Open source is about more than just coding

I can't help myself. A small part of me really wants to see OpenOffice succeed. While it probably won't displace Microsoft Office in corporate America, there's the consumer, education, and government markets where OpenOffice might be a reasonable alternative.

So why, then, haven't people in these markets flocked to OpenOffice as a cheap Microsoft Office alternative? OpenOffice has been around for over a decade, so what's holding it back. Certainly, perceived quality has been one of the culprits.

Every once in a while, I try to be an OpenOffice user. And every time, I give up, just because the tools are too clunky. And I'm not the only one. Friends of mine who have worked at Sun, where using StarOffice (OpenOffice's progenitor) was mandatory, inevitably roll their eyes and groan whenever you mention either StarOffice or OpenOffice.

And then there's the other side of quality, technical issues like bugs and performance. You know, the sorts of problems that you don't really want to encounter in the productivity tools you use every day. As an open source project, however, OpenOffice is dependent on volunteers to test and fix bugs. All noble sentiments aside, that's not the best formula for a replacement for high-use, end user application.

When you read exchanges like this one on the OpenOffice QA forum, your optimism really fizzles out. Here's a sample quote from this discussion:

This Quality Management is (imo) the missing link. Nobody seems to be (or even willing to be) in charge of this...

So - we have a constantly growing number of bugs, developers who waste time to track those bugs down (while this was the task of QA) and QA  members, who get frustrated because bugs get not fixed (and lower their engagement within the project). I cannot help - but to me this seems as we have a problem.

Yikes.  And, as this 2005 article from the Guardian argues, it's not realistic to expect OpenOffice to ever get ahead of the quality curve.

Since 2005, other productivity suites, such as Zoho, have emerged. It's a shame that OpenOffice continues to sputter. (And, my doubts about the "5% of US Internet users" estimate aside, even 5% is hardly a major threat, especially after a decade of effort.)

Comments

[Zachary Reiss-Davis]

I also intellectually would like it to succeed; I think the big reason that has stopped my adoption in the past is the pervasive availability of Microsoft Office in my life. When I decide to spend a week or two testing OpenOffice, I notice that it tries very hard to work like MS Office does, but doesn't do it nearly as well. If it was trying to innovate or introduce new features, ala Firefox, I think I would put up with small problems and bugs more readily. As is, I wouldn't use it unless "people" (IT departments, academic departments, ect) stopped giving me free legal copies of MS Office to use. Those people may be the right target audience for conversion; without data to back it up, I would bet that a majority of MS Office end-users don't actually pay for it.