Scott Kveton

Sometimes I have to just stop and wonder about OpenOffice. When I look across the computing landscape, I see two big “cash cows” today. One is operating systems and Microsoft has a pretty good (albeit slipping) lock on that one. The other is productivity software which is also know as an “Office Suite”. I think the value is moving “up the stack” so to speak. Today its operating systems and productivity, tomorrow it will be business intelligence, ERP and process management.

So getting back on task, why do I stop and wonder about OpenOffice? Why have people not looked at replacing their existing productivity suite with this?! Looking at the sheer value proposition, the use of OpenOffice is even more compelling than the use of Linux. The example I love to cite is that of a company that a friend of mine has consulted for. The company had about 100 total employees, most of which were outside sales. These were people out in the field with laptops using customer relationship software as well as a productivity suite on their machines. One day, the CEO called up said friend and said, “That’s it, I’m tired of dealing with Microsoft!! We’re going 100% Linux and OpenOffice on the desktop!!! Think of the money we’ll save!!” Whoa. Hold on there tiger. Let’s take a step back and talk about this for a second.

Deploying Linux on the desktop is no simple task. Even I’ll admit that. It is getting better but it simply is not seamless yet. When you look at the above example, you’re also talking about laptops (not always well supported in Linux) and you’re also talking about road warriors that live and die by their laptops. I’m more than happy to make the argument that you simply go with the most supported laptop running, say Red Hat or SuSE. Well, now there goes the value proposition on the operating system-side. You had to pay to get that software and manage it just like you would with Windows. Not only that, you’ve got these road warriors that use a whole bevy of Windows-only software; Goldmine and Act! are the first to come to mind. Finally, look at the cost of Windows on that laptop. What is it? Maybe $150 on a new laptop? And its really a pay-once kind of thing for the lifetime of the laptop; when you’re laptop dies or you need it upgraded you usually just buy a new one. So, going with Linux on laptops at this company would save at best $15,000 but would add a great deal of transitional cost because their people would not be able to run their Windows applications as seamlessly as before. At best you would break even; at worst, you’d end up costing a lot more as you transition not only the operating system but your other applications as well (thinks like customer management, etc).

Okay, now let’s look up the stack at productivity software. What if you replace that $350 copy of Microsoft Office with OpenOffice? Not only have you immediately saved $35,000 for the company you are still running Windows which saves you a lot of money in terms of transitional cost. All of those customer relationship packages your people use still work and they can even still open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

After talking with the CEO, my friend was able to make the value proposition above and convince him to go with just the transition to OpenOffice. They have saved money and will be able to leverage the new OpenDocument format (they will need to do this as they are in Massachusetts) to run their business.