OpenOffice

The Power of Brand and the Power of Product Redux

2014/10/28 By Rob 4 Comments

Last year I did a three-part blog (“The Power of Brand and the Power of Product”) describing a simple model of product adoption and market share, and showed how the parameters of that model could be determined using a single survey question. I used the open source productivity suites, OpenOffice and LibreOffice, as examples. It is now time to update that analysis with the most-recent survey data. (If you want to look up the original posts, here are the links: part one, part two, part three).

To recap the methodology, I conducted a survey using Google’s Consumer Survey service, which uses sampling and post-stratification weighting to match the target population, which in this case was the U.S. internet population. In other words, the survey is weighted to reflect the population demographics, for age, sex, region of the country, urban versus rural, income, etc.

The question in the survey was:

What is your familiarity with the software application called “OpenOffice”?

I have never heard of it
I am aware of it but have never used it
I have tried it once
I use it only sometimes
I use it on a regular basis

With 1502 responses, the results were:

I have never heard of it	61.3%
I am aware of it but have never used it	13.3%
I have tried it once	7.6%
I use it only sometimes	10.3%
I use it on a regular basis	7.5%

The same question was asked about LibreOffice, with results:

I have never heard of it	82.3%
I am aware of it but have never used it	5.8%
I have tried it once	4.4%
I use it only sometimes	3.1%
I use it on a regular basis	4.3%

Now these numbers are somewhat interesting on their own, but what is far more interesting are the derived metrics, which look at things like:

What is the name recognition of the product?
Of those who have heard of the product, what percentage actually give it a try? This is a measure of marketing effectiveness.
Of those who have tried the product, what percentage actually continue to use it? This is a measure of user satisfaction.
What percentage of all respondents use the product? This is a measure of market share.

Full details on how these other metrics are calculated, from this single survey question, can be found in Part One of this series.

Here are some charts to show how these metrics have evolved over the 2 1/2 years I’ve worked with this survey approach:

Those who know me know that I am partial to OpenOffice, an open source project that I contribute to. So I am extremely pleased to see it continue to advance in all fronts. Since coming to Apache, OpenOffice’s name recognition has grown from 24% to 39% and the user share has grown from 11% to 18%, while keeping user satisfaction constant. This is a testament to the hard work of the many talented volunteers at Apache.

Document as Activity versus Document as Record

2014/07/31 By Rob 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking some more on the past, present and future of documents. I don’t know exactly where this post will end up, but I think this will help me clarify some of my own thoughts.

First, I think technology has clouded our thinking and we’ve been equivocating with the term “document”, using it for two entirely different concepts.

One concept is of the document as the way we do work, but not an end-in-itself. This is the document as a “collaboration surface”, short-lived, ephemeral, fleeting, quickly created and equally quickly forgotten.

For example, when I create a few slides for a project status report, I know that the presentation document will never be seen again, once the meeting for which it was written has ended. The document serves as a tool for the activity of presenting status, of informing. Twenty years ago we would have used transparencies (“foils”) or sketched out some key points on a black board. And 10 years from now, most likely, we will use something else to accomplish this task. It is just a coincidence that today the tools we use for this kind of work also act like WYSIWYG editors and can print and save as “documents”. But that is not necessary, and historically was not often the case.

Similarly, take a spreadsheet. I often use a spreadsheet for a quick ad-hoc “what-if” calculation. Once I have the answer I am done. I don’t even need to save the file. In fact I probably load or save a document only 1 in 5 times that I launch the application. Some times people use a spreadsheet as a quick and dirty database. But 20 years ago they would have done these tasks using other tools, not document-oriented, and 10 years from now they may use other tools that are equally not document related. The spreadsheet primarily supports the activity of modeling and calculating.

Text documents have myriad collaborative uses today, but other tools have emerged as well . Collaboration is moved to other non-document interfaces, tools like wikis, instant messaging, forums, etc. Things that would have required routing a typed inter-office memo 50 years ago are now done with blog posts.

That’s one kind of document, the “collaboration surface”, the way we share ideas, work on problems, generally do our work.

And then there is a document as the record of what we did. This is implied by the verb “to document”. This use of documents is still critical, since it is ingrained in various regulatory, legal and business processes. Sometimes you need “a document.” It won’t do to have your business contract on a wiki. You can’t prove conformance to a regulation via a Twitter stream. We may no longer print and file our “hard” documents, but there is a need to have a durable, persistable, portable, signable form of a document. PDF serves well for some instances, but not in others. What does PDF do with a spreadsheet, for example? All the formulas are lost.

This distinction, between these two uses of documents, seems analogous to the distinction between Systems of Engagement and Systems of Record, and can be considered in that light. It just happens that each concept happened to use the same technology, the same tools, circa the year 2000, but in general these two concepts are very different.

The obvious question is: What will the future being? How quickly does our tool set diverge? Do we continue with tools that compromise, hold back collaborative features because they must also serve as tools to author document records? Or do we unchain collaborative tools and allow them to focus on what they do best?

Announcing OpenLibreOffice

2014/04/01 By Rob 3 Comments

2014-04-01

The Internet

The Apache OpenOffice project and The Document Foundation are pleased to announce that an agreement has been made to combine resources and jointly develop a next-generation open source office suite, to be called “OpenLibreOffice” (except in France where it will be called “LibreOfficeOpen”). OpenLibreOffice will be quad licensed under the ALv2, MPL, LPGL and WTFPL licenses, so programmers can maximize their ability to express fine distinctions about copyright law. Similarly, source code for OpenLibreOffice will be made available to in C++, C#, Java and Ruby, for the benefit of attorneys who wish to make fine distinctions about type checking.

Some people eat meat. Some are vegetarians. Some are vegan, and won’t even eat eggs or cheese.”, said Michael Meeks of Koolibra. “These distinctions are important to how we look at ourselves. The choice of open source license gives us each an opportunity to feel morally superior, which is the primary joy of open source development.

This new joint effort brings an end to the brief fork that had disrupted development of the decade-old OpenOffice project and lead to a passionate contest to see which project would fail the slowest. As former TDF Board Member Charles Schulz recalls:

The fork originated over a disagreement over the color of icons in the toolbar. Or something like that. I don’t really remember. It was 2011 and everyone was protesting for something. ‘Occupy OpenOffice’ didn’t sound right, so we just called it ‘LibreOffice’. It was intended to be a placeholder name. We were hoping, after a suitable period of insults and ridicule, that Oracle would just give us the trademark for OpenOffice. For unknown reasons, likely involving IBM, the Military-Industrial Complex and the Trilateral Commission, that plan didn’t work. By the time we realized that no one outside of France and Spain knew how to pronounce ‘LibreOffice’, it was too late.

LibreOffice shipped 68 releases over the 4 year duration of their fork, fixing over 1673 bugs and introducing only 1532 new bugs, making it the most productive, though least efficient, open source project of all time. Apache has made only two releases in the last year, taking the “principle of least astonishment” to new levels.

Apache OpenOffice Poo-Bah Rob Weir applauded news of the announcement:

Users will quickly benefit from the combined engineering effort on OpenLibreOffice. But even greater things await the public when the marketing efforts combine and 100 million downloads of OpenOffice get transformed into colorful infographics showing 20 billion IP addresses or abstract videos of flashing lights accompanied by jazz flute music.

In related news, Microsoft released a new policy paper suggesting that open source software was partially responsible for European economic woes, due to the lack of VAT revenue, and proposed a special new surtax on open source software, “in the interest of fairness and open competition”.

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IBM Support for Apache OpenOffice

2013/11/04 By Rob 2 Comments

As you probably know, IBM has been involved with the OpenOffice.org community for many years. This included collaboration on ODF and accessibility at first, as we worked on our separate Lotus Symphony fork. And then in 2011 we followed the OpenOffice.org community to Apache where Apache OpenOffice then took off. Since then we’ve been merging in features and bug fixes from Symphony, essentially ending the Symphony fork. The first results of this collaboration showed up in Apache OpenOffice 4.0, with the new side panel UI. The reception of this new release has been phenomenal. The release received great reviews, including an 2013 InfoWord Best of Open Source (Bossie) award. The success of this release propelled us to recently hit a new download milestone: Over 75 million copies of Apache OpenOffice in the less than 18 months since the first release of Apache OpenOffice.

The overall market for office productivity suites is changing. Microsoft Office 2003 is hitting End of Life in April 2014, causing companies still using it to explore other options. The introduction of new subscription models from Microsoft, as well as emergence of new cloud-based editors from several players, including IBM, are also making customers reevaluate their dependency on Microsoft Office. Do we really need Office? For everyone? What are the alternatives?

I’m really pleased to see other parts of IBM starting to see the opportunities available with Apache OpenOffice. Already publicly announced include integrations with IBM Connections, IBM SmartCloud and IBM ECM and Case Manager. (If there are other IBM products that you think would benefit greatly from integration, let me know!)

The latest, and most significant, enabler of enterprise use of Apache OpenOffice is our IBM Support for Apache OpenOffice offering. Although individual end-users and even small businesses can easily deploy Apache OpenOffice on their own (75 million downloads testifies to that), larger enterprises with more complicated and demanding needs benefit from the kind of expertise that IBM can provide. So I’m glad to see this offering available to fill out the ecosystem, so everyone can use and be successful with Apache OpenOffice, from individual university students, to small non-profits, to large international corporations.

The Power of Brand and the Power of Product, Part 3

2013/10/21 By Rob Leave a Comment

In the previous two parts (one and two) I described a model of product adoption and market share that could be built with a single survey question. I applied this model to the open source productivity suites OpenOffice and LibreOffice, looking at adoption in September 2012 and April 2013.

The results were described in detail in the previous article in this series, but can be summarized as:

OpenOffice	September 2012	April 2013	Change
Customer Awareness	24.3%	27.6%	14% growth
Customer Motivation	63.0%	65.9%	5% growth
Customer Satisfaction	70.6%	68.7%	3% decline
Market Share	10.8%	12.5%	16% growth

Six months have now passed and it is worth taking another look to see how things have evolved. As I did previously, I used Google’s Consumer Survey service which uses sampling and post-stratification weighting to match the target population, which in this case was the US internet population. In other words, the survey is weighted to reflect the population demographics, for age, sex, region of the country, urban versus rural, income, etc. I did this survey in a personal capacity for my own interest. The Standard Disclaimer applies.

OpenOffice (N=1519)	September 2012	April 2013	September 2013	Change (September to September)
Customer Awareness	24.3%	27.6%	30.7%	26% growth
Customer Motivation	63.0%	65.9%	67.4%	7% growth
Customer Satisfaction	70.6%	68.7%	77.8%	10% growth
Market Share	10.8%	12.5%	16.1%	49% growth

So what do we see? Very nice results, indeed. The OpenOffice brand is strong and growing. Over 30% of consumers surveyed had heard of it. Of those who had heard of it, 67% had given it a try. That number is changed little. This is an opportunity for Apache OpenOffice marketing volunteers to improve both of these numbers. Of those who tried OpenOffice almost 78% continued to use OpenOffice. This is a modest increase, but there is certainly room to improve here. Put it altogether, and the estimated user share, the percentage of US internet users who use OpenOffice “sometimes” or “regularly” is 16.1%, nearly a 50% improvement year-over-year.

In any case, to summarize and to illustrate the improvements graphically, I’ve charted the growth in user share over the three surveys, including results for LibreOffice as well: