>How much do you know about BI in OpenOffice? How about LibreOffice?
>
>First, glad to hear you weren't injured by the quake.
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>Second, future is uncertain for OpenOffice, so I'm not sure why you'd be asking that.
>
>LibreOffice has some nice features - but loses hands-down as an BI client against Excel. I dare say that few (if anyone) using Excel for OLAP access, PowerPivot functionality, or Excel Services would be happy with LibreOffice.
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>I would have thought you'd love the VertiPaq in-memory engine :)
>
>Need to remember something - last May, SQL Server 2008R2, SharePoint 2010, PerformancePoint Services 2010, and PowerPivot/Excel 2010 all RTMd at the same time. The MS BI stack, which was (with some justification) previously called a Frankensuite because of fragile integration points, became tighter. Still not perfect, but much better.
>
>People can complain about licensing - but MS is a much bigger player in corporate BI.

OpenOffice has found a new customer base - senior citizens. :o) I know this because I pointed my mom to it and she downloaded it and has since gotten numerous friends to do the same. Every month someone new is downloading and asking for her help. They are using Thunderbird as well. There's a group of people out there almost living on their pc's -- senior citizens. The pc and internet is becoming their primary means of communicating as they get less and less mobile and they do not have the funds to purchase MSFT Office and no need for the wiz-bang automation tools.