Summary
The office suite market is large, profitable and growing, and this attracts new entrants: low-cost clones, open-core products and, more recently, suites built largely with artificial intelligence. Most of them compete on price and on native support for OOXML, a format whose evolution remains in practice under Microsoft’s control.
When features can be reproduced cheaply, what distinguishes a suite is who governs the document format and the software, and therefore who controls the content. This is the question of digital sovereignty, and its outcome will depend partly on political decisions, and partly on software features.
The 1980s and 1990s
The office suite sector emerged in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s, when Microsoft Office established itself as the leading product, with a market share of over 90% according to Microsoft unofficial statements at their events.
Some may remember the main competitors: Lotus SmartSuite, WordPerfect Office and StarOffice, the ancestor of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Fewer will recall Anywhere Office, Ability Office, Pro PC Suite 2001 and ThinkFree Office. Ability Office still exists, and ThinkFree Office is now called Hancom Office.
By the end of the century Microsoft Office dominated the sector, while all other products had a barely noticeable market share or had disappeared altogether.
The sector has always been lucrative: the products meet a universal need, while development and sales costs are low relative to volumes, so margins are potentially extremely high. For this reason all the major software vendors tried to enter the market, and the first clones emerged, competing solely on price.
Market presence, however, was just one of the factors contributing to success. Other factors were bundling with the Windows operating system, lock-in through document formats and pricing.
The two decades between 2000 and 2020
Sun Microsystems, which had acquired StarOffice, released its source code in 2000, and OpenOffice.org 1.0 followed in 2002: the first FOSS suite to reach a mass audience. Version 1.0 offered only a glimpse of the suite’s potential, and version 1.1 was usable but still limited. Only version 2.0, released in 2005, made OpenOffice a genuine competitor to the market leader.
For several years the rivalry between the proprietary suite and the FOSS suite played out on two fronts: large migration projects and document formats.
At the time, migrations seemed to signal an irreversible trend, but this proved an illusion. Microsoft deployed all its commercial muscles and started to talk to politicians. Since 2012, the company has been one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Brussels (based on data from Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobby Facts).
The battle over file formats was most prominent between 2006, when ODF was standardised by ISO/IEC, and 2008, when the proprietary OOXML format was standardised through a process we have already described in a previous blog post and will not revisit here.
In 2010, following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, the community created The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. In 2011, Oracle was effectively forced to donate …
WebUNO: connecting webview to LibreOffice
Service Manager
Notebookbar widgets
