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Person | What problem are they trying to solve | How OpenOffice solves the problem | What would they search Google for to find a solution? | ||
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University student with limited budget | Need a word processor for their course, but Microsoft Office, even with student discount, costs money. |
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IT Director for Public Library or Community Center with a computers available for public use. | Wants to provide office suite functionality to their patrons. They have limited budget, so commercial software licences licenses come at the expense of other potential services. |
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Operator of Internet Cafe | Need an inexpensive way to provide office suite functionality to their patrons |
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Employee who uses MS Office at work, but occasionally wants to do some work at home. |
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IT Director or CIO of company who have been subject to BSA software license audits |
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CIO of large corporations facing end of support for Office 2003 in 2014 |
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Budget computer manufacturer | Consumers want basic office functionality on their new computers. An easy solution was to OEM Microsoft's Office Starter Edition. But Microsoft has announced that it is ending this program, and has not offered a replacement. | Manufacturer can bundle OpenOffice for free, and their users get a full suite, not just a trial or ad-supported product. |
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F/OSS Enthusiast | Prefers to use open source applications wherever possible. Where alternatives exist may use the option believed to be most open. | Open source, open community, reputation. | openoffice | ||
Manufacturer of In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) systems, media hubs, kiosks or similar computing appliances. | Wants to embed office-functionality without the expenses of commercial licensing or royalties. Maybe have additional constraints on available system resources. | Open source, Microsoft compatibility, portability of code, lower system resource requirements than commercial offerings. |
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Telecom provider/ISP | Wants to provide a library of free software for their subscribers, as a value add to their service. May want to customize or even rebrand the UI, e.g., "Comcast Office" | Free, open source, easily customizable, available on all major platforms. Permissive license makes it easier to get internal legal approval to work with it. |
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IT Director or CIO of company who plan for the desktop cloud deployment | Wants to embed office-functionality without the expenses of commercial licensing or royalties. And avoid the expanding license fee when the scale of the virtual desktop client number grows. | Free, open source, easily customizable, available on all major platforms. |
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Permissive license makes it easier to get internal legal approval to work with it. |
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Archivist or other user than needs to be able to read older documents. | Microsoft has dropped some older formats in Office 2010, such as Lotus wk1 spreadsheet formats. Users may need to read old documents. | OpenOffice imports many file, including older ones like Lotus 1-2-3. |
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Company or indivdual running Windows XP or Vista | Microsoft has announced that Office 2013 will require Windows 7 or Windows 8. Users on earlier operating systems will have an expensive upgrade, if their hardware can even run Windows 8. |
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