When consumers go to the shops and buy a computer, they expect to be able to take it home and “do stuff” with it – surf the web, send emails, play music, do their homework… If the software supplied with the PC “does their stuff”, then the consumer is happy. This is one reason why open-source software finds it difficult to make inroads into the domestic market – if what people already have is good enough for their requirements, why go to the hassle of changing to something better – even if it’s free?

Getting your software pre-installed by PC manufacturers and retailers is key to getting market share with domestic consumers. As hardware prices fall, this pre-installed software becomes an increasingly large percentage of the cost. Manufacturers work relentlessly to drive down component costs through aggressive purchasing policies, but they are still left with this big block of cost for software – from a monopoly supplier with whom they have no bargaining power.

A month or so ago the web was buzzing with rumours that one of the big name PC manufacturers had been talking to OpenOffice.org community about pre-installing OpenOffice.org 2 on their products as an alternative to paid-for Microsoft Office. This isn’t quite as simple a choice as it might seem: selling MS-Office does earn revenue, and no doubt helps conversations with the MS Account Director the next time licence terms are up for discussion.

On the other hand, consumers want quality office software on their PCs, but increasingly are not prepared to pay MS-Office prices.

It looks as though consumer pressure is finally winning through, with a household name PC supplier about to announce PCs with OpenOffice.org 2 pre-installed for the back-to-school market in the US. This is a significant development. Those kids will see for themselves that they are every bit as well equipped as their peers who have paid-for (or more likely pirated) copies of MS-Office. The message will soon get through to the schools too: handing out OpenOffice.org CDs is a painless way of ensuring your students return course work in a format you can read.

So watch the newswires for the official announcement (if you don’t read it here first . Don’t underestimate the market forces at work here – once one respected manufacturer leads the way with household name retailers, the rest will find it increasingly hard to resist.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 8:09 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.