Cor Nouws wrote:
Let's see what such an investigation would look like. The objective is
to estimate the sizes of two groups of people:
[...]
Oeps, not that fast.
Finding truth together, maybe needs smaller steps.
What do you mean? I just gave a simple and accurate description of what
the question in. If the number of people who would like to migrate but
don't due to vendor lock-in (ie. group 1) exceeds the number of people
who prefer MSO but would be forced to migrate to use ODF (ie. group 2)
then OOo would benefit by MSO supporting ODF. This is nothing more than
a bare-bones statement of the problem. The next step is to estimate the
relative size of these groups.
Q: How many people would like to migrate to OOo but don't due to vendor
lock-in?
A: No one can give an exact figure, but let's try to get a rough picture
of the magnitude we're talking about. For example:
* If OOo and MSO were essentially equal, you'd expect each to have about
50%. So group 1 would be ~50%.
* If we assume a typical disruptive technology scenario, where OOo is
"good enough" for most people, then group 1 would be more than 50%, so
let's say 75% (this is conservative for a disruptive technology).
* A recent poll by iTWire found that ~86% of the site visitors are
interested in trying OOo instead of upgrading to MSO 2003.
* What would it take for group 1 to be much less than 50%? What would it
take for group 1 to be (say) only 25%? That would mean that on a purely
cost-feature comparison (no lock-in) 75% of users find extra features in
MS Office that are worth ~$200 to them. Does this seem reasonable to you?
So, as a rough guess, I think it's safe to say that at least 40% of the
population would choose OOo over MSO if there was no lock-in.
Okay, what about group 2? Group 2 are the people who prefer MSO but
would be locked into OOo because they are required to use ODF. Can you
see this group being of a similar magnitude as the groups above? Can you
see this group being 50% of the population? Can you see it being 25% of
the population? Can you see it being 10% of the population?
With all this, do you think it's very likely that group 1 is larger than
group 2? Or do you think that group 2 is likely to be larger?
Personally I think it is very unlikely that the number of people who are
forced to use OOo due to ODF is larger than the people who would freely
choose OOo if there was a free market.
Best,
Daniel.
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