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The Price of Free

By: IdaRose Sylvester, Program Director, Freeform Dynamics
Published: 12th November 2008
Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

A couple weeks ago, OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released, and millions of consumers downloaded it, including me. OpenOffice.org is a Sun-sponsored project that provides a suite of desktop "office" applications, such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and a database, and is an open source, free competitor to the likes of Microsoft Office. This is the first time OpenOffice has run natively on Apple's OSX.

While we officially run Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista here at Freeform, many of us use Macs, and occasionally need to open up documents while running OSX. At first glance, OpenOffice.org 3.0 was a viable solution for this, and a major improvement, from a UI perspective, to previous version 2.4, and also an improvement over NeoOffice, another desktop open source competitor (for the purpose of this investigation, we did not investigate Google Documents, which operates in the cloud and is not how we currently manage documents).

On the surface, the OpenOffice.org 3.0 applications achieved a decent user interface, mimicking Microsoft Office older toolbars and drop down menus. However, I find switching back and forth between OpenOffice and current Office applications quite challenging compared to simply switching back and forth between operating systems, due to the countless nuances between a given application on one office suite versus the other.

Please see comparative screen shots of a new text document in OpenOffice.org 3 and Microsoft Office 2007 Word below.

Open Office

Microsoft Office

One of our major issues with using multiple office-based applications across the organization and with clients is interoperability. While promising nearly 100% interoperability with major Office applications, all open source programs we have tried have failed to provide interoperability in enough cases, especially with PowerPoint. I tried a few experiments with OpenOffice.org 3.0, and at first, I was hopeful. Relatively simple word and spreadsheet documents created in OpenOffice in OSX opened perfectly in their counterpart programs in Microsoft Office in Vista. Editing these documents in Office and sending them back roundtrip into OpenOffice also worked perfectly, to my surprise. This is where the good news ended.

I then tried opening two modestly complex documents created in Office in OpenOffice, and had entirely unacceptable results. When I opened a PowerPoint document in OpenOffice, all the graphics and template colors were perfect, a surprise. However, various viewing modes didn't work, such as handout, which would not render on the screen, let alone print. A Microsoft Word document created with a straightforward outline numbering system, when opened in OpenOffice, randomly renumbered and changed the format of most headings, rendering the document illegible.

Given that Microsoft Office Home and Student edition lists at $149.95, Microsoft Office Standard at $399.95, and Microsoft Office Professional at $499.95 (substantially lower prices available online), it is hard to justify enterprise reliance on a compatibility-challenged, albeit free, program. This is especially true in any organization in which office applications are mission critical for conducting business, and even more true for any business that ever shares anything more than very simple files outside the organization in an editable form.

However, OpenOffice can suit individuals and groups where interoperability is less of an issue, or where cost is a major factor, such as in a non-profit or bootstrapped startup. Solo entrepreneurs, students, home users and others may also find OpenOffice to be quite suitable. OpenOffice users do get an amazing amount of functionality, with more power in the programs than available at a premium just a couple years ago, and the community should be applauded. It's intriguing to think, too, with the popularity of OpenOffice, and the donations coming in, what may be next.

While OpenOffice is impressive for the cost, the cost of using it in most situations is too high for me at present, as I suspect it will be for most mainstream businesses, although I will keep it running and updated so I can open documents when running OSX. In the meantime, I think it is safe to say commercial software for the enterprise desktop will remain the default option for the foreseeable future.

Reader Comments

Do you agree with what IdaRose Sylvester, Program Director, Freeform Dynamics is saying? Perhaps you feel, or even know, different? Why not post your opinion on this issue?

17th November 2008: 'Steve Burrows' said:

MS Office Pro is currently selling at over £350 ( $525 ) via online retailers in the UK, so a 300–400 user SME could pay over £100,000 to invest in the latest version of MS Office, before deployment costs. The same price for Open Office - £0. Of course having invested in MS Office there are support and upgrade charges to be paid, which the OpenOffice user does not suffer.

The costs notwithstanding, IdaRose misses the point - there is no interoperability issue - users normally have one or the other package, they do not routinely switch between them. There is also not much of a compatibility issue - unless one is so naive as to think that MS Office file formats are some kind of world standard - users work in clusters, typically within an enterprise, where they are commonly equipped with the same software. Occasionally editable form documents are transmitted externally, and they may be incompatible with the (commercial) Lotus or Wordperfect office suite products used in many organisations.

From a European perspective I find IdaRose's comments ill-considered and ill-informed, below the quality of reporting that I expect to see on IT-Director.com. Cost is ALWAYS an issue for consumers of IT, any IT function leader who thinks otherwise is commercially incompetent, and in respect of Compatibility - last time I looked MS Office had c. 50% market share - meaning that approximately half of us were using some other package.

As someone who runs an enterprise that does use both MS Office and Open Office, and has used OpenOffice since its reincarnation from the original Star Office, there are good and valid reasons for choosing MS Office over the lower cost alternatives in some circumstances, however IdaRose does not address them. Open Office also provides some aspects of functionality which are clearly superior to the MS Office offering, however these also appear to have passed her by. Overall a disappointingly ill-considered piece of reporting that would have been better off being spiked instead of being published on such a reputable site.

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21st November 2008: 'Paul Tanner' said:

I would not come on quite as strongly as you Steve as I think interoperability *is* very important. However, Office does not handle this well either as each version seems to produce formats that users of previous versions can't read.

Those of us able to install compatibility packs or configure downward saving of docs can get round this. However, to those who send docs outside their orgs and are non-tech, I would advise use of PDF (or very old versions of Office). Given that, OpenOffice is a perfectly viable alternative.

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21st November 2008: 'Steve Burrows' said:

Thanks Paul, but are you confusing interoperability (in this context the ease with which a user can switch from one package to the other) with compatibility? I agree that MS Office does not maintain compatibility well, but given that it has c. 50% market share it would be wrong of us to expect good compatibility in any case, so the future of "compatibility packs" and file format converters is assured until MS and other vendors adopt a common "open standard" file format.

Of course that's what the Open Document Format (ODF) is all about - but Microsoft won't support it until 2009 when the MS Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is released. Open Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, IBM Lotus Symphony, NeoOffice and Google Docs are already there with ODF so I expect that MS will catch up eventually.

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