Pattern Finder

Smart Move: OpenOffice.org 3.0 to Support Read/Write of OOXML

According to a post at OpenOffice.org Ninja, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is planning to support the reading and writing of OOXML documents. This will not occur in the immediate future: OpenOffice.org 3.0 is about six months away (with OpenOffice.org 2.4 shipping in the meantime) and the screenshot included in the post shows a lot of work still needs to be done. However, this means that sometime in 2008 OpenOffice.org users will be able to easily share documents with workers or partners who are using the Microsoft Office 2007 default file formats.

What's interesting here is this appears to be a change in the OpenOffice.org stance from seven months ago. On August 15, 2007, Michael Brauer noted in a blog post, "First of all, Sun's OpenOffice.org developers are only working on import filters, that is, filters that read OOXML documents into OpenOffice.org. We are not working on export filters, that is, filters that save OOXML documents."

Whether it's a shift or not, the OpenOffice.org plan to import/export OOXML documents strikes me as both pragmatic and smart--although I'm sure the coding will be an absolute bear (see this post on the difficulty of importing shapes from OOXML). Most companies--and almost all end users--aren't interested in the ODF/OOXML debate: they just want to get their work done. Towards the end of 2008, OpenOffice.org users will be collaboration peers with enterprise users who use Microsoft Office 2007 (the vast majority) because they'll all  be using the same file format. At that point, some smart enterprises are going to say, "Hey, this pretty full-featured office suite plays well with my documents--and best of all it's free. We should look at switching from Microsoft Office."

Don't get me wrong--I don't think there will be a mass migration to OpenOffice.org 3.0. You can find plenty of blog comments where people say they prefer the fit and finish of Microsoft Office to that of Google Apps and OpenOffice.org. Furthermore, Microsoft has made sure that the tight integration/synergy between Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 doesn't go unnoticed.

Nevertheless, I think we will start to see pockets of OpenOffice.org usage, especially if the economy continues to go south and IT departments start looking for ways to economize. Let's be real--if an IT department figures it can decrease its Microsoft Office license fees by a fifth by replacing 20% of its Office installs with OpenOffice.org--and without taking a huge hit in productivity or training costs--it will do so. Several years ago, people would have laughed if you'd said Apple would soon have 14% of retail PC market share in the U.S.--yet that's happened. Get ready for some interesting times.

Burton Group's Response to the ODF Alliance Posted

I've finished posting Burton Group's response to the ODF Alliance’s response to our “What’s Up .DOC?” overview report on ODF and OOXML on the CCS blog. It's in three parts:

• Part 1: Points 1-6
• Part 2: Points 7-12
• Part 3: Points 13-18

Including the ODF Alliance's comments for context, it's pretty long--20 pages in Microsoft Word--which is why I split it up into three parts.

I certainly picked up some interesting tidbits in the course of doing research for the replies. For example: Adobe's Buzzword word processor is supporting OOXML sooner than it's supporting ODF (point 18 in part 3); and ODF supports many more table columns in a word processing document than OOXML [8,192 in ODF, 63 in OOXML] (this is probably because ODF table support is universal across all three applications, including spreadsheets, while the OOXML word processing spec is built with Microsoft Word as the model; point 17 in part 3).

Happy reading!

Burton Group's Response to the ODF Alliance (Part 1)

What follows is Burton Group’s response to the ODF Alliance’s response to our “What’s Up .DOC?” overview report on ODF and OOXML. At the outset, we’d like to clarify some things before getting into the point-by-point responses: 

1. The utility of a model is assessed relative to stated objectives in a given domain; a modeling endeavor never has a simple right or wrong answer (page 18 of our overview). A key part of this debate is the subjective assessment of how important Office file format interoperability is—we believe it will be very important for most enterprises—and that Office file format interoperability was not a goal for the group that designed ODF.
2. Standards initiatives participants are often at least partly politically motivated, generally with significant business issues at stake. That’s certainly not new to the ODF/OOXML debate.
3. We reviewed the current versions of the published standards, so the intention to more completely integrate ODF with RDF in the future is not an immediate consideration for enterprises making format decisions today. Burton Group believes that ODF 1.2 is a much richer and useful specification than previous versions, and we will update the overview to reflect that when ODF 1.2 is approved. 

Responses to the ODF Alliance points follow. To keep this post from being horrendously long—and since we haven’t finished all the responses at this point—we’ll post them in series. This post covers points 1-6. To make it easier for readers, we’ve listed the ODF Alliance comments in italics, followed by the Burton Group replies in a non-italicized font. 

Microsoft Buys FAST; Last Year It Was BI, This Year It's Search

Microsoft announced today that it was buying Fast Search & Transfer, the Norwegian enterprise search firm, for approximately $1.2 billion. It looks like pretty much a done deal, in that FAST's Board of Directors is recommending the acquisition and the two largest shareholders are on board (per a ZDNet blog post).

FAST went into an operational meltdown last year (see Forbes article), with writedowns, layoffs, and the exiting of many longtime U.S.-based employees. This probably helped decrease the purchase price, and Microsoft seized the moment. While the operational wheels fell off, the FAST technology is strong at its core.

That FAST would be acquired is not surprising; Bjorn Olstad, the CTO, commented in a meeting I was at last year that the infrastructure players (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) would increasingly encroach on FAST's space. In short, FAST was well aware of the challenges ahead, and sounded like it was amenable to being acquired. What surprised me was that Microsoft bought FAST; I always thought it would be Oracle, for a variety of reasons.

Last year, we saw the infrastructure players absorb business intelligence (Oracle bought Hyperion, SAP bought Business Objects, IBM bought Cognos); this year it will be search. At this point, Autonomy is the only large best-of-breed player left standing, and it will have a hard time going it alone.

This is a huge coup for Microsoft in the enterprise search space. After futzing around for years, Microsoft finally started to get serious with search in SharePoint 2007. It's not perfect--clients have started to tell me the boundary conditions they're running into--but it's a lot better than search was in SharePoint 2003. If you split the search market into three sectors: (1) cheap and OK, (2) relatively inexpensive and an 80% solution, and (3) expensive and sophisticated, Microsoft is targeting tier two with SharePoint Search. Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express is its answer to tier one (see my previous blog post here), and the FAST acquisition is its answer to tier three.

BI Is Now Infrastructure

With IBM's planned purchase of Cognos announced yesterday, business intelligence has become part of infrastructure. At this point, only SAS (privately held) of the large BI players remains independent. Oracle bought Hyperion, SAP bought Business Objects, Cognos bought Applix, and IBM has now bought Cognos.

This is interesting in that the infrastructure players are going after search as well, so no matter what form your data takes -- whether it's structured or unstructured -- companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle plan to search it and report on it with in-house solutions.

FT: Free for Casual Users; Fee for Heads Down Users

According to a story in The New York Times, the Financial Times "as of mid-October will allow users to get up to 30 articles a month for free, said John Ridding, chief executive of the newspaper. Anyone who wants to view more online material will have to subscribe to the site."

This is a very interesting subscription model. In the past, media sites have gone with the "all or nothing" route: either the content is free (The Washington Post) or it's available for a fee (The Wall Street Journal). The Financial Times, with its new pricing, is discriminating between heads down and casual users.

This is a usage model that we've seen for years in software. For example, business intelligence vendors  typically have an expert client workbench and a casual user viewer. The expert user version is a fat client, costs more, and has deep functionality; the casual user version is browser-based, costs less (sometimes free), and has basic functionality. These vendors realized that making a casual user pay the same fee as a heads down analyst just wasn't going to fly. Maybe we're finally seeing the same attitude in the online content space.

The Other Shoe Has Dropped: Microsoft Announces Microsoft Online

The other shoe has dropped. After hinting for about a year that it had a software and SaaS strategy, Microsoft today officially took the wraps off, issuing a press release. The product is called Microsoft Online, a SaaS-based set of solutions that were previously available only as software:

• Microsoft Communications Online (SaaS version of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007)
• Microsoft Exchange Online (SaaS version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007)
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Online (SaaS version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007)

Microsoft considers this IT-centric set of solutions different from its Live solutions, which are not IT-centric (i.e., end user or SMB-focused): Windows Live, Office Live, Dynamics Live CRM, MSN, Windows Live ID, and Xbox Live. Furthermore, Microsoft Online is targeted at the high end: companies with more than 5,000 employees. With Office Live targeted at businesses with 10 or fewer employees and Microsoft Online targeted at businesses with more than 5,000 employees, there's a pretty big gap in the middle. However, Microsoft (in the form of Jeff Raikes) hinted that the company will go after mid-sized businesses in the long run. My take is that  Microsoft has decided that after it's figured out how to serve both extremes of the market, handling the middle part will be a piece of cake.

Also announced are Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live (SaaS version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM), and Exchange Labs (R&D testing of messaging and unified communication). Office Live Workspace is a free collaboration workspace. As the beta signup states, "Store 1000+ Microsoft Office documents in one place; share files—you control who can view and edit; works with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook."

This is a huge announcement, with major ramifications in the market. Here are the "net it out" notes I jotted down after the pre-briefing by Raikes on September 27th:

IBM's Lotus Symphony: Less Is More--Literally

In my last post, I said that I thought that some people were looking around for options to Microsoft Office. Based on an article in PC World, at least 100,000 people were: "[IBM] reported Wednesday that its free rival to Microsoft Corp.'s Office suite was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release." Somewhat caught by surprise, IBM had to triple the number of download servers to handle the load.

However, there's a big difference between downloading software and actually using it. There, the news isn't quite as good. Another article in PC World entitled, "IBM's Symphony Hitting Wrong Notes, Reviewers Say," documents problems that early users are having with the product. While the user interface seems to be a hit, the software has non-minimal system requirements. Here's a comparison of some office suites:

• Microsoft Office Standard: 256MB of RAM, 1.5GB of hard disk space (source: Microsoft web site)
• OpenOffice.org 2.3, Version 2.3: 128MB of RAM and 800MB of hard disk space (source: OpenOffice.org web site)
• IBM Lotus Symphony: 512MB of RAM and 540MB of hard disk space (source: IBM web site) Note: The PC World article said that Symphony needed 1GB of memory, so it's unclear whether the article got it wrong or IBM quickly changed the requirements.

In short, Symphony requires 100% more memory than Microsoft Office and an additional three times the memory of OpenOffice.org. The software is also slow. One commenter notes, "My VIA SP13000 box takes a couple of minutes just to bring up the main window."

These system requirements and slow performance would not be surprising if the software were more functional than Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org, but it isn't. In the article, Don Harbison of IBM states, "IBM has little interest in chasing MS-Office's 'tail-lights'," Harbison wrote. "Lotus Symphony is powerful, simple, and focused. It provides all the tools and functions most businesses require without confusing features not required. ... In other words, no more, no less, than what is needed, as opposed to the alternative, which is wasteful, and unnecessary."

OK, so let me get this straight. IBM is pitching Symphony as a trim, lean version of Microsoft Office (which it characterizes as wasteful), and yet it requires twice the memory of Microsoft Office? In this case, less really is more. What IBM doesn't tell you--while it proclaims that the software is free, and so will save you money--is that the additional cost of the hardware will probably offset the software savings, which are $60 (based on the lowest price of Microsoft Office). It's a wash. True, if you've already bought the latest whiz bang computer with 2 GB of memory it's not a big deal, but if you're using a several year old computer with 512 MB of memory, it's going to be a disappointment. Yes, it's a free brick, but it's still a brick. I'm certainly going to feel productive waiting a minute or two for the splash screen to appear (hint of sarcasm).

So while IBM's dwindling Notes installed base may snap it up, it doesn't look as if IBM Lotus Symphony is going to make huge headway in the market at large. Time will tell.

Is It Time for Consumers to Move to Free Office Suites?

Peter O'Kelly and I fielded a call yesterday from Donna Fuscaldo of Fox News Business. She posed the following question: "Should consumers use these new free software packages [e.g., IBM Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice.org] as an alternative to Microsoft Office or Google's browser-based software?"

It's an interesting question, and one that shows that even general business reporters are noticing what Peter calls "an embarrassment of riches" in the space. Given that some suites are free (versus hundreds of dollars), you sort of feel the urge--at least I did--to say "Yes." However, the answer really isn't that simple.

The label "consumer" implies that's a person's only role. However, consumers are also workers, students, churchgoers, and volunteers. In other words, each consumer works with a variety of peer groups, and which system those groups use colors an individual's choice. For example, Burton Group (the company I work for) uses Microsoft Office. So while saving a few bucks is attractive to me, I don't really want to have to learn another user interface. In my case, my work system drives my consumer use.

But not all people work--retired people on a fixed income (such as my mother) are quite price-sensitive. Maybe a free suite is appropriate for them. However, a different dynamic kicks in there. I serve as computer support for my mother--a role common to people who work in high tech--so when she calls with a problem I want to be familiar with what she's using.

Based on these two examples, it may seem that I think Microsoft Office will reign far into the future, based purely on user inertia. Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. I do think people feel Microsoft Office is expensive. While you can buy a Home and Student edition of Microsoft Office for $125 on Amazon.com (contains Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and valid for three licenses), it doesn't have Outlook, and is just one of eight Office flavors. If you have money to burn, you can spend $679 (SRP) on the Ultimate Edition. To put that price into perspective, for the same amount of money you can buy (1) seven DVD players or (2) a 23" HDTV or (3) a PC from Dell. While Microsoft has held steady on its software prices, the price of hardware has plummeted, making Office comparatively more expensive than it was in the past. While Microsoft realizes this--witness the Home and Student edition--it is still being coy with the cost, preferring to obfuscate pricing via marketing. Let's face it, Microsoft could make things simple and just say, "The suggested retail price of Home and Student edition is $42 per user." Since it hasn't, people are feeling gouged, and they're looking around.   

It's Getting Crazy in the Collaboration and Content Space

Boy, things got crazy in the collaboration and content space this week. Within the past three days,

• Yahoo! bought Zimbra
• Google announced that a Presentation application was finally available in Google Apps
• IBM began giving Symphony (office suite) away for free with Lotus Notes
• Salesforce.com announced a new content management application, Salesforce Content

Within a year, this space has gone from being a relatively well-ordered universe occupied by a set of best-of-breed software vendors to a free-for-all among large suppliers, many of them going for SaaS-based solutions. Get ready for some major head scratching trying to figure out which route to take.

System Integration via SaaS

I'm in San Francisco for Salesforce.com's Dreamforce Convention and took a quick tour around the Exhibit Hall on Sunday evening. Some interesting apps:

• SpringCM: A SaaS-based content management system, including workflow. It integrates with Salesforce so that content management tasks don't become process black holes. For example, let's say a contract is in Legal. In Salesforce, that's all you see: In Legal. When you add SpringCM to the equation, the contract and other content is attached to that bid within the Salesforce UI, and you can see the process status within the Legal Department via SpringCM. In short, a relatively sophisticated content management system. The bad news is that the market will overlook the option of SpringCM for SaaS-based content management because they've never heard of the company--Cisco, Google, and Microsoft will be grabbing all the headlines.
• Endeca: Endeca, a company selling enterprise search software, can use Salesforce.com as a data source, as well as other systems. This allows Endeca users to drill down into the data held in their disparate systems via faceted search. For example, the Sales VP could drill down into sales within the Central Region (data held by Salesforce.com) and then look at the affiliated contracts (data held by a content management system) within the Endeca interface. The gotcha here is that your metadata needs to be in pretty good shape for the multisystem consolidation via the UI to work. If one system calls a client "IBM" and the other calls it "International Business Machines," the system won't necessarily know they're one and the same unless you create a synonym table.
• Business Objects: Business Objects, the business intelligence (BI) vendor, can extend the standard Salesforce.com reports via Crystal Reports. In addition, the company just started a service that consolidates information from data providers such as D&B, so you can run sales reports and then see how you stack up against the competition and the economy at large within the reporting interface. This is a change from buying the information from D&B directly and then having to consolidate the benchmarking data with the Salesforce.com data via spreadsheet.
• Omniture: This web analytics vendor can both get information from and pass information to Salesforce.com, thereby making it easy to map campaign initiatives against sales in either the Salesforce UI or the Omniture UI.

When talking about the advantages of SaaS solutions, people often cite (1) the pay-as-you-go model and (2) avoiding the need to install software due to brower-based access. However, another advantage is the one visible above:  being able to buy pre-built complementary applications offering functionality that used to demand hiring a systems integrator. While all of these applications require some integration work, it's days or weeks rather than months or years--not a bad deal.

Don't You Hate It When a Competitor Doesn't Read the Script?

Back in late March, when I attended Adobe Analyst Days, Adobe was pitching Apollo (now called Adobe AIR) as the great new rich Internet application (RIA) environment. When a skeptical analyst asked about possible competition from Microsoft (there were rumors about Silverlight, but it hadn't been announced yet), Adobe's reply was, "It won't compete with whatever Microsoft comes out with, because it's cross platform. Unlike Microsoft, we aren't Windows-centric."

At this point, the folks at Adobe must be wondering why Microsoft isn't sticking to the script Adobe wrote. At this point, Silverlight runs on both Windows and Mac OS X, and apparently Microsoft is working with Novell to bring it to Linux. In my view, competitors who think future Microsoft will behave like past Microsoft are making a big mistake.