This article is about open source software solutions that would replicate the Office stack of Microsoft. This argument has being going on during the last few weeks with the new "Writely" from Google (a web based word processing program). The Google spread sheets too became a big hit but yet still it is not as good as MS Excel but good enough. Writely did not impress me much as it could not open a simple word doc due to unknown reasons.

I'm a big fan of open source but sometimes the community is bit too optimitic about the outcome. The consumers would always look at the features they need and most importantly the total cost of ownership. This price becomes comparatively cheaper with the use of Microsoft since each of their integrations work very well with a minimum amount of tweaking. At the meantime open source solution would consist of many vendors who would try to market their own but would not look how well they perform with other systems. This aspect becomes much more critical with the services and maintenance because no single entity is responsible for the whole solution. There are some company who are involved but a very few. Sri Lankan company - WSO2 is good example.

Microsoft is also not far from a web based office solutions. Their Office Live will create a big impact and would be very useful for distributed companies with team members all over the world. These are very exciting days.

Link to Analysis: Businesses Don't Need Microsoft Software - Software News by InformationWeek