OpenOffice Shortcomings Force German City back to Microsoft

Let’s all be honest. To think that the open source world provides solutions for all of our troubles in the computing world. I will be the first to tell you that it is not true. That is not to say that I do not completely and 100% love and contribute back to the open source market, but it is not a perfect world.

The simple fact is that open source software typically provides the most benefit to the areas of either: 1) Where computing technology where syntax has been mastered and where a slue of solutions have run wild across numerous platforms, or 2) Where it is so expensive to allocate single resources to the solution of a problem, that the benefit of world-wide accessibility and contribution far outweigh the potential income of providing services or products.

The OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office argument is a hard one to win. While OpenOffice is very useful and provides serious functionality, Microsoft has provided far more depth into the features and capabilities that it’s Office product allows. Microsoft has built Office into every business that exists today, which brought in a lot of money, then allowing the product to mature at such a pace that OpenOffice and all of it’s contributors could never keep up.

OpenOffice is good, but Microsoft Office is spectacular, and that brought a German city betting on the cost savings of going open source to now re-think their position and pay a little bit of money for a spectacular tool.

Some have more emotional reasons not to use the Microsoft product, typically revolving around money. On the surface it seems like open source is good in this scenario, but diving deep, anyone can see the differences.

Source: German city says OpenOffice shortcomings are forcing it back to Microsoft