On Tue, 2005-09-13 at 20:43 -0400, Anthony Long wrote: > This is roughly $53/copy the University paid, based on the number of > students. I wonder how we can offer more value than Microsoft Office.
This price decline is not unexpected in a mature product. I would expect to see MS-Office included "free" as part of MS-Windows within the next five years. Meanwhile MS will leverage their dominance of the office market to embed their next generation of revenue generating products - Dynamics? - just as they used MS-Windows to corner the office market. This is not a problem for us. IE is "free" with MS-Windows, but people choose Firefox - because it is a better product. If we continue to build "the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms" then OOo will be visibly a better product. What's cool about this is that MS's product manager for IE is now going cap in hand to MS's Chair-thrower-in-chief for development funding to keep up with Firefox, with no prospect of getting any revenue from customers in return. I'd like to see a transcript of *that* conversation. > What pains are we missing in large buys like this at the enterprise > level? Let's face it -- MS Office is the standard, no matter how closed > it is. As it stands now, it's more of a headache for a large enterprise > to switch to OOo because of all the incompatibilities. It probably > costs more to migrate than to get another copy of MSO for the staff, > plus that copy of MSO is going to return leaps and bounds of revenue for > the company, and they know the files will work with their existing stuff > and that people will know how to use the program because everyone else > in the world does. In the SMP we acknowledged that migration is a pain, and it's hard to find compelling reasons for an established MS-Office user to switch. However, we do have a compelling case for users at a 'trigger point' - see http://ooosmp.homelinux.org/GoalsandObjectives/UsageGoals - and this is where we will see growth. It will not be long before English language users become a minority of OOo users - maybe we'll then need an English NL project ;-) OOo Marketing must continue to define OOo by what it is, not by the fact that it-isn't-Microsoft. John --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
