A recent Microsoft video suggests the company considers OpenOffice.org a significant threat to its own Office suite.
Titled "A Few Perspectives on OpenOffice.org," the video features a series of horror stories from customers who tried the open-source productivity suite and suffered from excess costs as well as IT resources, performance and compatibility issues.
A series of customer quotes flashes across the screen in the slickly animated video, read aloud by a series of unseen narrators. "If an open-source freeware solution breaks, who's going to fix it?" according to a statement ascribed to a school district official in the U.S.
"When we returned to Microsoft Office after our experience with OpenOffice, you could practically hear a collective sigh of relief across the entire district," states another comment attributed to a U.S. school system official.
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Obviously Microsoft is feeling the pain of losing some of its dominance in the office suite category of software. I recommend that my college students download Open Office all the time. I have never received any complaints or experienced a problem with their files. I have used Open Office, Microsoft Office 2007 and 2008 (Mac) as well as Apple's iWorks suite and found that Open Office correctly opened some Word files that iWork's Pages cannot handle. I highly recommend using Open Office. Microsoft is running scared and they should.
John H. Armwood
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