The industry’s two major office suites, Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, will soon be releasing new versions. Recent research into these versions by large government departments indicates that for many sites, it is now 10 times cheaper to migrate to the new OpenOffice.org 2.0 than upgrading to Microsoft Office 12.
Cybersource, an open source services firm, believes that we have reached a tipping-point of great opportunity for OpenOffice.org and for the IT industry in general.
Thanks to excellent new features and through Microsoft’s poor decisions, OpenOffice.org has suddenly become the de-facto next-generation office suite to move to,” said Cybersource chief executive officer, Con Zymaris. “This is because OpenOffice.org is now more familiar to existing Microsoft Office users than Microsoft Office 12 is.”
What a surprise… not, with the current pricing of Micro$oft’s Office 2003, I don’t think they plan to lower the price for the next version of Office.
Meanwhile OpenOffice is available at openoffice.org for absolutely nothing.
For Your Consideration
Imagine a school purchasing 32 new computers after Office 12 are released, if they don’t go with Micro$oft for the office suite, they save about 200 dollars per machine, t hat’s a hell of money that could be spent on other things. Now let’s say that the school goes one step further and kicks Windows out, that saves them about 80 dollars per machine, include M$ Office in that and you have a saving of 280 dollars per new machine, and say the school purchased 32 new machines, that makes for a total saving of 8960 dollars per machine.