| Mirror, mirror...who's the fairest...? BigPond Office of course! |
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| Written by Stuart Corner | |
| Monday, 26 November 2007 | |
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Why has Telstra done this? Well the fact is, as iTWire reported recently, BigPond has launched its own, hosted, office applications suite: the ThinkFree range, under an exclusive deal. This means, as iTWire also reported, that it is now no longer possible to access the ThinkFree website from an Australian IP address, unless you were a registered user prior to the launch of BigPond Office. That's life. Business is all about securing a competitive advantage. So, why give competition like OpenOffice a free kick (even though, as desktop software it is not even a direct competitor)? However, with this latest move the only advantage Telstra has gained for BigPond Office over OpenOffice is that BigPond users wanting OpenOffice now have to go to the OpenOffice web site and subtract the download from their monthly quota. (All mirrored software is quota-free to BigPond customers). At 119Mb for Windows, this would be very big deal for someone on a really low end plan. But not such an issue for someone on 5GB or more. Is suspect our reader's views are not unique and I venture to suggest that BigPond has done more harm than good with this move. It could instead have simply interposed a page for anyone wanting OpenOffice that said something like: "Hey did you know BigPond now has its own range of office applications available online?" followed that with a list of advantages of BigPond Office over OpenOffice and then given people the option to continue with the OpenOffice download if they wished to do so. This would have been much more effective instead of the blunt "BigPond has removed the OpenOffice software downloads for Windows users to support the release of this new product [BigPond Office]." BigPond's tactic is more likely to have an effect opposite to that desired: make something difficult to find, give little or no information and people are likely to go looking for it just to see what you are trying to hide. Undoubtedly BigPond Office will expand in functionality and if this tactic is continued more and more mirrored downloads are likely to disappear, even if they compete only partially with the BigPond offering. Accounting software is one category likely to be an early target for removal, resulting in more unhappy customers. (PS ThinkFree is at http://thinkfree.com , but redirects to http://www.bigpondoffice.com.au. OpenOffice is at http://openoffice.org . http://thinkfree.org is for sale: yours for $US11,000. An opportunity there for someone, methinks,{moscomment}
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