I tried to use OpenOffice.org as my personal main office suite a few years ago. I was employed this time and not agreed with Microsoft’s pricing politics, so I switched to OpenOffice.org (the only software I bought then was Outlook).
But the experiment ended relatively fast, as I got my first Microsoft MVP award and with that all licenses I could ever need. I switched back to Office 2003 and later 2007 because I felt more familar with it, working day by day with it at work. And with Office 2007 the interface became more intuitive – compared to the current interface of OpenOffice.org it’s a real quantum jump I think. And last but not least Microsoft did something unexpected – they offered a version of Office 2007 for a real customer-friendly price (in Germany at the moment approximately 75 EUR for Office Home and Student, which can be used on 3 PC’s).
And even as I switched to the Apple world at home a month ago I ordered a license of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac because the adaptions of OpenOffice.org were all completely unusable. Office 2008 isn’t really good, but it’s at least better than OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice.
Now I understand why: Michael Meeks did a startling blog post about what’s going on with OpenOffice.org, or what is not. OO.o is one of the few flagships of the open source software scene, next to Firefox and of course Linux. And as Michael Meeks tells us, today only 24 developers are actively working on it.
24 developers is really a surprising little number. But it would propably be a good reason for the slow development process of the software in the last years.
But is this development good?
No, I don’t think so. Maybe Microsoft with its thousands of developers around the world working on its software suite may be amused, but for us as end-users and customers this is a fatal development. Because a monopoly, which Microsoft in fact owns in this section, is never good in the long term. Even though I personally don’t like and use it.
I hope Michael Meeks post shakes the open source scene up and helps to get the ship turned around :-).
