Microsoft Office vs. the other guys

"What office productivity suite are you are using now, and is it your preferred choice?"

I recommend the following Open Source programs:

1. OpenOffice.org (office suite)
2. Firefox (browser)
3. Thunderbird (email)
4. Pidgin (multiprotocol instant messenger)
5. VLC (multiformat video player)
6. Miro (video podcast player)
7. Gimp (graphic editor)
8. Clamwin (antivirus)
9. Notepad++ (notepad replacement)
10. Freemind (mind mapper)

These programs are the minimum necessary to make any Windows desktop usable.

Thee are two approaches to cracking the MSOffice desktop monopoly problem; replace or re-purpose.

Among the most prominent of replacement efforts are the cross-platform variations of the OSS OpenOffice.org desktop office suite code base. With a feature set comparable to MSOffice, WordPerfect Office and Lotus SmartSuite, OpenOffice introduced truly cross-platform functionality. Replacement efforts, also known as "rip-out-and-replace", can be costly and disruptive. The reason is that years of integrated client/server - business systems development has bound these systems to the MSOffice productivity environment. Rip out MSOffice and you rip up much of your critical day-to-day business chores.

In fairness to the replacement crowd, it is true that many of these bound business processes are going to transition to or be re-written to the Web. The productivity advantages of Web based access, exchange, collaboration and communications are extraordinary. The question becomes, will these processes and systems transition to a MSOffice - MS WebStack/Cloud model? Or will they transition to an OpenDesktop - OpenWeb model? (Or other semi OpenWeb alternative?)

This is where the other option, re-purposing MSOffice come into play.

The re-purposing of MSOffice actually follows much the same patterns and methodologies used by Microsoft as they try to integrate and connect their proprietary WebStack/Cloud model. In fact, as Microsoft goes about the difficulties of makign this great transition, they actually expose many of the internals needed to similarly connect MSOffice to OpenWeb systems.

The advantage of re-purposing approaches is the same advantage Microsoft offers to businesses and organizations with workgroups and workflows bound to the MSOffice productivity environment. Web productivity, collaboration, communication, and connectivity technologies becomes a "value added" enhancement as opposed to "costly and disruptive" replacement/re-write.

Hope this helps. Watch the WebKit community because that's where most of this re-purposing to the OpenWeb is targeted. The reason? For re-purposing to succeed as an alternative to Microsoft's rich client - rich server" integrated desktop-device-Web-server platform, the OpenWeb must advance as rapidly as possible. The WebKit OSS Community is pushing the edge of the OpenWeb envelope like nothing else out there. And they have a very important cornerstone of extraordinary smart-device marketshare capable of stamping these much needed innovations into the life of the greater Web. This edge-of-the-web marketshare could effectively trump the foot-dragging, vendor consortia efforts to slow or impede OpenWeb standards development.

~ge~