OpenOffice

The Power of Brand and the Power of Product, Part 2

June 12, 2013

In Part 1 of this series we looked at a model of product adoption and market share that had a special and valuable property:  the parameters of the model could be derived from a single survey question, e.g.: “What is your awareness with the hand cream called Whizzo-Soft?” A. I have never heard of it. [...]

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Who wants to develop OpenOffice for Tablet?

May 29, 2013

One of the most common user questions I see on the Facebook and Twitter streams for Apache OpenOffice is “Do you have a iPad version?” or “Do you have a tablet version”?   Although there are companies that offer access to OpenOffice via a virtualized remote session, there is no native tablet version of OpenOffice. I [...]

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A Tale of Two Cities

November 23, 2012

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”   That, in the words of John B. Bogart of the New York Sun, is a classic rule of press coverage.  The ordinary is not news.  The expected is not news.  [...]

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LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims: Part 3, Developers

November 4, 2012

(This post represents my personal opinion only.  The standard disclaimer applies.) In previous posts I looked at claims made by LibreOffice, in project blog posts and press releases, related to the number of LibreOffice users and the number of active LibreOffice contributors.  I showed that in both cases the claims from LibreOffice were greatly inflated [...]

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LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims: Part 2, Community Size

November 3, 2012

(This post represents my personal opinion only.  The standard disclaimer applies.) In a previous post I looked at how LibreOffice inflates its user and download stats, claiming to have far more users than it actually has.  Several journalists took these claims at face value and repeated them in their articles, never questioning whether LibreOffice representatives [...]

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LibreOffice’s Dubious Claims: Part I, Download Counts

October 31, 2012

(This post represents my personal opinion only.  The standard disclaimer applies.) Part II is here and Part III is here. The Claims I’ve recently read some implausible claims from the LibreOffice project,  concerning their stats for downloads and users.  (These two different statistics are unfortunately conflated in their publicity campaigns, but more about that later).   [...]

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From the Whispers of ApacheCon…

October 20, 2012

From the whispers of ApacheCon, OpenOffice.org may never leave the incubator project. The intention may be to do a thorough code audit and produce one last, clean release that the rival LibreOffice can absorb. That was what you may have heard 10 months ago,  if you listened to the rumormongers.   Certainly there were a lot [...]

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Perspectives on Apache OpenOffice 3.4 download numbers

June 22, 2012

You may have read, on the Apache OpenOffice blog, news that the project has had 5 million downloads in the first 6 weeks since the release of version 3.4.  And as the above chart shows, the download rate has increased in the past two weeks, as we’ve started to roll out the upgrade notifications to [...]

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+1 for Apache OpenOffice 3.4

May 8, 2012

Read more in the official announcement.  You can download Apache OpenOffice 3.4 now, from http://download.openoffice.org/    Tell your friends.  And welcome home.

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Ending the Symphony Fork

February 1, 2012

What is a fork? A fork is a form of software reuse.  I like your software module.  It meets some or many of my needs, but I need some additional features. When I want to reuse existing functionality from another software product, I generally have four choices: If your module is nicely designed and extensible, [...]

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