"OOo! I want that!" An Examination of Individual Adoption of OpenOffice Software

Open source software has been growing in acceptance and use over the past decade. Recent work explores the criteria that organizations use in deciding whether to adopt open source software. However, little research has been done to understand the adoption decision from the perspective of the individual. This paper examines the factors that impact individual adoption of open source software. Specifically, it looks at the OpenOffice.org (“OOo”) office productivity software suite and explores the curious phenomenon that this application, which is available to users for free, is not widely in use; instead, the market continues to be dominated by products that cost hundreds of dollars. The paper adopts a qualitative approach to examining the issue, using interpretive content analysis to analyze online texts of potential users’ own comments about OpenOffice.org software. A cognitive map is generated to shed light upon individual adopters’ explicit and implicit beliefs about adopting OpenOffice.org.