The Justice Department (news – web sites), which challenged Microsoft Corp. in courtrooms for nearly a decade over antitrust violations, will pay more than $2 million each year to buy business software from Corel Corp., a leading Microsoft rival.
I would be more interested in seeing the marketshare that Corel has in comparison to that of OpenOffice. And why in the hell is the government wasting money with Corel when they have a perfectly capable alternative in OpenOffice? Sure it’s funny to give a slap in the face of Microsoft, but them losing $2 million of business for a year is nothing. Move the whole damn government to OpenOffice and that would make a real statement.
And with OO.org 2.0 soon to be released this seems to be the only logical option. Never know when Corel will go out of business or be sold for the 1,000th time.
Corel has always seemed to have the stronger product in my opinion, without relying on proprietary gimicks and forced incompatability.
All in all a good choice.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the OpenOffice people are doing what they set out to do very well. The problem is that they didn’t set out to make a *better* word processor than Word. They set out to make a fully compatible alternative that a Word user who switches to Linux could use happily with essentially a zero learning curve.
Given the objective of achieving 100% compatibility with Office, there is little opportunity for OpenOffice to become *better* software, except in the sense that it seems hard *not* to improve on the current Microsoft programs.
While Corel has been working hard to keep “down” with Microsoft–resulting in much unnecessary bloating, addition of useless features and removal of useful ones–it has at least some incentive to try to produce software that is “better” to encourage people to switch. If the government’s move enables Corel to regain even a little market share, there might eventually again be room for genuine competition.
But with the government I don’t think they are ever looking for better software, they just wanted something cheaper.
No reason to make something better than Word when you can beat them on price and over 90% of the features that makes Word so bloated nobody ever use anyways.
There are no reasons given as to why the government would make the switch, but if they did it because they think Corel is better I would like to know why.