HN Explorer

What's OpenOffice's Niche? (fourstarters.com)

4 points by cbetta ↗ HN
Last week the newest version of OpenOffice was announced, and the new release revived the discussion whether or not OpenOffice is better than Microsoft Office. Although I don't particularly like Microsoft and normally don't care about office suites, this latest release did get me thinking.

6 comments

[ 19.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] thread
Xichekolas
Uh... it's nearly as powerful as MS Office at 0% of the price?

Sounds like a pretty good niche to me.

cbetta
Did you read the article?
Xichekolas
Yeah... did I miss something big? He said basically: Google is free/online/good for collaboration/lacks full features. iWorks is for macs. Office is the obvious heavyweight. OpenOffice is close to Office, but not.

Was just pointing out that OpenOffice is free, which for me anyway, is the attraction.

Zak
It's free. It does most of what most people need from an office suite. It does not require being online. It runs on all the common platforms. I think that pretty much sums it up.
gwenhwyfaer
"Reference ODF implementation" seems like a fair niche to occupy going forward too, especially when considered in the light of the traits you mention.
BrandonM
How about export to PDF, and being able to define new functionality with Python? OpenOffice is even usable from a script, so it can be used to do things like programmatic document conversion. None of the others mentioned do that.