OStatic

Reports to contrary, the launch of Microsoft Office 2010 doesn't mean that OpenOffice.org is dead ? or even wounded.

ZDNet's Christopher Dawson says that users are going to choose the lumbering monstrosity that is Microsoft Office, or opt for Google Docs or another online suite. According to Dawson:

Andy Updegrove may have cracked the code on Oracle's seemingly insane decision to start charging $90 for the formerly free ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. That's $90 in a minimum pack of 100, plus a 22% support fees for updates. Does Oracle really think that this will fly with companies, is Oracle trying to kill off the product entirely?

The ODF plugin was developed to allow Microsoft Office users to exchange documents with OpenOffice.org users. It works for spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing docs and Sun gave it away for years. So why has Oracle so suddenly decided to charge for it? Whatever Oracle's strategy, the company isn't talking. At first glance, it seems crazy, but Andy Updegrove has a theory that seems likely:

If you could distill all of the advice from all the popular self-help and productivity books on the market today into one word it would probably be focus. Focus on what's important. Focus on pleasing your customers. Focus on doing what you do well. One-word productivity books don't sell very well, though, but that seems to be at the core of everything from David Allen's Getting Things Done to Seth Godin's Linchpin.

Of course I'm over-simplifying, but focus is enormously important, especially for resource-constrained organizations. That describes startups and most open source projects. So I found Steve Bank's Death by Competitive Analysis particularly compelling.

Since early this week, when Microsoft started rolling out its Browser Ballot, Opera has seen its downloads triple in response. You can bet that the other browsers, including open source powerhouse Firefox and upstart Chrome, are also getting their fair share as well. Maybe they could help leverage this for other alternative applications as well.

According to the Reuters story, Opera is affirming a surge in downloads after the ballot rolled out on Monday. Now that users are aware of their choices, more are picking to download other browsers:

It's been just over two years since the last stable release, but the Gnumeric team is still going strong. The project has a new stable series 1.10.x. This release removes the 65,536 row restriction on spreadsheets and includes many new functions, better OpenDocument Format (ODF) support, new statistical analysis tools, and a new utility for searching spreadsheet files.

Gnumeric is part of the loosely joined GNOME Office productivity tools, which also includes the AbiWord word processor and Evolution email and groupware suite. The 1.10.x series started life nearly two years ago in May 2008 with the 1.9.0 release.

If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive. Nearly 10 years in the making, OpenOffice.org has evolved from a clunky proprietary offering that struggled to import Microsoft Office documents to a productivity powerhouse that is faster, supports a fully open document format (ODF) and handles most proprietary formats with grace.

Originally StarOffice, Sun purchased StarDivision in 1999 and released the first code for OpenOffice.org in July of 2000. The open source office suite has improved by leaps and bounds since its inception and is now good enough to satisfy millions of users around the world who prefer a free (in all senses of the word) office suite to paying hundreds of dollars for a proprietary suite.

What would you say if you heard that OpenOffice.org had an impressive 22% share of the market? It does, in Poland and the Czech Republic. At least according to numbers pulled together by Webmaster.de using FlashCounter. The analysis looked at visitors from more than 20 countries and found use of OpenOffice.org is highest in Europe and not even in double digits in the United States.

The results may not be entirely accurate, but at least they provide a picture of office suite usage. The method used was to examine fonts installed on systems to identify various office suites. The OpenOffice.org numbers roll up all variants of OpenOffice.org ? IBM Lotus Symphony, StarOffice, NeoOffice, etc.

Was it you? Someone out there was the one hundred millionth person to download the popular open source word processing suite OpenOffice.org 3.0 yesterday, just in time for a celebration at the community's annual conference in Orvieto, Italy next week.

The milestone took just over one year to achieve once OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released October 13, 2008. The project followed up with three subsequent point releases and version 3.2 is scheduled to appear in December.

OpenOffice.org is a terrific suite of office applications in its own right, but it's out of this world when paired with extensions that add extra functionality. There are plenty of extensions to choose from, but let's take a look at a few that will really make your productivity soar.

Writer's Tools - You don't have to be a professional writer to appreciate this extension packed with loads of handy utilities. In fact, there are too many to mention, but here's a glimpse: Remote Backup lets you quickly shoot a backup copy of a working document to an FTP server, Quick Converter helps you perform metric-to-imperial system conversions on the fly, and the Lookup Tool checks word definitions from multiple online sources all at once.