SourceForge Community Awards and the Business Case for OpenOffice.org

Twelve SourceForge community choice awards have been assigned to nine different open source projects. PortableApps won four awards, included “Best Project”. OpenOffice.org, awarded with 3 prizes last year, won ‘just’ an award, resulting the “best project for Government”, getting an amazing share of votes (48.27%).

Despite PortableApps is today’s most amazing victory, I want to join the OpenOffice.org debate, recently raised by Matt Asay after Kevin Turner’s speech at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.

Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO, said:

Open Office. This is another incredible — we compete all the time with good enough. Are we good enough. I get this question all the time. And, sure, we go through the different value propositions with document fidelity and productivity innovation and the ability for e-mail and if you use Outlook, there’s no — and security and all the different things that we have that they don’t have. But I want to talk to you about what’s really important. The real important opportunity is the SharePoint opportunity that comes with Office, it’s the Exchange opportunity that comes with Office, and it’s the BI opportunity that comes with Office.

Those dollars right there all add up to US$17.3 billion in partner opportunity. Embrace Office, embrace the stack. It’s the fastest-growing stack we have in the history of our company, and it’s a wonderful opportunity for you to build your business and bet your business on that. And Office is the foundation of our entire partner opportunity and our entire partner ecosystem. Continue to take a look at that and take the Open Office threat seriously.

Matt Asay commenting the news wrote:

I can understand Microsoft keeping an eye on the OpenOffice “killer rabbit,” but devoting any time and attention to taking market share from perennially poor (in market share) OpenOffice?

That makes Microsoft the anti-Robin Hood, taking from the poor to give to the rich.

I can’t believe that a single Microsoftie loses a nanosecond’s worth of sleep contemplating OpenOffice and its effects on Microsoft Office market share.

OpenOffice.org is gaining market share, but there is a lot to do to turn OpenOffice.org migrations it into a business. Internal open source support is the most frequent approach, in the OpenOffice.org case.

Sun paid little attention to foster an OpenOffice.org partner’s network, as retained almost full control of decision making and IP ownership. Oracle’s vision about OpenOffice.org at large is still unknown, speculate about it seems hard, if not impossible.

Microsoft’s partners now need to work to sell Microsoft Office value, because of the existence of the OpenOffice.org ‘free’ alternative. So said, they can still count on Microsoft core value proposition and core competency, providing them with a full set of tools making real the whole document computing metaphore.

I see both having hard times, for different reasons: Microsoft has to work hard to retain its market share, while Sun/Oracle has to learn how to create its OpenOffice.org (business) market. We are living in interesting times…

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