What impact will it have if OpenOffice.org is deployed in Federal offices around the US?
Question posed on Linkedin by Alexandro Colorado:
A PCWorld article by Phil Shapiro reports that one of Obama’s first executive acts will be standardizing all federal offices on OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice is free, robust, stable and more than sufficient for 99 percent of government work. If any particular government office requires Microsoft Office, they’ll be able to purchase it — after explaining in a few sentences why OpenOffice is insufficient for their needs.
What do you get when all Federal offices standardize on OpenOffice? You get increased productivity at lower cost. Scratch that. You get increased productivity at no-cost.
Retraining is certainly a major issue. When considering this, one thing to keep in mind though is that many companies have held back on going to the recent versions of MO because of this same training overhead and implied productivity cost. When you count in the additional cost of the software upgrade to the latest MO the total impost on a business (or government agency) has proven too gnarly to contemplate. There are also the same costs for the next upgrade two years down the track. An often heard response to such a proposal to upgrade is that “the current version we are using does 99% of what we need so why should we change everyone”.
Contrast this with the same situation if the proposal was to upgrade to the latest OO. Same retraining overhead and productivity cost (I’d suggest actually less productivity cost moving to OO than the latest MO). Zero licensing cost for the OO. Same cost in two years.
So why would an organization upgrade to MO when they can upgrade to OO for the same (or less) pain and significantly less cost in both the short and long term. It’s a question of mindshare amongst the senior executives (CIO, CEO, Board, etc.) and how well informed they are of the pros and cons rather than the F.U.D. that Microsoft will spread.
If the President (as the Executive of the USA Gov’t), makes a strategic decision to move to OO from MO then there will be immediate visibility of this as a viable choice to consider in every single board room across the globe. That visibility and the ensuing discussion around it will be the primary impact.
Amongst all the possible good that an incoming President could do, this particular initiative would have a significant positive impact for all people around the world regardless of race, colour, creed, or language.
Mike Smith – dominoconsultant
Mike:
As a user of OpenOffice since it first appeared, I think your suggestion is excellent. Why don’t you go to WhiteHouse.gove and suggest it to the administration. Here’s the URL… http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/opl/