Like many OpenOffice.org adopters, Forrester's enterprise clients are starting to wonder what's going on with the once-promising open source alternative to Microsoft Office. As one chief technology strategist posited last week: "Oracle has made several strong public pronouncements that their support for OpenOffice.org will continue abated. This, however, begs the question of the increasing functional and technical gap between standard programs like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations and the new, all-encompassing view of the desktop being adopted by Microsoft in Office 2010. That being so, is there really any future for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org within the enterprise, except as an ever-shrinking niche to support basic, ultra low-cost office document capability on home-use platforms?"

Great question. After 10 years, Open Office hasn’t had much traction in the enterprise – supported by under 10% of firms, and today it’s facing more competition from online apps from Google and Zoho. I'm not counting OpenOffice completely out yet, however, since IBM has been making good progress on features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning Open Office for the web, desktop and mobile – a first. But barriers to Open Office and Web-based tools persist, and not just on a feature/function basis. Common barriers include:

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Content, Corel, General vendor/market landscape, Information Management, Microsoft Office, Novell, Open Office, Thinkfree, ibm, open source, oracle, productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.