Donnerstag Oktober 13, 2005

19 percent market share in SMB!
Wow! Read this:

"Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio noted ...

As for the popularity of OpenOffice.org, DiDio said Microsoft's Office suite dominates the market by a large margin. She did point out, though, that Sun's StarOffice open-source Latest News about open source offering has attained a 19 percent market share among small to midsize businesses."

Found here.
( Okt 13 2005, 08:38:10 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [2]

My very personal highlights of three years OpenOffice.org
I came to the OpenOffice.org project a bit more than three years ago when I joined the StarOffice team. The fact that OpenOffice.org is turning five today, made me think about my very personal experiences with the project, the application, and most importantly, the people behind all this.

Many nice and funny stories and experiences came to my mind. Via OpenOffice.org I have met tons of people, many of them I would consider friends today. I remember my meetings with Louis Suarez-Potts (OpenOffice.org community manager at CollabNet) at Starbucks in Berkeley before my ballroom dancing practice nights. Or my meeting with Charles Schulz (native-language confedration lead) and Sophie Gautier (French native-language project lead) in Paris when I was there for a Linux event. Or the local OpenOffice.org community member meetings that I initially organized in the Bay Area and in Hamburg, and later just visited as a guest. Nevertheless, there are three special highlights I want to talk about a bit more.

This year's OpenOffice.org conference really felt like a large family reunion. It felt extremely nice to meet all the people in person again who I got to know and like at previous OpenOffice.org conferences, meetings or just online. Chatting and discussing ideas with them while drinking a cafe latte on the veranda of the cafe at the central market place was just great. I wish we could all sit in just one very large office building! IRC and email is nice, but meeting the people in person, sometimes for the very first time after months of online collaboration, is just great!!! Thanks again to Urska, Robert and Davide who organized this year's conference!!!

The second highlight is a very personal relationship to one dedicated community member, Cristian Driga. Cristian lives in Romania and is OpenOffice.org's online survey and online voting expert. He just got married a few weeks before this year's conference, and I'm very happy that I got the chance to meet his lovely wife at this year's conference as well. To the very first OpenOffice.org conference Cristian travelled by bus. I can't remember how many hours it took him to get there, but AFAIK it were quite a bit more than 20 hours. He has helped me and the project a lot, and I love working together with him. Now were are using instant messaging more and more often, which gives me a bit the feeling that he is sitting right next to me.

The third highlight has to do with our file format, the OASIS OpenDocument format. I haven't really been involved in the efforts that led to Massachusetts decision to support OpenDocument and PDF. However, I was very much involved in the Valoris report which led to the favorable recommendation by the European Union. I provided Valoris with the details and success stories that I got from many different OpenOffice.org community members. Sophie Gautier for example was a great resource! I also collected input from projects like KOffice and companies developing solutions based on the file format. It was great to see, that we got invited by the European Commission to present in Brussels. Again, with the help of many community members I was able to put together a large number of slides for the final presentation which people like our XML expert Tim Bray presented. I don't know if the recommendation by the European Commission influenced Massachusetts in any way, but the whole effort and the final recommendation by the European Commission was definitely a huge personal hightlight of my time with OpenOffice.org.

I hope my highlights made it clear that open source and the success of open source is not about one company or one individual, it's the people (the community) who matter. Yes, I prepared a lot of the stuff for the Valoris report and the presentation in Brussels, but most of the content, success stories for example, came from community members (BTW, this includes corporate community members, e.g. Sun engineers). I'm looking forward to next year's OpenOffice.org conference where I hopefully will meet all the people in person again. Let's celebrate OpenOffice.org's birthday which is somehow also somehow our own birthday, at least for me! ;-)
( Okt 13 2005, 05:11:49 PM CEST ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org Spreading
This simple Flash file (Please click on the graphic to see the next slide!) illustrates how OpenOffice.org is and has been spreading globally. The data is coming from the ongoing OpenOffice.org user survey. The graphics were created by Kris Nackaerts who works for Intergraph and gave me the permission to publish/use the graphics.

The numbers are absolute numbers, i.e. the number of survey responses per country. The numbers do not take the number of PC's per country or the availability of Internet into consideration. Nevertheless, the illustration shows, how the software is spreading. The reported success stories and deployments seem to be pretty much in line with the picture provided by the Flash file.
( Okt 13 2005, 04:53:28 PM CEST ) Permalink

"Writing a Program to Control OpenOffice.org, Part 2"
"In Part 1, we studied the fundamental concepts of OpenOffice.org's software development kit (SDK) and how the SDK can be used to communicate with the OOo programs. We now are ready to write an application. As previously stated, we are going to develop a program that is able to interact with OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet application, Calc."
The full article can be found here.
( Okt 13 2005, 04:12:46 PM CEST ) Permalink

Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org!!!
More details on the OpenOffice.org home page!
( Okt 13 2005, 04:03:00 PM CEST ) Permalink

"Could ODF be the Net's new, frictionless document DNA?"
A very interesting article with many cool ideas:

"Come to think of it, what documents can't be stored in ODF? What about browser-generated documents that are authored in GMail, Yahoo Mail or even blogs? Once a few key providers of these different document authoring tools decide to natively store their documents in ODF, then the ODF format could enter a viral stage that turns ODF into the underlying DNA to anything capable of generating text. Were this to happen, Microsoft would have no choice but to support ODF (something it's apparently considering) since at that point, it would not only be odd man out, the number of ODF-compliant documents being generating by all the ODF-compliant authoring tools in total would begin to catch up to Microsoft's file formats."

The full article can be found here.
( Okt 13 2005, 10:42:38 AM CEST ) Permalink

Computer-On-a-Stick incl. OpenOffice.org
"The FingerGear Computer-On-a-Stick also includes an Office Productivity Suite, along with many of the most commonly used home and office applications. The Office Suite, developed by OpenOffice.org, is compatible with Microsoft Office(TM) applications, including Word(TM), Excel(R), PowerPoint(R), and Outlook(R). The Computer-On-a-Stick also bundles the increasingly popular Mozilla FireFox(R) web browser, now at a 25% market share(1), as well as a PDF Creator, a zip compression utility, and an Instant Messenger which communicates with Yahoo(R) IM, MSN(R) Messenger, AIM, and Napster(R), among others."
The full article can be found here.
( Okt 13 2005, 10:30:55 AM CEST ) Permalink

Very interesting comments on the OpenDocument format
Read this!
( Okt 13 2005, 10:29:03 AM CEST ) Permalink