Assessing the switching barriers between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.

摘要

Using a survey methodology, hypotheses derived from the open source, consumer marketing, and technical and trade literature were tested to identify the switching barriers between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. 240 questionnaires were completed and analyzed. The results showed that the product-specific switching barriers are comfort with Microsoft, habituation to the Microsoft Office interface, and dependence on Microsoft Office's file formats. The user-specific switching barriers are user innovativeness, loyalty to Microsoft, and likelihood to have actively searched for information about alternatives. The key insights for stakeholders are that markets should be segmented according to user characteristics; that strategic decisions that favour the user perspective may need to be made to improve OpenOffice.org adoption; that a progressive introduction of OpenOffice.org will likely improve adoption; that users do not care about most of the factors listed in the literature; and, that the theoretical foundations in the open source literature have a developer bias.