Tumbling Dave

Where is "FireOffice -- the Firefox of OpenOffice.org"? The secret to succeeding with Open Source on the desktop...

In January 2004 there wasn't much hope for Mozilla browsers. Mozilla had a 5.5% share -- 1.5% more than it had in January 2003. The future looked bleak. But by the end of the year, Mozilla had tripled its numbers and had a share of 16.5%. A great leap forward that changed the game for browsers and gave IE some serious competition for the first time.

As you know, this extra 10% of users were not using Mozilla -- they were using Firefox, a brand new pared down browser based on Mozilla's code.

Firefox gave up trying to beat the incumbent Internet Explorer on features, standards compliance, or power. Instead, it did a few key things in a clearly better, easier way. You could pitch Firefox to anybody in a few seconds:

• It was faster and more stable
• It had tabs
• It had built in search

... it was quick to install and it worked well alongside IE -- so there was not much risk if you didn't like it. You'd "download it and give it a try". I remember there were even Firefox plugins that would use the IE display engine on sites that didn't play nice with Firefox.

OpenOffice.org is in a similar position to Mozilla in 2003. OpenOffice.org should be irresistable -- it does nearly everything MS Office can do, in some cases better, and it's free. But the pitch fails because most Windows users already have Office, or would know how to get it if they wanted. OpenOffice.org's own why OpenOffice.org is not especially compelling if you already have MS Office installed -- it just sounds like the same product.

FireOffice -- the FireFox of OpenOffice.org -- would do a few things so obviously differently from MS Office that people wouldn't be able to help but try it out.

Here are the features that I want in FireOffice:

• Loads faster than MS Office -- I don't mind it 90% fewer features, because if I need to break out the big guns I can load MS Office (or the full OpenOffice.org). Just get my document open faster.
• Handles multiple open documents better -- a tabbed interface with the option to have documents, spreadsheets, presentations open in different tabs on the same window.
• 1 or 2 killer interesting, time saving features -- that I haven't thought of
• Lightweight, fun and interesting extensions -- like import photos from Flickr to illustrate presentations, upload my documents to Scribd easily, and so on. Not serious stuff that turned it back into a heavy app, but fun things that made me want to show FireOffice to my friends.

FireOffice wouldn't try to stop me owning MS Office. It would try to get me using it less. It would make my core day to day tasks go by faster and be more fun.

Please somebody, fork OpenOffice.org and build FireOffice -- I am waiting and ready to use a lightweight open source office suite.

What do you think of OpenOffice.org and Firefox? What other Open Source apps could learn from the Firefox example? Tweet or comment me...

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