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"We (Forrester) just published a report on the state of adoption of Office 2013 And Productivity Suite Alternatives based on a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments. The sample does not fully represent the market, but lets us draw comparisons to the results of our previous survey in 2011. Some key takeaways from the data:   One in five firms uses email in the cloud. Another quarter plans to move at some point. More are using Office 365 (14%) than Google Apps (9%).  Just 22% of respondents are on Office 2013. Another 36% have plans to be on it. Office 2013's uptake will be slower than Office 2010 because fewer firms plan to combine the rollout of Office 2013 with Windows 8 as they combined Office 2010 with Windows 7. Alternatives to Microsoft Office show little traction. In 2011, 13% of respondents supported open source alternatives to Office. This year the number is just 5%. Google Docs has slightly higher adoption and is in use at 13% of companies. "

Finally! Someone who gets it. For an office suite to be considered as an alternative to MSOffice, it must be designed with multiple levels of compatibility. It's not just that the "feature sets" that must be comparable. The guts of the suite must be compatible at both the file format level, and the environment level. Randall put's it this way; "It's the ecosystem stupid". The reason ODF failed in Massachusetts is that neither OpenOffice nor OpenOffice ODF are designed to be compatible with legacy and existing MSOffice applications, binary formats, and, the MSOffice productivity environment. Instead, OOo and OOo-ODF are designed to be competitively comparable. As an alternative to MSOffice, OpenOffice and OpenOffice ODF cannot fit into existing MSOffice workgroups and producitivity environments. Because it s was not designed to be compatible, OOo demands that the environment be replaced, rebuilt and re-engineered. Making OOo and OOo-ODF costly and disruptive to critical day-to-day business processes. The lesson of Massachusetts is simple; compatibility matters. Conversion of workgroup/workflow documents from the MSOffice productivity environment to OpenOffice ODF will break those documents at two levels: fidelity and embedded "ecosystem" logic. Fidelity is what most end-users point to since that's the aspect of the document conversion they can see. However, it's what they can't see that is the show stopper. The hidden side of workgroup/workflow documents is embedded logic that includes scripts, macros, formulas, OLE, data bindings, security settings, application specific settings, and productivity environment settings. Breaks these aspects of the document, and you stop important business processes bound to the MSOffice productivity environment. There is no such thing as an OpenOffice productivity environment designed to be a compatible alternative to the MSOffice productivity environment. Another lesson from Massach

Charlie nails it in this analysis of Microsoft's future.  Most interesting is Charlie's explanation of how Microsoft so totally missed the needs of their corporate business user base - the heart of the monopoly!  Windows 8 is a disaster for productivity.  Great analysis! excerpt: Microsoft is in deep trouble, their two main product lines are failing, and the blame game is intensifying. Steve Sinofsky gets the blame this time for the failure of Windows 8, but the real problem is the patterns that are so clearly illustrated by these actions. Microsoft is largely irrelevant to computing of late, the only markets they still play in are evaporating with stunning rapidity. Their long history of circling the wagons tighter and tighter works decently as long as there is not a credible alternative, and that strategy has been the entirety of the Microsoft playbook for so long that there is nothing else now. It works, and as the walls grow higher, customer enmity builds while the value of an alternative grows. This cycle repeats as long as there is no alternative. If there is, everything unravels with frightening rapidity.

Bingo!  Took five years, but finally someone gets it: excerpt:  Great question. After 10 years, OpenOffice hasn't had much traction in the enterprise - supported by under 10% of firms, and today it's facing more competition from online apps from Google and Zoho. I'm not counting OpenOffice completely out yet, however, since IBM has been making good progress on features with Symphony and Oracle is positioning OpenOffice for the web, desktop and mobile - a first. But barriers to OpenOffice and Web-based tools persist, and not just on a feature/function basis. Common barriers include: Third-party integration requirements. Some applications only work with Office. For example, one financial services firm I spoke with was forced to retain Office because its employees needed to work with Fiserv, a proprietary data center that is very Microsoft centric. "What was working pretty well was karate chopped." Another firm rolled out OpenOffice.org to 7,00 users and had to revert back 5,00 of them when they discovered one of the main apps they work with only supported Microsoft. User acceptance. Many firms say that they can overcome pretty much all of the technical issues but face challenges around user acceptance. One firm I spoke with went so far as to "customize" their OpenOffice solution with a Microsoft logo and told employees it was a version of Office. The implementation went smoothly. Others have said that they have met resistance from business users who didn't want Office taken off their desktop. Other strategies include providing OpenOffice to only new employees and to transition through attrition. But this can cause compatibility issues. Lack of seamless interoperability with Office. Just like third-party apps may only work with Office, many collaborative activities force use of particular versions of Office. Today's Web-based and OpenOffice solutions do not provide seamless round tripping between Office and their applications. Corel, with its

This week Microsoft will take its Office 2010 suite out of beta. If you're considering upgrading Office with Office, we'd encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs. If you choose this path, upgrade means what it's supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed. Google Docs has been providing rich real-time collaboration to millions of users for nearly four years. It lets employees edit and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the browser from anywhere in the world. We recently made tremendous strides in improving Google Docs formatting, speed and functionality, and a growing number of companies are now using it as their primary productivity software. Of course, you probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000?), and there's no need to uninstall them. Fortunately, Google Docs also makes Office 2003 and 2007 better. For example, you can store any file - including Microsoft Office documents - in Google's cloud and share them in their original format (protected, naturally by Google's synchronous replication across datacenters). Plus, in the coming months, Google will enable real-time collaboration directly in Office 2003 and 2007, as you can see here. Google Docs represents a real alternative for companies: a chance to get the collaboration features you need today and end the endless cycle of "upgrades". For more information on the choices available to you, check out the summary below. But don't take our word for it - you can try Google Docs and the rest of the Google Apps suite for free. The only thing you have to lose is a server or two.

Good List for essential software apps. One of the ways that you can save a little more money is to look for free alternatives to software products. Outfitting your computer with the software applications that you need can start to become expensive. The good news, though, is that there are free options that can help you accomplish a number of tasks. Here are some thoughts on free software alternatives.

Forbes magazine has a doom and gloom Microsoft article that "ends on a note of doom".  They lampoon Windows 8 using the reviews of other bloggers like Charlie Demerjian, "Microsoft has failed". http://goo.gl/H4mZc The end of Microsoft though comes from the inability of Microsoft to change course.  In short, Microsoft has fallen into a death spiral consistent with Catastrophe theory (http://goo.gl/6CWwY). No comment or mention of Microsoft Cloud efforts:  Azure, Live.com, or SkyDrive. excerpt: In the end, the death spiral for Microsoft is in full effect, and management is expending a lot of effort to speed it up. Anyone who dares point out that the entire system is collapsing, or worse yet suggests an alternative, gets Sinofsky'd. Or was it Guggenheimer'd? In any case, Microsoft is unwilling to change, and that is very clear. Even if they wanted to, they are culturally far beyond the point of being able to. What was a slow bleed of marketshare is now gushing, and management is clueless, intransigent, and myopic. Game over, the thrashing will continue for a bit, but it won't change the outcome. Microsoft has failed. I hope this isn't true. Microsoft has been a stabilizing force in the market and many users are very attached to its products. For the first time, however, businesses can look to Google and to Apple and see plausible, battle-tested alternatives to the products they have used from Microsoft-for much less money. And in a bizarre way, Microsofts spasm of innovation has made the company now a destabilizing factor for IT departments and Google Docs is looking an awful lot like the old guard. The big question is how fast Microsoft might collapse if businesses began to defect en masse. Like other phenomena of global instability, extreme change seems to come quicker now. For Microsoft, the window is closing fast."

Secure alternatives to current social media giants.

"FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS What is WhiteHat Aviator? WhiteHat Aviator; is the most secure , most private Web browser available anywhere. By default, it provides an easy way to bank, shop, and use social networks while stopping viruses from infecting computers, preventing accounts from being hacked, and blocking advertisers from invisibly spying on every click. Why do I need a secure Web browser? According to CA Technologies, 84 percent of hacker attacks in 2009 took advantage of vulnerabilities in Web browsers. Similarly, Symantec found that four of the top five vulnerabilities being exploited were client-side vulnerabilities that were frequently targeted by Web-based attacks. The fact is, that when you visit any website you run the risk of having your surfing history, passwords, real name, workplace, home address, phone number, email, gender, political affiliation, sexual preferences, income bracket, education level, and medical history stolen - and your computer infected with viruses. Sadly, this happens on millions of websites every day. Before you have any chance at protecting yourself, other browsers force you to follow complicated how-to guides, modify settings that only serve advertising empires and install obscure third-party software. What makes WhiteHat Aviator so secure? WhiteHat Aviator; is built on Chromium, the same open-source foundation used by Google Chrome. Chromium has several unique, powerful security features. One is a "sandbox" that prevents websites from stealing files off your computer or infecting it with viruses. As good as Chromium is, we went much further to create the safest online experience possible. WhiteHat Aviator comes ready-to-go with hardened security and privacy settings, giving hackers less to work with. And our browser downloads to you - without any hidden user-tracking functionality. Our default search engine is DuckDuckGo - not Google, which logs your activity. For good measure, Aviator integrates Disconnect

A while back I included the following as one of the areas of interest of the PDF/D Consortium: Structured Documents and Single Sourcing: improving round-trips to document softwareWhat did I mean by Structured Documents? For years Solid Documents has been converting PDF files to Word documents with a focus on retaining format and layout to allow customers to repurpose the content. While this is a great solution for a large amount of customers, it is not the only type of reconstruction that is interesting. PDF is by nature a "document" format: the layout is in the form of pages. Content also needs to exist in alternate formats like a continuously flowing stream. Use cases for continuously flowing content include:conversion to HTML to reflow for form factors other than "pages"conversion to content management systems where structure is more important than layout and formattingconversion for alternate readers for people with disabilities (text to speech, etc)Reconstruction for these use cases focuses more on the structure of the document than on the layout and formatting. For example, we need to take unstructured PDF files and recognize columns, tables, lists, headers and footers, etc. This allows us to organize the content in a logical structure. Ultimately, we'll recognize topics and sections too so that we can produce logical hierarchies from plain old non-tagged PDF files. One great example of where conventional PDF pages are not the most appropriate way to read a document are on small screens of handheld devices. For example, the typical Blackberry has a 3"x2" screen with a resolution something like 320x240 pixels.

Teddit is a free and open source alternative Reddit front-end focused on privacy. Teddit doesn't require you to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The source is available at https://codeberg.org/teddit/teddit. No JavaScript or ads All requests go through the backend, client never talks to Reddit Prevents Reddit from tracking your IP or JavaScript fingerprint Lightweight (teddit frontpage: ~30 HTTP requests with ~270 KB of data downloaded vs. Reddit frontpage: ~190 HTTP requests with ~24 MB)

Excellent list of NoteBook alternatives to Google Notebook.

Notification of this article also appeared in the Diigo Document Wars Group..... WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo

Note the emphasis that this is a unilateral move by Microsoft and a different remedy may still be forthcoming from DG Competition. In particular, not only the remedy as to bundling may be different, but other related issues remain, such as Opera's complaint that Microsoft had been undermining Open Web standards with inadequate support.

"Add Hitler to the list of people frustrated by Google's decision to shut down Google Reader. In the latest addition to the Hitler Reacts meme, Hitler fumes over the news that his favorite RSS reader is being killed off. "Why on Earth do they need to destroy all things good?" Hitler says at one point. "How dare they take away Google Reader. I have over 300 feeds in there. Have they any idea how much effort I've put in?" When one of his lieutenants tries to tell him that the product has been shut down so Google can focus on other areas such as Google Glass, Hitler shouts that Glass is the worst product idea since Google Wave, before going back to his rant. "What are my alternatives now, huh?" he shouts. "Getting my news from what's retweeted by Stalin?" Fair warning: there's some NSFW language in the video. "

While trying to help a friend understand the issues involved with exchanging MSOffice documnets between the many different versions of MSOffice, I stumbled on this oldy but goody ......... "A group of software developers have created a program to make Microsoft Office work with files in the OpenDocument format, a move that would bridge currently incompatible desktop applications. Gary Edwards, an engineer involved in the open-source OpenOffice.org project and founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, on Thursday discussed the software plug-in on the Web site Groklaw. The new program, which has been under development for about year and finished initial testing last week, is designed to let Microsoft Office manipulate OpenDocument format (ODF) files, Edwards said. "The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the 'open,' 'save,' and 'save as' sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF Plugin renders ODF documents as if (they) were native to MS Office," according to Edwards. If the software, which is not yet available, works as described, it will be a significant twist to an ongoing contest between Microsoft and the backers of OpenDocument, a document format gaining more interest lately, particularly among governments. Microsoft will not natively support OpenDocument in Office 2007, which will come out later this year. Company executives have said that there is not sufficient demand and OpenDocument is less functional that its own Office formats. Having a third-party product to save OpenDocument files from Office could give OpenDocument-based products a bump in the marketplace, said Stephen O'Grady, a RedMonk analyst. OpenDocument is the native format for the OpenOffice open-source desktop productivity suite and is supported in others, including KOffice, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and IBM's Workplace. "To the extent that you get people authoring documents in a format that is natively compatible with