Global battles over computer technology’s future have spread from the server world to your desktop. It’s not just about whether your web site runs on Windows or Linux, it’s about how you will do your work day in and day out. And this new battle is not a two-way, but a three-way confrontation. The competition for the desktop will come to affect how we think about software and daily office work generally.

As you read the rest of this, consider what desktop software I might have used to write it. Good old Microsoft Office, Sun's Open Office, Google documents, or the built-in blogging editor in our drupal web site where you are reading it now?

When Microsoft ruled the world, way back in the 1990s, it was all about commercial software you installed on your network. You worried whether aging computers could keep up with the latest Windows or Office, or could you use a Mac instead. If you didn’t have a network, you worried about how to get one. If you were big enough, you purchased (licensed, really) other commercial products or built your own.

In the systems world, Microsoft faced growing challenge from Linux--the Open Source successor to Unix. Most web sites run on versions of Linux plus Apache server software.

Meanwhile, Microsoft office continues to dominate both Windows and Mac users daily experiences. And Office casts a wide shadow. With all the other software you use, you ask, can I generate an email from it using Outlook or mail merge with Word? Can I use Access or Excel to analyze my data? Microsoft dominates, yet now faces worthy challenges from two directions.

Open Source takes on the Microsoft Office

First, just as at the systems level, Open Source now challenges Microsoft on the desktop. Open Office, (www.openoffice.org) sponsored by Sun Microsystems, continues to gain polish and functionality. It has more and more of the professional features of Microsoft Office. It presents them in ways that are office-like, but also in ways that seem streamlined, less bureaucratic. For us data-oriented folks, Open Office’s database component has begun to shape up nicely. Open office claims 100 Million downloads (doesn’t mean everyone is using it) over seven years of growth.

Just now, IBM has also now partly entered this space. IBM revived its old “Symphony ” brand to release its own Office alternative, free and open, if not entirely Open Source.

Google and Office 2.0

The other big challenger to Microsoft on the desktop comes directly from the web in the form of what we can call Office 2.0. Have you tried Google documents ? If you have a gmail account (and why not add one?), you can create google documents, including word processing, spreadsheets and now presentations. The software is easy to use and organizes your work automatically into gmail-like web folders using familiar free-form tagging.

You can't do everything you can do in either MS Office or Open Office, but you can certainly prepare the basic documents that make up most daily work. Everything is stored on line. This means, you can start at home, continue at work, or just log in any place you can get on the Internet. No more disks, thumb drives, or emailing back and forth.

The best part is that Google documents make collaboration easy. You can create a document and share it with a team. The software keeps track of revisions that each person makes. You can even have everyone on a conference call while looking at and editing the document at the same time. When I have needed to finalize an agenda or a proposal with others, using Google documents makes so much more sense than emailing things back and forth among several people.

How to choose? Some considerations:

• Organizations adopting free or open source desktop alternatives gain financial and maintenance freedom from Microsoft licensing and relatively high support requirements.
• Microsoft Office costs a lot these days. Really steep nonprofit and academic discounts eliminate that issue for some, pretty much. If you are establishing organizational policy, you have to figure in to what extent you want to count on those discounts continuing in the same way.
• As for using Google, you have to decide if you are comfortable entrusting Google with confidential information. Google' positive values are taking some hits from its compromises with the Chinese government over privacy and other concerns over what it can and will do with all the data it collects and houses.
• Sun Microsystems is as much a corporate giant as Microsoft or Google, yet you have to admire its commitment, along with IBM and others, to learning to play in an Open Source world. While Sun may cede the desktop to Microsoft for the foreseeable future, the Open Source licensing has tremendous attraction in those parts of the global economy growing the fastest. And Dell, HP and vendors others are gearing up to offer business grade systems bundled with Linux plus one or another version of Open Office on the desktop. Things will continue to shift over time.
• Using Google offers desktop independence, yet depends on connection to the Internet. Google is hard at work at developing ways to run its software locally, but for now, no Internet, no documents. How much can you count on steady connection to the Internet? Along with the Google office environment, more and more organizations are managing contacts with Salesforce, and many nonprofits are also running web only “software as service” applications.
• Internet bandwidth is rapidly becoming the network infrastructure these days. Internet bandwidth and stability issue will gradually become less than a concern. The security and privacy issues remain more complicated, and will be grow as google and salesforce or others combine (that’s science fiction so far). Interestingly, the spread of municipal wifi will both jump ahead broadband availability while also accenting the security issues.
• In the short run, both run Open Source and Office 2.0 software as web service options run together against Microsoft. But they represent different strategies in a way we should be aware of in thinking about both the desktop software itself and about the specialized software we use to run our organizations.

Use of Open Office will gradually join using Firefox and Thunderbird (for web and email) in building popular comfort with Open Source generally. When the time comes to update one's web site or database, Open Source content management systems like drupal will feel safer. Similarly, getting use to simple work team collaboration or project management using a google document or spreadsheet is opening eyes to the power of general collaborative environments. --to working together with ad hoc and permanent teams on content and planning. This can include the kind of collaborative features we build into our drupal installations or organizing work through Base camp or other popular project management tools.

The technology world is moving away from the proprietary, closed, my staff only world that Microsoft Office epitomized. We are moving toward a more open source/open content world and our desktop choices will change to keep up.

So back to my opening question: can you tell what I used to write this? The answer is, all of the above. Started in Office 2007, saved it and opened it in Open Office, then saved that and moved it to Google documents to think about it for a sec, and then fine tuned it before publishing in this blog format.

Do you use MS Office alternatives? Why, how, and with what results? Love to hear from you.