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Story: OpenOffice.org reveals marketing ambitions
Posted by: Rex Ballard (Saturday 25 September 2004, 12:35 AM)
OpenOffice is missing a huge opportunity here.
OpenOffice users should be introducing it to corporate users as much as possible. They should be introducing it to CEOs as well as CIOs and CTOs.
This way, when Microsoft comes around demanding 9 figure payouts and commitments in exchange for upgrades to Office 2003, they have the leverage to get a lower price and to get the door open for Linux.
If Microsoft is faced with the choice of "We don't want to upgrade anything, we don't even need your support, we've put OpenOffice on everything and have told our people to publish all of their read-only documents as PDFs, and all of their read-write documents and archive documents in OpenOffice format" or "Sure we have about 20% at of our workstations we'd be willing to upgrade if the price is about 30% of MSRP, but only if you'll loosen up your restrictions and let us install whatever we want in any mix or combination.", Microsoft might have to back down and take the 20%, since that's better than nothing.
The corporate executives will be looking at their budgets and saying - no we're not willing to lay off 20% of our staff just so that the CIO can get a few free dinners with Microsoft. Not when there's an office suite which - when combined with what they already have in terms of MS-Office 2000 or MS-Office XP, should meet all of the core needs of the company.
And don't invite Microsoft in to "discuss it". Is there really anything so "hot" that it could give you an ROI of 200% of payroll before the next set of upgrades to Windows or Office comes along? What was the REAL ROI of upgrading to Office XP? Did you recover at least 10 times what you paid in revenue increases or expense reductions over what you were getting with Office 2000?
But here's OpenOffice, which basically requires minimal effort to download, can be stored and distributed from a corporate server, and can be used to convert existing office documents to industry standard formats.
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