Marketing OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org cannot be faulted for lacking ambition: the marketing plan calls for a 50% penetration rate by 2010. There is a little table which reads a bit like a Bush administration budget forecast - usage is supposed to jump from 35% to 50% between 2009 and 2010. By the end of 2004, the project will be satisfied with 2% penetration. Getting that many users will be a challenge, so much of the plan concerns itself with how OpenOffice.org will find them. There is a big emphasis on establishing OpenOffice.org as a global brand. The project has also singled out seven target markets which, it thinks, are especially ready for a jump to OpenOffice.org:

• Governments - with an emphasis on developing countries. Reading between the lines, it appears that OpenOffice.org does not wish to compete with Sun's StarOffice sales in richer countries.

• Education. As a way of competing with Microsoft's education programs, which target teenagers, OpenOffice.org's plan suggests trying to hook kids when they are seven or eight years old.

• Public libraries - especially smaller ones without lots of extra cash.

• Non-profit organizations.

• Small and medium-sized businesses.

• Original equipment manufactures, who should be encouraged to bundle OpenOffice.org with their systems.

• Linux distributors; OpenOffice.org would like to have its software shipped with every general-purpose distribution.

To push OpenOffice.org into these markets, the project has a whole set of "marketing contacts," is working on promotional materials, and has a set of development goals, such as the creation of "OEM kits." Feeding the demand side of the equation is very much at the core of the OpenOffice.org plan.

There are some interesting things which are missing. In its introduction, the plan states:

This would clearly be a good thing for OpenOffice.org to do. The marketing plan does not really address this goal again, however. Raising funds appears to not be a part of this plan at all. There also appears to be little concern about marketing OpenOffice.org to developers. By most accounts, the bulk of OpenOffice development is still done by Sun engineers, and the project remains difficult for new developers to approach. Forks like ooo-build have appeared in response to developer frustrations, and Sun's ties to Microsoft have recently led to Bruce Perens calling for developers to not donate their code to the project. If OpenOffice.org cannot get past this marketing problem, it will have a hard time achieving self-sufficiency and its usage goals.

The project's relationship with Sun is a recurring issue in this document. Clearly, as long as OpenOffice.org is dependent on Sun for funding and developers, one of its priorities must not be marketing to users, but marketing itself to Sun. Thus, the plan worries:

and recommends that:

OpenOffice.org has to step carefully around its patron. So there are no plans to try to "sell" OpenOffice.org into large businesses and other places where Sun is trying to do deals involving StarOffice. A fair amount of new OpenOffice.org functionality is being written in Java, which creates problems for some Linux distributors - there is no free, certified Java runtime which can be shipped to run that new code. So OpenOffice.org's plan contemplates the creation of a "Java-free" configuration (something the distributors have been doing for a while), but there is no thought given to making it all work with a free, non-certified runtime engine.

The plan spends some time contemplating the threats faced by the project. These include confusion with StarOffice, the fact that others can fork the project, missing functionality (email, web browsing, group calendars, etc.), and software patents. The biggest threat seen by the project, however, is clearly Microsoft; somehow the planners have gotten the idea that Microsoft might not just stand by and watch while OpenOffice.org grabs the 50% of the market it covets. The project intends to respond by making migration from Microsoft products even easier, stressing the "full functionality for free" nature of the software, and targeting users who are facing forced upgrades or who fear license compliance audits.

There is one threat which is not even mentioned by the plan, however: other free software projects. Names like AbiWord, Gnumeric, Scribus, KOffice, etc. simply do not appear at all. Some of these are, perhaps, shrugged off by proclaiming that OpenOffice.org is the only free integrated office suite - though the KOffice developers might disagree. It can also only be true that the OpenOffice.org developers do not wish to upset parts of the free software community by overtly tagging them as competitors and making plans on how to beat them. The fact remains, however, that a number of free "productivity" tools exist, and many of them are held, by some users at least, to be superior to the corresponding parts of OpenOffice.org. These tools will not go away; a "strategic marketing plan" that aims for 50% penetration while ignoring the other free alternatives runs a real risk of an unpleasant collision with reality as things play out.

It is worth noting that the plan is not in its final form; this is, in fact, the first public release, which was intended to encourage discussion and debate at OOoCon last week. There will be, without doubt, changes to the plan as a result of that discussion, but LWN was unable to attend the conference and reports have been relatively scarce so far. Even so, the plan gives valuable insights into an important free software project which is at a sort of turning point. It indicates that the project intends to concentrate on "selling" OpenOffice.org to vast numbers of users rather than on engagement with the free software community. More OpenOffice.org users can only be a good thing; one can only wish the project luck in achieving its goals.