The Open Learning Centre

In the current economic climate what do you think is the best way to keep existing customers happy and encourage them to spend more with you?

Introduce some special offers perhaps? Add extra value to your products and services? Be even more nice than you are normally?

All these might be reasonable suggestions and I'm sure there are plenty of others that we can think of too. But I bet you wouldn't have thought about this as a strategy instead...

Chart courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider

1. Take your finest super-high-margin cash-cow product and add a few features
2. Increase your product's pricing way above the rate of inflation
3. Make certain that your UK pricing is far higher than in other parts of the world and tell everyone
4. Remove all previous incentive pricing discounts for upgrades
5. Change the terms of use of your product/service such that it becomes a highly restrictive short-term lease agreement only.

Now, I can tell you are thinking that that all sounds a bit odd really doesn't it. Amazingly however this appears to be precisely what Microsoft have decided to do for their forthcoming Office™ 2010 release due out later this year.

So apart from the new features, just what are they thinking of here? Is this some kind of reverse psychology to make everyone think that they've gone bonkers and so will buy it out of sympathy? I really don't know and, as I have not used Microsoft Office for several years now, I'm not able to comment on how good, or bad, or pointless, any of the new features might be relative to what has gone before.

What I do know however, is this. For virtually every organisation we deal with there is an alternative to Microsoft Office that also comes in a "Professional" edition (it only has one edition) and it doesn't cost me, my business, or our customers a single penny. Using it I can create very nice proposals, letters and other documents, give presentations and make spreadsheets. I can share these with our customers, partners and prospects who are using Microsoft Office or many other applications. I can, with a single click, create PDF versions of my creations that can be read by almost anyone and printed as I intended them to look, rather than how an application thinks I wanted it to.

This product gets a regular and incremental new release roughly every 6 months or so (unlike Microsoft's incidentally, which only gets updated once every three or more years and presents a major learning curve each time) and all upgrades are free too. I can install this software on lots of different computers (actually there is no limit), I can legally, and am actually encouraged to, make copies of it and give to my friends, neighbours and customers, and the same version runs on all sorts of different computing platforms too: like Macs, Ubuntu (Linux), some Unix systems and Windows™ for example.

I'm sorry. but there are no prizes here for guessing that the product I'm talking about is called OpenOffice.org (the ".org" is part of the name).

Have you ever tried it? If you haven't I strongly recommend that you do. If you want to you can get it from here right now. It is, and always will be, free and is, not unsurprisingly, very popular:

On October 28th 2009, the one hundred millionth person clicked on the Download OpenOffice.org button since version 3.0 of the software was announced just a year before.

Just think about that for a moment. That's 100,000,000 individual downloads of a free product, the alternative legacy application from Microsoft will soon cost you £430. Oh yes, and those 100,000,000 downloads happened in a year and 16 days...

When Microsoft Office was relatively cheap and everyone had it there was little sense in looking elsewhere for an alternative. But now times are very different: money is ultra-tight; a significant proportion of the world, especially public sector organisations and Governments, are using, or are moving to, alternatives based on Open and Free standards; and the main proprietary competitor has just inflated it's pricing by a large margin. This now means that it will cost nearly £450 to upgrade each and every computer in your operation, and that is just for the office applications don't forget.

So surely, this moment in time represents an ideal opportunity to evaluate and plan your migration path away from these legacy, over-priced and over-valued proprietary software applications? Applications which, in reality, are still being packaged and sold as they were ten or fifteen years ago; what is now a bygone era just like the Ford Cortina or Brotherhood of Man.

If you do try OpenOffice.org and have questions, or if you do not feel comfortable downloading and installing software, or perhaps you would prefer someone experienced to come and discuss the differences between applications and even suggest migration strategies for your organisation, then The Open Learning Centre have come up with a special offer for any organisation in the UK. You can read more about it here. Or just contact us directly.

"Often, Open Source is best – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services. But we need to increase the pace and drive the principles of open source open standards and reuse through all ICT enabled public services"

With the launch of yet another shiny new electronic gizmo yesterday, it could be said (and it fact has been by my friend and colleague Max Cooter) that 27th January 2010 was a bad day to bury good news, but good news there was: the UK Cabinet Office released an updated and revised version of it's "Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use: Government Action Plan [pdf]"

This document, first published in February 2009 and discussed at some length on our more freeform blog (The Open Sourcerer), has been revised and updated following input and comments from industry and community alike.

The foreward has been updated and re-written by Angela Smith, Minister of State for the Cabinet Office. In which, in the first paragraph no-less, she appears to take a swipe at some of the traditional/legacy software vendors:

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, he fought to keep it free for everyone. Since then, not everyone in ICT has displayed quite the same philanthropic spirit and a small number of global organisations dominate.

The document has been slightly re-organised at the beginning and a couple of points have been strengthened in their tone and clarity which we are very pleased about. Item 4 describes these changes to the Policy since last year.

4. This Strategy does not represent a wholesale change to the Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy published in February 2009. It has been updated to take account of comments posted on www.writetoreply.org. The key changes to policy are:

• We will require our suppliers to provide evidence of consideration of open source solutions during procurement exercises – if this evidence is not provided, bidders are likely to be disqualified from the procurement.
• Where a ‘perpetual licence’ has been purchased from a proprietary supplier (which gives the appearance of zero cost to that project), we will require procurement teams to apply a ‘shadow’ licence price to ensure a fair price comparison of total cost of ownership. We have also defined the shadow licence cost as either:
  1. the list price of that licence from the supplier with no discounts applied, or
  2. the public sector price that has been agreed through a ‘Crown’ agreement.
• We have clarified that we expect all software licences to be purchased on the basis of reuse across the public sector, regardless of the service environment it is operating within. This means that when we launch the Government Cloud, there will be no additional cost to the public sector of transferring licences into the Cloud.

This document continues to be a well articulated high-level strategy to encourage the take up of Open Source and Open Standards in the public sector, but unfortunately, it still has no teeth. One common request made by many in our community was about the enforcement of this policy. There continues to be, apparently, little or no appetite to monitor individual, departmental or regional IT procurement. Our own conversations with LEAs, Councils and other public sector organisations have shown there to be a mixture of reactions to the policy: broad acceptance, complete ignorance, cynicism and scepticism, right through to downright hostility.

The basic problem however is this: until this Action Plan becomes enforced it will continue to be a great objective, but nothing more than that unfortunately.

Additional opinion and news on this can be found with some of our good colleagues at Openforum Europe and Open Source Schools. Please feel free to add your comments below and/or provide links to other places where this is being discussed. The more coverage and debate this plan gets the better.

The Cabinet Office also has an aggregation of much of the comment and discussion avaialble here on netvibes. Please use the #ukgovOSS tag on your tweets, blog posts and other discussions to get noticed.

It's that time of year when around 30,000 educationalists from all over the world descend on Olympia in London for the annual edu-geek-out that is BETT.

I've been going to BETT now for 3 or 4 years as an exhibitor or just helping to promote Open Source and Free Software with other like minded members of our amazing community.

This year we helped our friends and colleagues at Open Source Schools and Open Forum Europe on the Open Source Café. The simple objective of the show was to inform the education sector about Open Source and where to find help, advice and common ground with peers who've "been there" and "done that" already.

This year was, frankly, quite exceptional.

The stand received financial sponsorship from Red Hat, Linux IT, University of London Computing Centre and The Learning Machine (Ingots) for which everyone is very grateful. Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu very kindly provided us with 600 Ubuntu 9.10 CDs (500 Desktop and 100 Server) to give away (thanks Larry) and there were a similar number of CDs containing a great collection of Education-centric Open Source desktop applications for Windows from Free Software for Students that was compiled and produced by Peter Kemp and David Wilmut. That's around 1200 CDs in total full of completely Free goodness and fun. We encouraged all the recipients to copy, share and pass them on too! At the end of the show we had only a few (quite literally) of each remaining.

An interesting equation was discussed: The value of equivalent proprietary software was estimated to be over £4000 for the pair of CDs - I actually think that is rather low considering the volume of stuff in the Ubuntu repos including several real Enterprise grade applications such as OpenERP and Alfresco - so we have potentially delivered a net saving to the education sector of at least £2.5m. And of course this does not include all the free copies that will be made and passed around!

I noticed a real sea-change between this show and last year's. I don't actually recall speaking to one school or Local Authority this show that had no-idea of, or that wasn't aware that they were using, Open Source Software. Most were really proud of their achievements, many were rolling out or had completed roll outs of OpenOffice.org rather than waste many thousands of pounds on unnecessary & proprietary Office Application Suite Licenses. Many more used and raved about Audacity - the ubiquitous audio capture and editing tool. No one I spoke with was reticent toward Open Source and many were keen to talk and share their experiences. This is what the Open Source Schools project is all about: using the principles of FOSS; of community, collaboration and sharing, and providing a location for this to happen. If you are involved in education and have any interest in Open Source, or even better are an expert, get involved and share your experience and knowledge gained.

We also found time to meet up with friends and colleagues from Sirius, Mark Taylor and John Spencer. Sirius has been very successful in the education sector, they are the only Open Source vendor to be on Becta's "approved supplier list", and were nominated for an award this year for the work they and North West Learning Grid put in to the National Digital Resource Bank.

The national digital resource bank will deliver a vast range of publicly funded resources under a creative commons licence and populate your learning platforms, preparing them for effective use.

It will also create a sharing community of educators who will identify, review and improve a common set of national digital assets.

The world is really changing very fast. I go to parties and find people in all walks of life (i.e. not IT professionals) who are aware of Open Source, Governments are (some faster than others admittedly) waking up to the reality that FOSS provides significant benefits over proprietary software in many ways more than just money, and Enterprises are adopting not just Open Source Software but the principles behind it too to make their own businesses better.

BETT 2010 confirmed this trend in spades. Roll on BETT 2011.

Miles Berry from Open Source Schools and one of the organisers of the event has also posted a review of the show that you can read here.