Switching Microsoft Office Users To LibreOffice Should Be Our Focus

So Linux popularity has exploded in the last say four or five years especially. Our desktop market share in a recent stat counter metric is over five percent now. Think about that. Five percent on desktop market share. That was unheard of say 10 years ago where we were still struggling to get to two percent. We were like one, one and a half percent say 10 years ago. When I started in Linux say 16, 17 years ago we had well below one percent desktop market share. We barely registered on those stat counter charts right. And now all of a sudden we're ticking above five percent and we have this momentum behind us. And a lot of it has to do with Microsoft kind of dropping the ball with Windows right. Everybody has problems with Windows these days. They're trying to get away from Windows. They're looking for an alternative and you know Linux is the best alternative. Let's be real you're probably not dropping Windows and buying a Mac. You're probably not dropping Windows and buying a Chromebook right. That's probably not what you want to do. You still want a real computer that has a real operating system that allows you to do everything you want to do. You're going to move from Windows to Linux. That's typically the path people are going to take. And I think you know even though we're gaining a lot of desktop market share I think we need to focus more on one specific area that is going to drive Linux adoption. I don't think it's necessarily trying to convince people that Windows is bad and that's why they need to move to Linux. I think we need to focus on what is the real money maker for Microsoft. And that's actually Microsoft Office. That is actually what really locks in a lot of people to Microsoft Windows is people have to use Office right. And it's all about the Office suite. It's all about now you know Microsoft really doesn't make a lot of money from Windows anymore. Their cash cow is that Office suite and Office 365 and the desktop client and all the subscriptions people are paying the monthly subscriptions for you know this really high priced Office suite. And what's great about Linux and free and open source software is we have really several fantastic alternatives to Microsoft Office as far as free and open source Office suites. The most popular one obviously is LibreOffice. That's the one I use. I've been on LibreOffice since the beginning of time. Back before it was you know back when it was OpenOffice and then it was forked and became LibreOffice. I've been using OpenOffice slash LibreOffice for at least 20 years. I was using OpenOffice even back when I was still running Windows like 20 years ago. So you know it's a fantastic Office suite. You don't have to use Microsoft Office but we haven't really been good at delivering that message. And it's not necessarily going after hey all you Windows users come to Linux. We need to specifically start targeting some of the proprietary applications and telling people hey all of you Microsoft Office users start using LibreOffice or other free and open source alternatives. That's where we need to start focusing our effort on. It's not necessarily the proprietary operating system. It's the proprietary software on that operating system. Now one of the unfortunate things that Microsoft does is they make it very hard for a lot of these open source Office alternatives things like LibreOffice. They make it very hard for these programs to be 100% compatible with Microsoft Office. And obviously it's not in Microsoft's best interest to allow these free and open source platforms these free and open source Office suites to be 100% compatible with Microsoft Office. That's just going to speed up people leaving Office for LibreOffice. And obviously LibreOffice has been complaining about this especially here in the last week or so. I've actually read some articles where the LibreOffice folks and the Open Document Foundation they complain a lot about how Microsoft put proprietary bits and they make it very hard for them to do compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. It's really tough and it's one of the biggest complaints. I know a lot of people blame free and open source software for not being compatible with Microsoft Office. Why don't you LibreOffice devs just make everything 100% compatible? Why do you still struggle in this department? Well it's not necessarily like it's the people working on the free and open source software. They're not the problem. They want that compatibility to be there but it's the proprietary software that really makes it difficult. But ultimately I think we're going to get there. I think that's the next area we need to focus on. It's not focus on the operating system but the actual applications. Let's start with trying to convert people off of Microsoft Office. I think that is a big area we need to focus on. Obviously we could focus on other areas as well like the Adobe Creative Suite. We're still not great in that area as far as offering good free and open source alternatives. I mean I use a lot of great free and open source like video editors, audio editors, image editors. But realistically they're not on that level with some of the Adobe products. I understand that it's very hard to get like graphics professionals to drop that stuff when there's no real alternative. So eventually though I think we're going to get there in that department. But the Office Suite I think we're already there. We just need to keep pushing that message. Anyway, food for thought. Peace guys.