It seems that every where I go, people are talking about the possibliity of migrating to Open Office.  This might seem odd to the average user who finds Microsoft Office perfectly adequate for their everyday work, but for IT management and Cheif Financial Officers, it is starting to make sense.

So what's driving this trend towards Open Office.  Well primarily two things:

• Cost - The average user uses about 5% of the capabilities of MS Word and Excel.  There are no compelling featrue reasons to stay with MS Office packages for these people.  They typically don't even need any training to move to another package.  This translates to big savings.  A typical mid sized organisation is likely to be up for $50-100K just to upgrade to Office 2007.  The cost of rolling out Office 2007 will be just as high, if not higher than replacing it with Open Office (Open Offcie typically installs faster and won't clash with old versios of MS Office).

• Independence - A common theme I'm seeing in talking to customers is a fear of dependence on Microsoft.  Its a bit of an odd thing because you would have thought by now people would have gotten used to be dependent on the folks at Redmond.  However, it seems to me that there is increasingly an underlying mistrust of Microsoft brewing amongst at a lot of IT managers.  Its hard to pinpoint why and I might have a go at this issue in another blog.

So, that all said, why should you change to Open Office.  Well firstly, its a quality product.  It does far more than the average person needs to do... and its quite reliable... and most of all, its free.  Compatibility with MS Office is very good (though be aware that occasionally complex documents have some issues).  But anyway, don't just take my word for it, give it a go yourself.  Vist http://www.openoffice.org .