{"id":2139,"date":"2012-11-23T09:39:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T14:39:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=2139"},"modified":"2012-11-24T19:55:10","modified_gmt":"2012-11-25T00:55:10","slug":"a-tale-of-two-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2012\/11\/a-tale-of-two-cities.html","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Two Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;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.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 That, in the words of John B. Bogart of the <em>New York Su<\/em>n, is a classic rule of press coverage.\u00a0 The ordinary is not news.\u00a0 The expected is not news.\u00a0 The unusual is news.\u00a0 Of course this can distort our perception of reality, since we&#8217;re bombarded by stories of the atypical.<\/p>\n<p>Here is a recent example, of two cities looking at migrations of their desktop office productivity software.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In September we heard that Leipzig, Germany, population 530,000, decided to drop Microsoft Office and move to OpenOffice for its city council.\u00a0 Already 3,900 of 4,200 PC workstations have migrated.<\/li>\n<li>In November we heard that Freiburg, Germany, population 230,000, decided to drop OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and move to Microsoft Office 2010 for its city council.\u00a0 2000 desktops are part of this move.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So which is &#8220;dog bites man&#8221; and which is &#8220;man bites dog&#8221;?\u00a0\u00a0 A look at the press coverage tells us:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\" https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;tbo=d&amp;gl=us&amp;tbm=nws&amp;q=Leipzig+openoffice&amp;oq=Leipzig+openoffice\">Leipzig OpenOffice<\/a> coverage == 2 articles<\/li>\n<li><a href=\" https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;tbo=d&amp;gl=us&amp;tbm=nws&amp;q=freiburg+openoffice&amp;oq=freiburg+openoffice\">Freiburg OpenOffice<\/a> coverage == 29 articles<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The larger migration away from Microsoft Office in Leipzig was barely covered in the press.\u00a0 But the Freiburg story has had enormous press uptake.\u00a0\u00a0 By this I take it that moving from Microsoft Office to open source alternatives like OpenOffice is normal, the expected, the non-newsworthy common occurrence.\u00a0 It is &#8220;dog bites man&#8221;.\u00a0 Moving in the opposite direction, from free software to proprietary is newsworthy because it is so rare.\u00a0 It is &#8220;man bites dog&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>This, I think, is encouraging news.\u00a0 We just need to make sure that within the open source community we continue\u00a0 to tell the good news, even if the press does not think it is newsworthy.\u00a0 Yes, we need to understand better why Freiburg failed, and what we can do to improve.\u00a0 But we also need to put this in perspective.\u00a0 This perspective includes other migrations like Leipzig, but also the perspective that in the time it took me to write this blog post we have had more downloads of OpenOffice than were lost in Freiburg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;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.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 That, in the words of John B. Bogart of the New York Sun, is a classic rule of press coverage.\u00a0 The ordinary is not news.\u00a0 The expected is not news.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-openoffice","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2144,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions\/2144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}