I blog regularly about the advantages of open source, so in a spirit of honesty I should also blog about some of the disadvantages. With our impending house move, I’ve been busy disposing of our old computer kit on Gumtree, and buying neater replacements – a laptop instead of a desktop, a compact printer instead [...]

When I compiled the OpenOffice.org Strategic Marketing Plan for the Community back in 2004, I wrote on the back cover: What do you do if you have a product that’s as good as anything on the market, but you want to give it away? And what if your major competitor already has a virtual monopoly [...]

Following our shortlisting for the Best Online News release Award of 2009, it was great to see the news today that “PRWeb, the online news distribution service of Vocus (NASDAQ: VOCS), today announced that an OpenOffice.org news release was named the winner of The Best of PRWeb contest.” We’ve long known that “many eyes make [...]

I once asked a corporate IT person what his company’s investment was in office software. He gave me the cost of their Microsoft Office licences – which was the wrong answer. Anyone can go out any buy the same licences – they aren’t an investment – they don’t create any competitive advantage; they’re just a [...]

A couple of years ago we came up with a slogan for OpenOffice.org – Open for Business – to get across a couple of messages: OpenOffice.org software may be used by commercial businesses completely free of any licence fees OpenOffice.org software is also a great platform to build businesses around – training providers, systems integrators, [...]

Playing with beta software is a good (if slightly risky) way to find out what’s coming round the corner. OpenOffice.org 3.2 is due for release early in the new year, and I’ve been using a beta version to investigate the new features. The good news is that the software has proved to be perfectly stable [...]