Here’s a thought. If OpenOffice.org wants me to quit spending thousands of dollars on a commercial product, they have to compete on more than just price. Price isn’t the deciding factor in which suite I buy.  Quality and enhanced productivity are. Even if the cost of Office Pro works out to a few hundred dollars a year per user over it’s lifetime, that’s less than a dollar a day. In real world terms that means my employees pay for Office in about 2 minutes each day thanks to the extra features.

This is essentially what I was trying to convey the other day.  OpenOffice.org, and other free MS Office competitors like Lotus Symphony, aren’t going to get widespread adoption just because they’re free.

IBM has joined the growing group of tech companies punting alternatives to Microsoft’s omnipresent Office suite.

Its new Lotus Symphony package, which launched yesterday, includes word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs and is available free of charge to Windows and Linux users.

I mean…I’m sure that the IBM folks have a nice product and everything. But do that many normal people actually switch from Microsoft Office? Being a cash-strapped geek, I switched for a while while in college to OpenOffice, which was just fine for writing essays and whatnot.

Switching completely for any business is a different story. It is painful. The lost hours of productivity that have to be dedicated to training staff on the new software is not insignificant. And having them get used to an MS Office alternative can certainly stifle work flow. The costs associated with switching are not insignificant.

When those costs are compared to the cost of staying with what works (MS Office) I don’t think we’ll see a wholesale exodus just yet.