While Microsoft  has had some 20 years to make Office what it is today, most industry analysts say that new open-source contenders, such as OpenOffice, measure up reasonably well against Redmond's suite. But they also say that while these suites do have most of the features of Microsoft Office, they lack certain advanced capabilities that make all the difference.
Clearly, Microsoft continues to define the office space and likely will dominate office software for the foreseeable future. But an interesting question to ask is whether a group of volunteers -- however large -- can ever hope to measure up against Microsoft's millions of dollars. Gates and crew have poured countless programmer hours into Office over the past 20 years, while OpenOffice and other alternative product groups consist almost entirely of volunteers. Is the idea so far-fetched that a group of volunteers can compete successfully with Microsoft?
Because the two office suites are not on the same playing field in terms of development funding, it is difficult to equate Microsoft's programmer dollars against the time provided by open-source volunteers. But there are plenty of those in the open-source community who are willing to give that comparison a shot.
One of those is Jacqueline McNally, marketing project lead for OpenOffice.org. "When volunteers give freely of their efforts and time, it is often mistaken that we don't have value because we don't appear on a balance sheet," said McNally from her office in Perth, Australia. "It would be an interesting exercise if it were possible to put a value on the time contributed to OpenOffice, considering there are thousands of contributors providing millions of hours."
Competition Ongoing
While there are of course proponents and detractors on both sides of the line, many analysts have identified open-source software and nonproprietary formats as building up strong momentum against Redmond. "The growing awareness of the benefits of open file formats and transparency are driving interest in OpenOffice, KDE, Gnome, and other alternatives to a Microsoft solution," said Stacey Quandt, research director for security solutions and services for the Aberdeen Group.
However, while there are plenty of proponents, the open-source movement does have legitimate detractors. One is Michael Goulde, analyst of software infrastructure for Forrester Research. According to him, the coding for open-source products often provides a built-in drawback. By way of example, he points to OpenOffice. "The actual code for the first version was spaghetti," he said. "The code for 2.0 isn't much better. This is going to be a bear to continue to evolve, and they should probably start from scratch. It's no accident that in Forrester surveys OpenOffice usage barely shows up." (continued...)
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