Impossible bedfellows
April 20th, 2007
Interesting news story that Dell are having to continue to offer MS-Windows XP in response to consumer demand.
- People buying PCs invariably want the latest and greatest of everything. Is MS-Windows Vista really that bad (at least in its version 1 incarnation) that customers simply don’t want it?
- It shows Dell are prepared to listen to customer feedback from their IdeaStorm website
Regular readers of this blog (hi, Mum) will remember that there was a huge vote on IdeaStorm asking for OpenOffice.org to be offered as an option on Dell computers. Maybe Michael Dell himself was one of those voting, as he apparently has OpenOffice.org on his personal laptop.
So why isn’t OpenOffice.org an option today on Dell’s product configurator, in the same way as MS-Windows XP? After all, it gained far more votes than MS-Windows XP.
The answer is interesting. Open-source has succeeded far more than many people recognise. It’s not just an approach to writing code; it is also a principle of open-ness and sharing around which communities can form for support, translation, documentation, and so on.
Dell, on the other hand, is firmly in the commercial world, where suits rule, and everything has a price. People expect to pay for Dell products, and expect Dell to support them. Dell expects to back up that obligation with support contracts with vendors, with SLAs and pages of legalese. The corporate suits also worry about secret source problems, and so demands patent indemnities from suppliers.
So will we see OpenOffice.org on Dell computers tomorrow? I wouldn’t hold your breath. Not because Dell isn’t listening; not because OpenOffice.org isn’t an attractive product; but simply because the two parties live in different worlds, with different value systems. So, StarOffice on Dell? or OpenOffice.org Novell edition on Dell? possibly. But the ‘real’ community OpenOffice.org? I don’t see it.
By all means petition Dell for a ‘bare PC’ – no software; no MS-tax – but then expect to download and install your own open-source software, with support from the open-source community. That’s just the way it works.
April 21st, 2007 at 6:21 am
Should we turn arround and instead of writing a letter to Dell should we write it to Sun or novell to push their ‘supported’ version of OpenOffice.org. I recently heard Simon Phipps on his change of heart about the difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
April 21st, 2007 at 8:36 am
You may rest assured that the vote on IdeaStorm has not gone unnoticed by the product marketing folks at Sun and Novell. They would be happy bunnies indeed to see StarOffice or OpenOffice.org Novell Edition on the Dell product configurator as another piece of commercial software. From an OpenOffice.org community perspective, it would also be better to see millions of copies of a commercial OpenOffice.org derivative on Dell PCs instead of Corel or a joke software like MS-Works.
However, is that really what all those free software enthusiasts were asking Dell for? Were they voting for a commercial OpenOffice.org derivative, or for the free Community OpenOffice.org product?
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:55 am
I bet is the community openoffice.org product, but baby steps, baby steps. Once that said, OpenOffice.org has not put much effort in pushing the community support in their product. Still very obscured to find the supported mailing lists. I am working on an extension so users can get a community option on the ‘Help’ menu item.
I think the OOo community support is part of the features of using OpenOffice.org, so to my point of view they should be part of the product. I want to launch this extension soon so people can contribute, but hopefully it will be a core piece of the OOo suite.
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:42 am
[...] how has Dell managed to overcome the two previous showstoppers: a lack of formal support; and provision of patent indemnity? Chris Kenyon, Ubuntu’s director [...]