Last week I decided to give Open Office a try. Open Office is a free and open source office productivity suite, sponsored by Sun Microsystem. Open office is one of the most popular alternative to Microsoft Office. You can find the following applications in the suite:

• Open Office Writer: Document processing software, substitute to Microsoft Word.
• Open Office Calc: Spreadsheet software, substitute to Microsoft Excel.
• Open Office Impress: Multimedia presentation software, substitute to Microsoft PowerPoint.
• Open Office Draw: Drawing utility software.
• Open Office Base: Database software, substitute to Microsoft Access.
• Open Office Math

I have not tried all the software in the suite, but I have used the Open Office Writer and Open Office Calc extensively. Overall my experience with Open Office has been great. My favorite feature of the Open Office is the “Export as PDF”, which is something that Microsoft Office does not offer. With a click of a button you can export your word document or spreadsheet document as a PDF document. Very handy! Having to be a satisfied user, I think Open Office has a very good potential in beating Microsoft Office. It is a solid office productivity suite, and it is free. 

There is just one concern that I found with Open Office. Have a look on what happen when I try saving a Microsoft Word document.

Does this mean Open Office is not able to create a compatible Microsoft Office document? or Is it just trying to push its format to the user?

So far I found that Open Office compatibility to Microsoft Office to be pretty good. It is able to open any types of Microsoft Office documents (2003 or 2007) with no problem whatsoever. Although I can see that in one or two document, it’s not able to display the document’s formatting correctly. For example, I found that in one document, there is a table that looks bigger in Open Office, that it exceeds the page margin. Other than this one issue, everything works perfectly fine.

So why is it giving us a compatibility warning? Why is it even asking the user to save the document in a different format? Was it really necessary to create a new format that is not compatible with the existing one? I think this will hurt Open Office a lot, as it might hinder people who want to use Open Office as a substitute of Microsoft Office. Those people who want to migrate to Open Office need a certainty that they can still work on any Microsoft Office document after migration. They want to be able to create document that is recognizable and natively supported by Microsoft Office.

I feel that this is a similar case as to Linux and Windows. Many people are not jumping ship to Linux because most of the software out there are incompatible with Linux. They are built for windows, and you can not install/use them natively in Linux. You have to use another tool/software to run them in Linux. Even so there is no guarantee that it will work. This reminds me the history of Microsoft Excel that I read from Joel Spolsky blog. Joel Spolsky stated that, the day that Excel gains significant market share from Lotus spreadsheet, was the day it was able to write Lotus spreadsheet transparently. Thus offering full compatibility and making it easier for people to switch to Excel. Quoting his blog post:

And this reminded me of Excel's tipping point, which happened around the time of Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently.  

Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using Lotus 123. They didn't want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you're the lone Excel fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you can't switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology.

It is very important for any new product, that entering a well established market, to provide full compatibility to the dominant product. Compatibility is an important feature that should not be neglected. By offering compatibility, you are indirectly increasing your target market to be the same as the dominant product. Or in other words, you are making every user of the dominant product to be your potential user. Compatibility allows user to migrate to the new software seamlessly, which is something that is very important. I know it is unjust to use a free open source software as an example, but its such a shame to see a solid software like Open Office has to suffer from this issue.

RWendi