First, in response to Dolinar’s article, I would like to make a few comments.  His very first sentence attempts to set the tone for what ends up becoming an article harassing Microsoft for not adopting more formats.  Dolinar wonders “Why doesn’t free trump expensive?“  I feel that this problem of non-adoption of F/OSS software (especially in lieu of expensive proprietary software) has two barriers to vanquish in order to gain the end goal of widespread adoption.  First, it has to be a better piece of software.  Secondly, it must have a serious driving force behind it.

For free software to win over expensive, commercial software it must be better.  The problem is that everyone defines the word ‘better’ differently.  For a lot of computer geeks, including me, better means something completely different than it would to a ‘normal’ person.  I love Linux because it allows me to hack at my entire computer system and customize whatever I feel like customizing.  At the same time, however, it allows me to mess up things that would stump a normal user.  When my Linux server wouldn’t initialize my X server session because the computer clock battery had died it stumped me for a while, but I enjoyed a challenge.  When my mom’s computer clock is off from real life, she has to call the nearest tech support person over to help her fix it.  The majority of the market for common, everyday software doesn’t necessarily care for more complex, hackable, or secure software.  They want something that is moderately stable and usable.  More specifically, they want something that they are familiar with it.  As a generation that has grown up with GUIs (though I ran DOS and was quite amazed by it at the time) we have always had some variation of Office, whether it be Lotus’ version or Microsoft’s version.  Later in life we were taught and tested on MS Office.  People who are older and, generally, less welcoming of new software are resisting more or less anything new that is not forced on them.

The problem that OpenOffice is encountering is not one limited to OpenOffice.  Hell, just look at Office 2007 and the new ‘Ribbon’ interface.  I, personally, love it–I feel that it makes things much easier to find and is more visually appealing.  The a large part of the workforce, however, has resisted the software.  Change is always bad.  Now consider for a second that, while people don’t like the new version of MS Office, they at least know what exactly MS Office is and how it (as a general rule) works.  Why would they install a completely new set of applications that they have to relearn?  Keep in mind that to get OpenOffice they have to visit a new website and download the installer.  If an office wants to do this they will have to install it on every single new workstation and then change settings that are needed to work with other offices that don’t use OpenOffice (such as changing the default document type).  While I was using OpenOffice Writer I don’t know how many times I have sent a file to someone, not thinking about the fact that the other person is basically guaranteed to not be running MS Word.

On the flip side, Firefox is one of the most popular open-source projects.  According to PC World, Firefox has a 19% market share and is predicted to hit 20% in July.  What made Firefox such a success?  I would argue that Firefox had a few things going for it.  First of all, it came from a decently developed background.  Firefox is the offspring of the Netscape browser, so a lot of the development team had a large amount of experience working on web browsers.  Secondly, it was better than the huge mess that was IE.  IE 6 was initially released in 2001.  The second of two major patches for IE 6 was released in August 2004.  Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004.  At this point, IE 6 was a mess.  It didn’t have tabs, extensions, or anything close to a valid CSS intepreter.  Firefox, however, was new, fast, and didn’t have a lot of the problems that IE faced in being the major browser.  People started switching and word got around about a new browser that was better than IE 6.  Firefox then leveraged this excitement (along with a strong development team) to produce solid versions.

Firefox shows what can go right with a project.  If OpenOffice even had 15% of the market it would be viewed as a major success against Microsoft’s Office.  If OpenOffice really wants to win against MS Office, they need to go for visible successes and not hope that the format wars will push them to the front.