ComputerWorld is reporting, that per a government analysis, upgrading to OpenOffice 2.0 will be 10 times cheaper than Microsoft Office 12. Normally I would be skeptical of such a claim, since it’s was done by a bloated bureaucracy. But this analysis comes from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts making more believable.

In a recent presentation to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the state’s secretary of administration and finance Eric Kriss said that his organisation would ’save significantly by migrating to OpenDocument-based products rather than going with Office 12 - on the order of US$5 million for OpenDocument versus US$50 million for Office 12, including hardware and operating-system upgrade costs.”

Massachusetts made waves when it announced that it would no longer use proprietary documents formats, as found in MS Office. Combine this news with the rumored upcoming announcment regarding a possible Google Office and things do not bode well for the next version of Office. (Google has reportedly been on the hunt for OpenOffice and StarOffice developers.) MS Office has been a cash cow for Microsoft in the past, accounting for 28% of its total revenue last year, but recent improvements in open source software has eroded their strangle hold.

A lot of ballyhoo has been made about web-based office suites recently, using the newly named Ajax technology. One such groupware suite is Zimbra™ Collaboration Suite. Zimbra is an open source project which has been billed as a Lotus Notes replacement. While we doubt the Lotus Notes replacement part, the interface is very nice, even allowing drag and dropping of emails.

After all this, is there still a reason to use Microsoft Office?