The times, there are a’changing

As the OOoCON 2007 is now over, some of you may ask what OpenOffice.org has in store for 2007 and 2008?

That’s a good question. I’ll try to answer it. There will be two major milestones for OpenOffice.org in 2008. The first one will be the final agreement on MS OOXML. The outcome of this decision will be crucial for the future of OpenOffice.org, the industry, and our ability to exchange information freely through documents. The second milestone will be the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. I have already described a bit what there would be inside it, and Louis’ keynote in Barcelona showed the rest.

However, the 3.0 release will not be a clearcut advancement for OpenOffice.org as a software. As our development process is incremental, the 3.0 will be just that, a release that will incude a breadth of new features but that will not fundamentally change from the previous release of OpenOffice.org. So do not expect something completely different, you would be disappointed.

There will be major features included in the 3.0 though, and it might be interesting to see the difference between the 2.0.x releases and the 3.0. As the old chinese saying goes, « sometimes it’s good to turn back and contemplate the way one has gone ».

What you will see in the 3.0 will in essence be the progressive transformation of OpenOffice.org into a suite of software that effectively integrates that age of the participation. I will not speak of the « Web 2.0 » itself, as I think the 2.0 will soon change into a 3.0. And OpenOffice.org will be the first to carry out that number! More seriously though, do expect more communication, modularity, a breadth of extensions, increased performance and much more web-readiness.

As it turns out, I’m already blogging using only OpenOffice.org and the Sun Blog Publisher (a wonder in itself) one of the best-crafted extensions in store When it comes to wiki editing, I’m using OpenOffice.org and two very good extensions allowing me to type and compose a normal document and exporting it under different wiki syntaxes.

The reason why all this works so well is twofold. In some way, this also related to some of our new initiatives in the field of marketing (more on that later). First, we have to stop , and already have, in some cases, thinking in terms of productivity suite or office suite. It just does not work like that any more. Just like it would be quite stupid for a company like, say, Google, to think about Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and now Presentations as one, squared and coherent set of offerings, we have to stop looking at the « product » itself and consider its potential uses in the age of social networks, the long tail, the small head and what have you, the Conversation. Google does not think about its online office suite that way. Each and everyone of its products can potentiall collaborate, mash up with others, and fit the best for an user in many cases.

We thus would like to think of OpenOffice.org as a set of tools for creativity, enabling people and organizations to produce content. By content we may be a bit specialized in the field of documents, but even the document metaphor is changing these days and becoming more the notion of structured , hyperlinked, mashable content accessible and editable through many interfaces. And this is what OpenOffice.org really is about: ODF, XForms, Web services, wiki, blogs, images, etc. You can already create and manipulate all this content directly from within OpenOffice.org. Now what will also be added is the social and collaborative aspects of this evolution: we’re adding Thunderbird and a calendar. Available as separate products, we will be able to gain some real clout inside the entreprise business and be meeting the needs of many of our exisiting users. And IM ability could be on the way through a simple extension.Second, our launching of our new extensions web site allows anybody to contribute to OpenOffice.org much like Firefox extensions and plugins allow hundreds of people and companies to offer solutions and code.

In this way, OpenOffice.org will become much less a coherent product understood in a traditional sense than a platform offering countless opportunities, code, solutions to anybody, anywhere, at anytime. And my vision of this is that perhaps everyting concerning OpenOffice.org lies in this word, « the platform ».

Talking about vision and users, OpenOffice.org is set to start more innovative marketing techniques, such as building a presence inside social networks. We already have one in FaceBook,by the way, and we’re only experimenting for the moment. Of course, many « serious » marketers will find that to belong to the world of hype. So I thought about giving some more reliable data about OpenOffice.org today. Some of my readers may be interested, for instance, in the major deployments of OpenOffice.org registered. Talking about this, Macedonia just announced that OpenOffice.org and Linux would be deployed on 180,000 seats of its schools. Stay tuned for more. Because there IS more to come.