Open and shut case

It's been a game of one-upmanship, that has not been able to reach its final
round. Supporters of both MS Office and OpenOffice have been going around the
town claiming that one is better than the other. And to add further to the
debate, Germany based Webmasterpro.de, an IT service provider has come out with
a list of international installation rankings for the open source office suite
and some of its competitors, including Microsoft Office, Apple's iWork and
Corel's WordPerfect.

And the results have been interesting. While in developed countries like the
US, the UK OpenOffice has only 9 percent market share; in Eastern European
countries like Poland, Czech Republic and Germany, more than 21 percent PCs are
installed with OpenOffice. One of the reasons why Germany boasts of one of the
highest adoption rates (21 percent) could be attributed to the fact that
OpenOffice originated from StarOffice developed in Germany. Similarly, Canada
has the highest WordPerfect market share (4 percent), which perfectly reflects
the fact that it is developed by the Canadian software company, Corel.

Contrary to the expectations, all the hype around OpenOffice in India in the
last few years hasn't yielded the desired results even though in the last few
years the Election Commission too has gone ahead with the deployment of
OpenOffice and free CDs have been distributed in southern states. The market
share of OpenOffice in India is the second lowest in the world at a dismal 5
percent, marginally ahead of China. Incidentally, adoption of MS Office in India
is one of the highest in the world, 88 percent (the other country being
Netherlands).

The report further added that around half of the OpenOffice users also have
Microsoft Office installed, but notes that this may be due to expired trial
versions of Office that came pre-installed on new Windows machines.

Says Sanjeev Kumar, CIO, Polygenta Technologies said that Open Office is seen
as a substitute for cost cutting when IT budgets are cut. "Moreover, OpenOffice
is not effective and organized with no structured organizational support and
with companies (read Microsoft) coming out with pay-per-use plans, the option to
switch to licensed software is high," he added.

Another serious issue associated with OpenOffice is compatibility with other
business applications. Added Ajay Meher, CIO, Sony Entertainment Network, with
80 percent users using Microsoft, compatibility issues crop up. For instance, if
a document created in OpenOffice has to be read in MS Office, one has to first
download and install plug-in which most users desist from doing. "In most office
environments, the IT set-up is secured with these plug-ins and cannot be
installed without administrative access resulting in people ignoring such
documents," he noted.

Kumar however doesn't forget to point out that in terms of quality and
features, OpenOffice is one of the best when it comes to standalone machines.

Stuti Das

Source: DQs