OOo Possibilities
Eric Lai has an article about tension around technical and governance issues within OpenOffice.org. He asked for my thoughts on the matter, and included most of what I said in the article.
I’m struck by how defensive OOo supporters are of any criticism. I don’t really think they fully appreciate the immensity of the task of not just providing a reasonable alternative to Microsoft’s desktop monopoly, but a superior one that will actually draw users to it. In terms of market share, OOo is utterly failing. Just to give my own experience, I have yet to meet a single colleague in my field that uses anything but Word to author their documents. I would be surprised if any of them have even heard of OpenOffice.
Clearly this failure is not the fault of OpenOffice.org alone; indeed, it’s as much as anything a consequence of monopoly. The question raised in various places about the technical and governance infrastructure of OpenOffice.org, then, is not about pointing fingers and assigning blame. It is about recognizing the enormity of the challenge and figuring out how to address it. Our model should be something like Mozilla, which has managed to steadily chip away at both the market share and the mind share of Internet Explorer by providing a superior product, with demonstrable innovations, backed up by a vibrant user community, organized in an effective open community. So the question many of us are raising is: what changes can we make to OpenOffice.org to see similar results?
