliably switch to OO - for all manner of reasons.<p>It is a competitor, sure, and certainly making inroads into the home market. But a serious corporate threat? Not yet.

OpenOffice is a horrible piece of software.<p>When I switched to Mac, I tried MS Office 2008, and it was buggy as hell, so I've been using OpenOffice, which sucked too, but slightly less (on Macs). Now MS Office 2011 is coming out, bugs fixed, looks great, UI/UX is great, so I started converting all docs back to MS format and will ditch OpenOffice in a couple of weeks.

As someone who tried to switch, I can tell you that this is not the case. I remember doing a resume in OO.org, and then when I sent it to my friend with Word to print it off, it TOTALLY wrecked everything. Not cool.

I went to a Microsoft Roadshow recently where they were demoing Office Web Apps - he specifically said it was being targetted towards home users, because "people don't buy Microsoft Office for home use. They use Open Office or they pirate Microsoft Office."<p>If they're saying that in a promotional event, then it really shows the threat MS see from OO. They own the corporate market, but they have trouble capturing the home market, especially with Google Docs

Welcome to India. Most of the Government offices here are using openoffice (Indian railways,Electricity boards,Government schools,Post offices, etc). OpenOffice is a real threat to Microsoft here in developing nations.

OO is a committee designed bloatware mammoth.<p>Office was created in low level coding, with the minimum possible dependencies (e.g excel reinvents the wheel so it does not include so many external libs). OO is a sluggish and high level clone with minimum attention for detail. Consumes too much memory and too much processor, like Netscape Navigator became, but hopefully(thanks to the license) it could be transformed into firefox.<p>It will be very expensive to replicate the hard work that went into Office, only starting from scratch you could do it like Koffice, abiword or gnumeric did.<p>You can't outperform Office in their strengths, but you can outperform it on things Microsoft is not an specialist, like multiplatform coding, cloud writing, and new interfaces(multitouch and voice).<p>I don't use windows, and honestly I don't care about Office any more. There are very good alternatives, but not OO.

I don't think OpenOffice is a threat, especially considering what Oracle does (virtually everything to kill it).

I almost completely disagree with rodh257. A large percentage of corporate workers don't create complex content and rarely interact with complex files created by their colleagues. It is completely reasonable for a CIO to engage his staff on a research study to determine how feasible it would be to migrate a significant swath from MS Office to OpenOffice.org (or LibreOffice). I have personal experience with this.

I've used OO.o and worked with its code and when it came time to choose between it and Office, I had to choose Office.<p>I needed the ability to manage sections of a document, move them around, open and close them. Only Office has that feature. I spoke to someone from Sun about that feature at their booth at a convention and they had no plans to implement it.<p>Its bloatware, but it has everything. And it works.

I wonder if the the biggest aid to OO adoption will be the new interface in Office 2007? OO basically clones the old Office menu-driven interface for everything, which I find easier to navigate by drilling down in context to find things. Switching to OO avoids the need to relearn how to use an office suite.

You know what I hate about google spreadsheets. When you open a long spreadsheet it won't open at the last row. You have to scroll all the way down. Excel seems to handle this issue fine.

Open office is a threat only to those who use it.