Simon’s Blog

So, OpenOffice 2.0 has shipped. I’ve been using the beta for what seems like ages, and it’s a pretty good product. Truly it’s a massive step forward from the version 1.x releases. Jonathan Schwartz has written today about why Sun and Google will not be driving a rewrite of OpenOffice in AJAX. I recommend people read it: especially those people out there who are developing (or thinking of developing) browser-based office applications (in AJAX, or Java applets or “the next big thing”). So where should Sun and Google take OpenOffice next? Well, I think they should set a goal of achieving a leadership position in the Office Suite market in the Enterprise. Why? It’s all about value.

My assertion is that overwhelmingly the greatest value that OpenOffice will bring to individuals and organisations will be as a result of successfully driving adoption in the Enterprise. The reasons why are long-term, and to do with increasing competition in the tech sector. However, achieving the goal of dominance in the Enterprise has another benefit to users of OpenOffice. You see, right now, OpenOffice falls into the category of “just about good enough… except for Impress/PowerPoint”. But if it achieved the goal of leading in the Enterprise, OpenOffice would have to have become a spectacularly good product.

OpenOffice has made great strides in adoption by individuals and small businesses – where people care about saving money. However, in the Enterprise it’s almost nowhere. Why is this? The answer is quite interesting. It’s often a mantra amongst senior management that you can’t compete against free. So, the ultimate way to kill competition that has an expensive offering is to compete with a free offering. It usually works, too. But there’s one situation where it doesn’t – at least not always - and that’s where people aren’t spending their own money.

The problem is that most people in the Enterprise (regular employees and middle management) simply don’t care about financials. So they don’t see any benefit to saving money. It’s never ceased to amaze me that this is the case (cash flow is king - if you run out of money, the company is out business and you’re out of a job etc.). But it’s true. So even if there are no good business reasons not to switch, CIOs won’t win any friends by asking people to change from MS Office to OpenOffice. The reason is that people will see only negatives: they have to learn a new product; they will have difficulty exchanging documents with partners; and OpenOffice isn’t as good as MS Office. They won’t see the positive of thousands of dollars saved over time per employee in the business which can offset some of these negatives.

So, the way to drive adoption is to provide some net benefits to people in terms of user experience. Free doesn’t cut it. But providing net benefits over the competition is easier said than done. OpenOffice tried this before. They made it super-easy to create PDF documents. Fabulous! But, native PDF creation will now be incorporated into the next version of MS Office. Competition by trading features is tough. I think the way to win is by genuine innovation: thinking about how to do something in a fundamentally different way that’s better than the competition. Up to now, OpenOffice has been playing catch-up – essentially cloning the competition. Now they have a platform from which they can build something really exciting. And by doing something exciting, they could actually change the whole face of the technology industry. I hope they give it a go!