The Gloves are Coming Off for OpenOffice.Org

My shiny new laptop that runs WindowsXP (company policy: no Ubuntu for now) brought me a funny little icon this morning. The Java icon was bright orange. Curious, I clicked, and was invited to install OpenOffice.org, right there, right now. Well! It looks like Sun has finally grown a pair, and is going to attempt to “infect” as many machines as possible with their app-killer open source freeware. How might Microsoft react? Shut off Java? Not possible. Limit items in the icon tray? Again, too draconian for all of their own bloatware. I would like to see how this campaign plays out in the next few weeks.

Overall, I’ve been happy with OpenOffice.org, but I can certainly see how the power users of MS Excel are very very wedded to their pivot tables and other mojo packed into the newer versions. Mircosoft’s best bet may be to flaunt this extended feature set– Excel is much more powerful than OpenOffice.org’s spreadsheet (there, I said it) for those who know what they’re doing. Granted, 95% of the people will never be at this level, but that other 5% are usually the thought-leaders on this kind of stuff in an office environment.