A Big Week for OpenOffice.org

The community that produces the free productivity software suite is scheduled to launch OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Thursday, with several stated improvements including a few to its Calc spreadsheet application. (The release notes can be found here.

On that same day, OOo will put a feature freeze and user interface freeze into effect on its development of OpenOffice.org 3.0 - - which is scheduled to launch in September.

OOo still has a sliver of the overall market, even as giants Microsoft and Google duke it out to expand their productivity software offerings in the online world in full Software as a Service mode. Within the last few days, Google has even instituted some UI improvements to Google Docs, making it look more Word-like than before. Whether OOo can break through the Microsoft-Google noise remains to be seen, and will be interesting to watch.