Microsoft Says OpenOffice.org is Fine...if You're Living in 1996

Microsoft tries to deflect attention away from OpenOffice.org


Microsoft is doing its best to drum up business for its upcoming Office 2007 productivity suite. Office 2007 promises to be a major money maker for the company and the company is trying its best to draw down attention to its free rival.

"The truth is though that Open Office.org is really designed to solve the problems that Microsoft focused on 10 years ago when the model was an individual user working at their individual PC. The world and Microsoft software has grown way beyond that to make it very easy to do what used to be very hard things...Essentially, Open Office is fine if you have very limited needs because it was really designed around what Microsoft Office products were designed around 10 years ago,” said Alan Yates, business strategy general manager for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft.

Microsoft is right that the market has moved on in the past 10 years. For many businesses, Microsoft Office remains the best option out there and Office 2007 will likely offer vast improvements in manageability and productivity. But for many users out there that just want to create a document or spreadsheet and be done with it, OpenOffice.org is hard to pass up.



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