OpenOffice Dev

I was chatting with a fellow dev the other day and he told me about one of the jobs he had had.

The client had worked out their Ms Office licence fees were x thousand per year. They estimated that to get everything working in Open Office would cost about x thousand (including recoding all the VBA as Star basic).

So they paid this guy the same x to do the work over a period of months and have paid nothing for office suite licensing since.

I find that very interesting for several reasons.

1. Payback in 12 months is a good return
2. The figures were 10’s of thousands of pounds so they must have had a significant investment in MS Office.
3. I still don’t see why these projects seem to be so rare.
4. Is this a future opportunity?
5. In a few more releases the VBA would probably have worked in OOo.
6. I’m watching IEs marketshare plummet, watching the strange things happening in MS Office, and wondering if OOo can do what Firefox has?

I know whenever we discuss this, very few people see any signs of migration. If you do see any evidence then let us know, even if its to Google etc.

cheers

Simon