Slashdot Mirror
Is StarOffice Ready To Take On Office?
A reader writes "CNET has an article about: Is StarOffice ready to take on MS Office? A quote: "Bottom line for Sun and StarOffice: If you keep aiming where Microsoft has already been, then your opportunities will be in China. A better tactic is to take aim at where the IT market is going to be and your opportunities will be much wider.""
No, Staroffice has a long way to go before most companies adopt it as their standard office app suite.
Microsoft owns that market, it's a logical outgrowth of their also owning the OS market.
StarOffice never even *had* a paperclip. How's that for innovation and wisdom?
Got Rhinos?
Until it comes with built-in Code red IV
First off, is being behind in feature creep really that bad of a thing?
The ace in the hole for StarOffice is that it is free. Who cares if it lacks some whiz-bang feature that most people hardly use, if it costs nothing?
That in itself makes it competitive.
Staroffice is nowhere near the quality of Office XP.
Corporate users care more about usability, standards, and TRAINING than license costs.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Do you see a parallel to windows vs. linux?
The biggest point he's made is the user familiarity. Something difficult to overcome. Something that Linux has been working on to try and grab the Windows population.
Say what you must, but everytime I show KDE to Windows only users, they look puzzled. The minute I pop up a terminal, they're gone. Its the familiarity that's the hardest wall to scale. People don't like change.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Star Office is positioned to move forward, but they have not released anything for quite awhile. I have been waiting for something beyond the 5.2 release so that I can show our management that we can duplicate the current office app for less money.
.NET) crowd from finding another alternative.
StarOffice needs to get something out quick to keep the off-line (not
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Why pony up more $$$ for the new MS office?
These are frugal times.
I don't care wether Sun is making improvements to exsiting features in MS Office or if they are adding new features, just as long as StarOffice can do what I need it to do.
Is StarOffice still a full suite only or can I download and use individual components?
Internet Radio!!!!
UltraRadio
Before Star Office talks about taking on Microsoft Office, they should get the spreadsheet to give correct results. As it is now, I'd rather use Visicalc with an Apple ][ emulator.
A group of developers at my company has tried converting to StarOffice. That attempt has lasted for a couple of weeks, when people were trying to get the needed functionality out of the SO (something to do with spreadsheets). Bottom line is: we are still using MS Office, and no matter which way you look at it, it's simply allowing better functionality. Office 2000 may not be the best app bundle in the world, but it certainly does the job better than SO.
My feeling is that Sun StarOffice exists because Microsoft is poking a stick in Sun's eye (big servers), so Sun is poking them back (office suites). If big name vendors such as IBM/Lotus and Corel/WordPerfect could field full featured suites and utterly fail to compete on price with Microsoft, it won't be any different with Sun.
That, and as an eat-your-own-dogfood shop, Sun probably felt having a piece of essential internal infrastructure under the control of a small company teetering on the edge of existence was probably a bad idea.
Now, when Microsoft's OEM licence practices are altered by the courts, StarOffice may well become a standard OEM freebie. However, that doesn't mean that many corporate users will or could switch.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"A better tactic is to take aim at where the IT market is going to be and your opportunities will be much wider."
Considering much of the IT market has been laid off in the last 12 months I'd say that giving it away is keeping pace with that. The only way they could do it any better would be to provide CD's of StarOffice at the local soup kitchens.
Do I think Star Office is good enough? Yes.
Will I be able to convince Co-workers to use it? No.
Unfortunately, nobody is willing to learn to use something else. "It costs too much to retrain.." In short, "free" is the only selling point that Star office has. Joe Average could care less about XML as the document format.... You get my drift.
MS-Office is FREE in China (and Japan and....)
Star Portal, or Star-whatever they are calling it now, has some real interest to me. Imagine distributing a free office suite to anyone on your LAN via web servers. And they could dial in or use broadband and get the same thing. But it won't be useful until they ditch the way it loads an entire Star Office environment every time. Who wants that?
Does StarOffice have tracking of revisions yet? That was one of the features that I noticed it lacked last time I looked at it (a while ago, admittedly). Without that feature, they might as well well forget any serious usage.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Is StatOffice Ready To Take On Office?
Note that you don't have to state MS Office, because everyone already knows what you mean. No, StarOffice is not ready to take on Office.
Cunning linguists
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
What it really needs to make it is perfect file compatibility with Office. When you multiply the cost of Office by thousands of employees it's a serious chunk of change, and in a recession some smaller companies might finally be willing to try it.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Well this is exactly what I expected from CNET, a load of FUD. Let me dispel some of the myths in this article:
Myth: Office has a broad range of functionality.
Fact: Office is a buggy useless piece of crap like all microsloth applications. All it's good for is pissing you off with that damned paperclip.
Myth: Office makes you productive.
Fact: Linux makes you more reproductive. Chicks dig it, and the spreadsheet in Star Office can tell you which ones are ovulating. Where are your priorities.
Myth: Star office is not suited for the US corporate desktop.
Fact: Star office is made by Sun, a comany name that is not easily ridiculed. By contrast, Microsoft is regularly referred to as Microsloth, Microsucks, Micro$oft, and Micro~1 on slashdot. Who'se better suited for the corporate desktop now, bitch?
Remember slashdot rule #12: No matter how illogical, factually incorrect or malicious it may be, it's not FUD if it attacks Microsoft.
Your friend,
--Shoeboy
"Ahhhhh! No, not that! Why would we want to find out what the users want and use? We might have to think then!"
I'm sure there are IT/IS departments out there that are intelligent and responsive. I just haven't found one. My latest example: the IS department where I work just rolled out a web page that allows someone who is using a machine that's not logged into the Windows Domain (i.e. someone running a Linux system) to change their domain password. The domain password for the main WIndows Domain is used for all IS run file servers and also for email accounts (we have the privilege of using Exchange server for email). So, this a good thing, right? Wrong. Why is that, you ask? Because this webpage only works if you're running IE on Windows. Turns out that the only reason for this page is for people who are remotely logged into the network (and thus are in a different domain). So, I email IS to ask them about this, and their response was that IE was the "Corprate Standard", now go away. Never mind that they could just ask for the username and current domain password before allowing changes, rather than using some funky "WWW-Authenticate" method, that might make things easier.
1) Better word filters, it's beaten up a couple of my .docs
/home, a /usr/bin, and all that already, I don't need /usr/share/local/staroffice/home & bin & multiple layers of symbolic links
2) Better gui integration, I don't need it to take over my desktop, it should just sit in there like every other program. I HATE primadonna projects that add self importance by taking up desktop real estate (what the hell do I want some video game adding hundreds of desk icons and taskbar AND everything else it can under windows).
3) Drop in support. You gotta add this to your path and add this and add this, for functionality that is ALREADY in your directory hierarchy. Why can't they just use the same directories everyone else does? I have a
I would think that with the coming economic downturn, being able to offer an alternative to Microsoft's draconian (not to mention expensive) licensing scheme would be attractive, particularily to the bean-counters who are likely going to be calling the shots. I just installed Mandrake 8 and it was pretty much painless and as far as what the average user does...clicks on their e-mail, clicks on their word processor, and browses the net, there isn't a whole hell of a lot of difference.
The clincher for many businesses however, will be not so much (Lin)ux/ Star office's functionality or having to accustom users to a different way of doing things, but rather the must-have app that only runs on Windows. THATS why Microsoft has the lion's share of the desktop market.
You're using her as bait, Master!
i find star office very confusing to work with. I am used to ms office and separate programs for every kind of work (spreadsheet, word etc). It very hard to orient in one application, and quite frankly it takes too long. Instead of one click i have to tart it up and go thru a menu. If they woulda add just a lil more uniform design (kinda like word perfect), i would have no problems switching.
I'm sorry to say, I actually like it. I have even encouraged people to install it.
Yes, it may not have all of Office 2000's functionality, but it is close, and there are several benefits.
1. It's free(as in beer, but not as in speech (read on, however).
2. It's cross-platform. There are linux binaries (and solaris, I believe) on sun's website. This may just be the office suite of choice for linux (at least beginning linux users) users, as it does not require much to get it working.
3. 6.0 looks really sweet.
Plus, come one, people. It has 98% the functionality of office 2000. That is good enough for at least 75% of people out there, because most people don't use the bloated features avaliable in office. Yes, you have to do things slightly differently. But generally, whatever you wanted to do in office, can be done in staroffice.
While my third point is kind of irrelevant (it makes me hopeful, though), I think the first two are serious advantages that IBM/Lotus/Corel don't have. Sure, you could get Corel's Java Wordperfect, but it kind of sucked, and it didn't have all the features of star office, and the full version cost money.
Finally, StarOffice is forming the core of OpenOffice, which has (IMHO) the potential to become fantastic. In fact, the first full featured beta is avaliable, I may just switch.
As it is, however, even if StarOffice falls off the face of the earth, methink the project is a success. There are a substantial number of users (maybe not compared to Office 2000, but a fair number nevertheless), it's free as in beer, it forms the core of an office suite that is free as in speech, and is cross-platform.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
How is this "informative" without even an example of where staroffice is supposed to be wrong?
This might seem a bit backwards but I think the thing that really keep StarOffice from competing with MS Office is it's lack of support for MS formats. Unfortunately, the MS formats have become one of the standards used. While SO claims to be able to support formats such as .doc, they really don't. In addition, SO introduced it's own format. That's just what we all need...Another format to attempt to comply with.
As much as I hate to admit it, StarOffice is a classic example of the schism between commercial software developers and open source advocates. The latter love to tout free alternatives to commercial software: "Star office!" "The Gimp!" But then realistically, when you try to use the free clone in an real environment, it quickly becomes obvious that it is not nearly as ready for prime time as its proponents claim it to be. This is not to put down all open source development, but it is a small cry for realism and restraint among zealots. Look a it this way: who knows more about office suites, college students who write two papers a year, or people who work 40 hours a week in a business?
It is also regrettable that Star Office tried so hard to be like Microsoft Office. It would have been better to develop a simpler, more rock solid, legitimate _alternative_, rather than what comes across as a wannabe clone that misses the mark.
This whole "if it's not M$, I can't use it" mentality-- it's nuts. I have a difficult time believing that people are that rigid or unable/unwilling to think.
How much more could StarDivision (isn't that who Sun bought it from?) have done to make it easy to use? F7 is spellcheck for both M$-office and StarOffice (or as the corporate hacks here called it, "TarOffice."). The different buttons look the same: "B" for bold, "I" for italics.
I don't understand the trepidation and fear that people have. Can someone explain it to me? Productivity software are tools. Like hammers. Nobody shows fear at using a peening hammer when all they've seen before is a claw hammer. They're both hammers, and as such work about the same way. M$ Word and StarWord are both WYSIWYG word processors; they work very similarly.
The car analogy works-- do people tremble in fear at the mention of driving a Honda simply because they've only ever driven Fords? Or are Pontiacs so different from Lexus that their respective owners couldn't drive the other ones?
Geee, sounds like 'standard operating procedure' to me.
Our primary Development department tried SO, mainly on Windows machines. They disliked it, and had troubles with some of the document template / form fillin types of tasks we were using for code change forms and suchlike.
However, our secondary development group all run Linux machines as our primary platform. We all use SO, because of its similar interface to MS Office, as well as its success at rendering MS Office documents. What will be a welcome change is individual applications, rather than a monolithic system that brings the machine to its knees. Hint for SO users: run a lighter weight window manager such as Blackbox or IceWM rather than a desktop environment such as Gnome or KDE.
I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check. -M.C. Escher (1898-1972)
No.
Until it has grammar checking capabilities like word has, and WordPerfect, it will not replace Word on my computer.
Chris (krafter@zilla.net)
1. Make a presentation software that's not completely limited to the slide show format. The metaphor should be a stage, and allow for notes on slides, multiple projectors, speakers, etc. Imagine a networked display system between three laptops (two for display, one to control/syncronize, an have your notes on it).
2. Combine word with CVS and give complete modification histories, and keep all undos in files. Sure, they grow large, but you could also show precise branches and replay changes done by one person on another file.
3. A Spreadsheet program that has HUGE libraries of functions, and allows other functions to be written in any language under the sun, compiled, and then used nicely. Also, allowing spreadsheets to use scripts from the command line would be nice.
4. Speaking about the command line, how about a nifty little piping interface that allows for a tool setup with all sorts of little switches on each icon (representing the different switches on the command line) and then drag pipes from one command to another, then let the data flow in.
Just my 2 cents.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
The big difference is that Office is only for Mac and Windows. StarOffice is on Solaris and Linux and others as we all know. So as far as I am concerned it certainly has a chance to go ahead of MS in this respect. I also think most people who use Office can use StarOffice easily. So it's an easy migration. Especially for the tight-fisted boss or the home-user.
Not as good as an etch-a-sketch however.
How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure. - Charles Crumb
Show me some real life expamples where starcalc fails to give a correct answer when calculating. I mean real life.Show me a link to a site that shows the failure of starcalc and then I'll accept your argument.
/. , I just read the headlines now and follow the links, since discussions seemingly lead to nowhere nowadays. And it didn't get beter with the moderation system, but I won't start on that since my adrenalin is already at an all time high now.
;)
Please, I'm not trying to start a war here, but I hear this kind of thing all the time "we tried this and that and application xyz didn't do it correctly". When these kind of things are stated by M$, we call that FUD, when Slashdot users post them we think it's a valid argument.
Sorry about the rant but it's the lack of nuance that drives me further and further away from the comments on
Can you tell?
(relax now, ease back, easy... easy... phew that was close)
mod me down i don't care, just had a BAD day
I've tried StarOffice a few times just to see what it was all about... I must say that MS Office is still my favorite, no doubt about it. Perhaps in the future it will compare to MS Office? Microsoft do have a lot of resources though, and this research lab too... their Office applications will only get better and better and I wonder if any other office applications will beat them any time soon.
Will work for bandwidth
be the standard inside Sun first? Put all your downloadable documents in that open XML format too.
I went to the technical seminars at Sun's headquarters, those presentors all made jokes on MS and its softwares. Guess what these presentors run on their machines? Guess which software they used to do the presentation? I didn't find it very funny. I bash MS from time to time, but at least, all my machines (except those belonged to the company) run Linux or BSD.
Not having a Windoze machine on my side of our office, i do use staroffice / openoffice.
... except .... it takes forever to load. I mean a l-o-n-g time.
.. i think the K folks have something that looks and feels good. A little dusting and cleaning and Koffice may be more attractive than Staroffice
the functionallity is fine, it is just different than Word or Excel.
For the things i do it works well
I know my computer is about 2 years old (dual 550 XEON, 256 ram, RH 7.1) but from the time i click the staroffice icon , till i see the screen , i can go get lunch.
Koffice seems to be a nice framework , but still blows up and the filters dont work, but
* Carthago Delenda Est *
As long as people can say Office, and everyone knows they're referring to what is actually called Microsoft Office, no, StarOffice doesn't have a big change.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
1) Perfect (or nearly so) compatibility with the .doc, .xls, and .ppt formats. Too much stuff out there in these formats to not have it.
2) Make it available everywhere. People use AOL because they made getting their software easy. They put CD's everywhere. Downloading it from the internet is not good enough. Very few people have a fast network connection at home and even if they did they wouldn't likely download it. Sun needs to provide it to all OEMs, carpet bomb the US with CD's containing StarOffice From Sun, etc. Yes this costs money but it won't hurt Office unless it is done.
3) Make it as close to Office as possible in look and feel, at least for a while. If people feel they know how to use it already, they will be much more inclined to switch. It doesn't matter if the interface to Office stinks, it is what people are used to.
4) Do a cost analysis and trumpet it everywhere. If StarOffice is even close in features and is highly compatible, you'll get the attention of IT managers and CFOs. Businesses only care about saving money. Make their jobs easier/cheaper and they'll migrate in droves.
Unfortunately I think Sun doesn't want to do any of this. Unless they do, StarOffice is going to be an also-ran for at least several more years.
There's something else at play here. I have noticed that many secretary types, my wife included, stubbornly cling to Office. There's the perception that other software doesn't work the same and isn't fully compatible. They are afraid their work will somehow be "lost". This isn't just about Office, it applies more broadly to Windows. To sell some other kind of productivity software to my mother-in-law, you have to get past this objection. Many rank and file clerical type employees do not want to learn some new software. This goes beyond familiarity. It's irrational. But that is what Star Office is up against.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I've been awaiting the latest, greatest from them, and look forward to using it both at home and at work.
Will it really take on MS Office? Probably not, but really, I'm not sure that bothers me. I made my choice, it plays well enough with MS Office, and life goes on.
I'm not sure the article served any purpose other than to get people worked up over another software debate.
My name isn't really Jenny....
Only morons use "word processors". The l337
use vi.
Woot_spork
Eh, just make it have a better ui,
Let me guess, they're using Digest instead of Basic authentication, and you're just pissed because Netscape doesn't support it. Here's a nickel, kid. Go get a real browser.
The biggest Office XP competitor is Office 97. IT departments tend to take an all-or-none approach to upgrades, and the law of the convoy tends to win out - slowest ship.
.NET... the competition is with Office 97. When there is a technical innovation or a IT shop just has to upgrade for the sake of upgrading, I think SO has to be a consideration. Hopefully the OS and total cost of ownership get considered at the same time.
That said, Office 2000 and XP seem to offer no real advantages/features what-so-ever over good old '97.
So, in the context of the article, I don't think Sun's competition is the current incarnation of Office or even with
As far as guessing where the market is going to be, well who the hell knows that? Besides, who wants to rent software? It's sort of like leasing a car - you do it because you want the latest status symbol - the guy who paid cash for the '88 civic gets from point A to B with the lowest cost of ownership. There's so status symbol with software - some works better than others, so you go with what works best, and there we're back to Office '97. If you own it, why change?
I use it all the time,
but the stupid web interface has to go,
I want an icon on my desktop for text editing, one for Excel, etc, not one, than choose inside of this dippy web browser
"People don't like change."
Very true. At my high school, the teachers scream if someone changes the layout of their desktop. We recently upgraded to win2k - they still haven't stopped sending angry emails.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
Setting up decent-looking fonts under Linux is still difficult. I think that this is the major
issue blocking the use of SO as a serious alternative to Office.
I've been supporting office apps since WordPerfect 5.2. My needs are the same as they were in 1990.
1 - A word processor that doesn't crash and can read and write everybodies pretty docs quickly and easily.
2 - A spreadsheet that doesn't crash that can read and write everybodies large, complex spreadsheets quickly and easily.3 - An email application that doesn't crash that can read, write and query everybodies mail and attachments.
4 - A database that doesn't crash that easily reads, writes and manipulates everybodies data formats.
Anything else is gravy and I can only take so much gravy (I'm sure someone will disagree with me on this one).
I like to malign Microsoft for their foul tactics and sometimes equally repugnant software just as much as most of you, but I believe the office suite is an excellent bundled software package. The Excel, Word and Outlook components are industry standards for their software types. Access, Frontpage and Powerpoint are closer to second-tier in my mind but have come in handy on a lot of occasions. Access is a decent, if highly outdated, desktop database package good for whipping up quick reports, testing SQL queries and creating simple vb forms. Powerpoint is probably the most highly used presentation software. Frontpage, well, let's not go into that.
What I like most is the built-in VBA scripting support in Microsoft Office; each application gets its own object model, sometimes several of them as in the case of MS Access. Since all Office apps implements a COM-based architecture, they can automate each other, so Excel can pipe data to Word, Access to Excel, ecetera. This comes in handy when creating reports, porting data or just performing general office chores.
Here is some sample pseudo-code to print a report from an Access database:
// next line calls a module function
dim app
set app = new access.application
app.open("c:\my_database.mdb")
app.print_report(report_name)
app.close
I was not able to find out anything about support for scripting in StarOffice from this rather skimpy article, and I would be grateful if someone could enlighten me (escaping to shell, python or perl scripts doesn't count either). Modern applications, especially integrated suites, should be able to interoperate using each other's object models. Perhaps this is another reason for O2k's dominance.
A lot of people, probably a good 33%, would rather steal a copy of Msft Office than buy an inexpensive workalike that has 95% of the features. Just like Msft turning buggy software to an upgrade incentive, they probably put up with the piracy rate to maintain a huge mindshare and user base.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.consitutionparty.com/
The following error was encountered:
Unable to determine IP address from host name for www.consitutionparty.com
The dnsserver returned:
DNS Domain 'www.consitutionparty.com' is invalid: Host not found (authoritative).
This means that:
The cache was not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL.
Check if the address is correct.
Generated Wed, 05 Sep 2001 20:43:33 GMT by (my.server.at.work).com (Squid/2.2.STABLE5)
Besides, they're just a bunch of right-wing,theocratic zealots. If all they wanted to do was enforce The Constitution, I'd be all for it, but read the website, they all want a God/Christian based government. What crap.
Of course, maybe you want that....
I hate MDI's they stink.
Hell, even MS finally got rid of most of their own MDI's.
Apparently, Sun thinks that the IT/CS crowd is the real and best customer. Novell, I think, learned the folly of that attitude, though ju-u-ust a little too late. Too bad. So sad.
You acknowledge that the Software is not designed or intended for use in on-line control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications; or in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.
Is this typical to include in an agreement?
Yes but every time I try to see it your way, I get a headache.
I have been using star office and openoffice pretty intensively over the past few weeks. Here are some things I have found:
1. star/open have lousy support for hyperlinks. It's hard to use, confusing and often produces errors (such as attaching "http://" before relative url's.
2. Starwriter has a pretty sophisticated stylist, and a good GUI for figuring out the hierarchy of styles. However, applying styles is not always easy, and often two different styles conflict with one another, causing bad results.
3. Using starwriter as a wysiwig html editor is a real disappointment. You can't add css easily, and often the styles in the stylist don't appear in the code as a style (a la css) but rather as a inline style (with font tags and things like that). If you add custom css in html source, when you change to wysiwig mode, it demolishes the code additions.
4. 5.2 crashes an awful lot, especially in Windows.
5. People who use Star/Open to create documents are forced into using styles rather than doing direct formatting (which is good).
6. The filters (MS Office, etc) work perfectly. Easiest thing to do is to save all documents in rtf format.
7. Open Office in Linux lacks a lot of proprietary filters and spell checkers and fonts. Apparently the plan is for staroffice to incorporate them, but openoffice never to include them.
8. I've been coming to the conclusion that for simple web page editing and creating, the Mozilla composer editor is a much better alternative. Except for the fact that Mozilla doesn't provide any ability to work with css stylesheets, its 4 different views and its ability to display css styles and make simple tables make it a clear pick for simple web pages.
9. Star/Open haven't had good readymade web templates.
I am a real fan of star office and open office. But these days, I find that I'm making more web pages than word processed documents. So why is openoffice focused on the traditional word processor functions?
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Yes, but then your domain ID and password would be sent across the network in cleartext.
If you look a little closer, sonny, you just might find out that you really do have an intelligent and responsive IT department.
AC
I reviewed StarOffice about a year ago for my Web Site. Some of you might be interested in reading it, since its an independent review written by someone not working for a major media Web site. Or maybe you wouldn't... Either way, here it is.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
If it isn't broke, tinker with it till it is!
...would be multiple distro's for different users. What does everyone hate about Office? The over-featured bloat that drives performance into the ground, right? It would nice to see an OpenSource Office suite codebase that supported multiple distros, for different user needs. I'm an accountant. I need a spreadsheet program with all the bells and whistles, and will happily dream up some more for you to implement. I need a presentation manager that lets me make Pretty Pictures, but I don't need a lot of sound and video effects. I need a damn word processor that allows met to have the same, simple, useful feature set previously implemented in, oh, let's say, MacWrite circa 1985. (fsck Word!) The guys in sales need a very simple spreadsheet-the simpler the better, with fewer chances for them to screw up, pretty good word-processing with lots of support for standardized documents, and a stone killer presentation manager. The paralegal down the hall needs all the bells and whistles for a word processor, a simple spreadsheet and really has no use for a presentation manager. A killer office suite application would let me selectively included or exclude functionality before compiling and/or loading. A truly killer office suite would help me profile my requirements and then reccommend modules to load or not, while keeping file format compatability with other configurations of the same app.....
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Final writer on my amiga (I know softwood published a windows version but unfortunately their page seems dead), did everything I needed for 98% of the Word processing I need.
Star office should swallow every bit of technology it can, and be more stable, it would surely gain market share.
I can't beleive that people drool over powerpoint, Scala does such a better job for presentation... oh well.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
> Many rank and file clerical type employees do > not want to learn some new software.
Just curious, how often do you use Office applications? How advanced of a user are you? Is it possible that those "rank and file" clerical workers are actually right? That switching to a new office suite will cost them many hours of productivity?
It is for programmers to talk about switching office suites, because most of us don't use them very often. I use office for maybe 2 or 3 hours per week. But if you spend eight hours a day in Word and Excel, those small differences matter a lot.
Think of it this way: Say I decided to take away your vi and replace it with emacs (or vice versa). Simple enough, right? They are both text editors and you will figure out the differences, quickly enough. Besides, you're probably already marginally familiar with the other one anyway.
The reality is, that if you're a veteran programmer, you are probably intimately familiar with your text editor, and replacing it with a new one would cost you many hours. If you are a veteran "rank and file" clerical worker, you are probably intimately familiar with Word or Excel and changing office suites would cost you a lot of lost hours.
Switching Office suites in a corporation is an extremely expensive proposition. Even if the software is free (hell, even if Sun paid you), for most companies it is a bad deal.
I first tried SO 5.2 as an alternative to MS Office shortly before Sun bought it. I fired it up, started writing, wanted to do some simple, repetitive task (I forget exactly what). Since SO looked very similar to MSO I tried the same simple feature that would do it for me there. It didn't work. After fifteen minutes of digging through the documentation I discovered that there was no automation for that feature in SO. I quickly nuked it, booted up Windows, and used the Microsoft product instead.
Since time is money I just found Star Office to be more expensive, even though technically it could do everything I wanted it to do. As long as Microsoft keeps improving the user experience it will have the better product. The product should be an enabler for the functionality it contains, and Microsoft did a much better job of that than Star Division did, even though both had all of the needed functionality.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
star office is good for the same reason trillian is good (www.trillian.cc); it allows for people to access all data from the same genre of products. Just like trillian provides people with the opportunity to access aim, yahoo, msn, icq, and irc, star soffice allows people to access all stuff micro$oft: even the setup menu is EXACTLY like the windows setup menu. People not on windows (and maybe even there) like things that combine formats and have one app for everything (aka emacs) ;-)
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
For anyone out there reading who can't imagine StarOffice competing with much of anything, I urge you to go to openoffice.org and download the latest build. (The StarOffice/OpenOffice situation is much like Netscape/Mozilla)
It really is a completely different experience. No more desktop, normal individual apps. While the the apps are rather memory hungry (so what, memory is $.15/MB), it's instantly responsive on my 700mhz machine. Everything I do with Word/Excel is there, with an interface that was quite familiar. It's more than ready for prime time.
> MS-Office is FREE in China (and Japan and....)
Actually the piracy rate in Japan is rather low. The poorer nations typically have the higher piracy rates.
This is from memory, but I remember reading these piracy rates for the following countries:
* China 99.9%
* India 98%
* Russia 95%
I don't work in a role which supports Office apps (thank god) but I do know that in our firm (one of the big boys Sun would LOVE to win back from microsoft) there would be no way we could convert to SO until there was support for Excel/VBA macros in spreadsheets. It's a sad (and scary) fact that a fair chunk of our business relies on arcane and complex spreadsheets written ages ago by someone who's since left. It's bad enough when we have to upgrade MS Office and test everything, but converitng to whatever language SO uses for macros? No thankyouverymuch!
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Computers are dropping in price - pretty dramatically. Right now you can get a P3 600 with a 20GB HD, 128MB of ram, etc, for about $300 (without the monitor) - that is without OS. Now try to talk someone into spending $200 for the OS, and another $400 on the software to actually do work. The software totals more than the hardware! Most people are just not used to that.
Given MS hard line stance and raising of prices, Linux is getting an opportunity just as it is beginning to be stable and useful. Add to that the need to upgrade perceived by most businesses, and the low cost of Linux - an opportunity is born.
Yes, the current StarOffice is a pig - but presuming they answer the must problem areas (loading time, removal of the "desktop" and import/export filters) of that product, they have a chance to help the market find a low cost alternative. I just don't know how they will sustain their development if they do ask money for it.
David Stidolph
Austin, TX
First they try to conquer China and Latin America... and as everybody knows, the install base grows because businesses actually interchange documents with eachother. I use Microsoft Office because our relations do.
As Europe is very Open Source minded and embraces non Microsoft Technology (such as Java, Open Source etc.) much more than the US, it might be a possible scenario that more and more US businesses will adopt something like StarOffice in order to interchange documents with their (foreign) relations. And then they'll adopt because their national relations use it.
Ofcourse, SUN has a long way until the turning point is achieved, but I think it's a smart idea to conquer the US via China and Latin America.
Bizar technology?
Word 5.1 for the Mac was the last, and perhaps only, good version of Word. It did everything real humans needed in a word processor, and everyone else used RageMaker, TeX, etc.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Basically, I think he's totally missed the point. That being that the vast majority of people don't use even half of the widgets MS Office provides them with. In my own experience I've found a lot of them to be extremely annoying. From a functionality standpoint, I'd say the only thing in StarOffice's way is lack of visibility. I had never heard of StarOffice until about a year ago when I first used Linux, and I only recently actually used it. Personally, I would rather use it than MS Office, especially after the frustrations I experienced trying to install Office 2k security patches over the weekend (How do I provide an O2k SR-1 cd when I installed SR-1 over the internet? Why won't my origional O2k cd suffice?). If I can functionally replace Excel and Word, I may even be able to sell my company on it. MS Project is the big one for us. If there's an open source app that can replace that (on Win2k, at least for now) then I'll have some real ammunition.
An Outlook style addressbook is a must as well...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Uh, shouldn't YOU be the grammar checker?!
Spelling, yes: typos etc. are common for those of us who have never taken a typing course, but grammar should be up to the resbonsibility of the user. If you don't know proper grammar by now, well, then you're probably screwed anyway.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I've read many comments that claim that there are too many MSWord documents to have anything less than 100% compatibility.
Rubbish.
MS never offered 100% compatibility between SmartSuite, WordPerfect, or anything else. The filters in MS products were about the same quality as the ones in StarOffice.
For that matter, WordPerfect never offered serious quality import capability from WordStar, and certainly little import capability for Wang wordprocessor systems. Import/export is not the issue.
What's missing from the Linux desktop is a clear direction from the community about a common scripting language, and object embedding.
I'm not a zealot, but I've worked almost exclusively with Gnome for quite a while. It's getting there. If it could offer a scripting language similar to VBA, that would be helpful. Bonobo offers the possibility of object linking within applications.
The scripting language wouldn't be that tough - Linux offers a zillion languages and realistically we're talking about GUI wrappers for some of those languages.
SOffice is not as easy for printing, clipart, and labels as MSOffice. It doesn't have a GUI DB component, (Adabas is not included with the distributions that I've grabbed from Sun.)
MS is opening themselves up to a real kick in the pants. They keep raising license fees for their software, and free software keeps getting better.
It's just a matter of time before American businesses catch on. My company spends millions a year for MS products, and it looks like that number is only going to get bigger.
In the mean time, let's figure out how to herd cats so we can get the free software geeks to converge on a standard platform. Let's pick Gnome or KDE and be done with it. American business doesn't want to be bothered with a million choices. That's why MS has done so well. Let's come together so we can offer a limited set of viable choices to the business community. MS will be hoisted on their own petard.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
FREEDOM.
Freedom is the reason you should check out OpenOffice, K Office, Evolution, Gnumeric etc.. Remember: Sun has GPL'd Star Office's source code. That means that everyone can peek at it and change it -- that means you don't have to worry that the next version of the product will fuck with you because if it will, enough developers will be pissed off enough to fork and fix it. You don't have to worry about Passport, .NET, talking paperclips, proprietary file formats or "Smart Tags", or whatever Microsoft's current strategy of becoming Big Brother is.
This is relevant not only for individuals and for corporations. Choosing OpenOffice now is reasonable long term thinking, something most individuals seem incapable of. Yes, Sun would behave just as badly as Microsoft in Microsoft's shoes, but with OpenOffice under the GPL, there's not really much that can go wrong. The file format is also open, XML-based and documented and can be legally implemented by anyone.
Freedom is not just an ideological point. If you trust all your critical documents to a closed source software corporation, you are dependent on them and on their decisions, which will hurt your bottom line -- and, in the long term, hurt you much more than training your personnel to use an alternative.
The bottom line is that if you care about freedom, you shouldn't have to go to China -- you have to look at the alternatives. If you don't do that, you have no right whatsoever to complain that you have none later.
Now that businesses are utterly dependent on Office, Microsoft feels that they can safely tighten down the screws. They can raise the per-seat cost of Office, because people would rather pay than have to learn something new. They can crack down on illegal copies because there is less (percieved) hassle to pay them off then it is to switch office suites.
With their profit margins sagging, MS is under pressure from investors to keep profits up at the accustomed levels. The market for office suites is saturated -- everyone who needs/wants MS office already has a copy (legal or otherwise). The only way they can continue to bring in mountains of money is to force unlicenced users to become licenced ones, and to extort more money out of their existing users. However, they are operating under the faulty assumption that every unlicenced user is willing to pay to be legal. Many people use a pirated copy of MS office because they are unable or unwilling to fork over the $$$ that MS wants. Many shops will bite the bullet and switch to a free alternative rather than risk being mauled by MS's attack dog, the BSA. As more companies switch, awareness of Free software will grow, creating momentum and giving the Free alternatives legitimacy in the eyes of the PHBs. Bean counters will see the bottom-line savings that comes from not paying Danegeld to Redmond.
The best thing we can do for Free Software is to hype it as a management fad -- reduce your IT spending by n% in one easy step! Free software's current target market is the technical elite -- in effect, preaching to the choir. The people who the FS movement needs to seduce are the MBAs of the world -- middle managers, people who have to watch the bottom line of expense sheets.
I've rambled enough now. Time to go home and eat dinner
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
It sounds nice like a nice tack: provide minimal Microsoft compatibility, while focusing on some vaguely suggested (notice how he avoids any specific discussion of what Sun should do with StarOffice) need that Microsoft doesn't address. What he doesn't get is that there is no such thing as "minimal Microsoft compatibility". This is why the life of an alternative office suite is so miserable.
Let's start with what most people agree on by now: you need to be able to read Office documents that people send you. (Forget for now about creating your own documents, and editing documents that people send you.) According to the article, you just say the magic words "open XML format", wave your wand, and your need for MS Office vanishes in a puff of smoke.
People who say that seem to think you can represent a Word document in a souped-up version of DocBook. Not even close. For starters, there's OLE. This alone is an extremely complicated data model that must be entirely replicated. Not to mention that you have to support every data format that is commonly embedded into Word documents; "just a Word viewer" is an oxymoron. Next, people put formulas in their embedded Excel documents, so you have to clone the scripting language, along with all of the zillions of functions provided. People put macros in their Word documents too, which require in addition to the scripting language a document model that is exactly like Word's. Plus any feature that can be accessed by macros (which I'm guessing is most of them). Oh, these macros might alter the document, so don't think you were going to get away with a read-only model. Compared to all this, emulating the UI is child's play, so to write a Word viewer, you may as well write MS Office.
Basically, Microsoft adds tons of features to Office, and people find the craziest ways to use them, so you have to support every damn one in order to provide "minimal Microsoft compatibility". Anyone who doesn't think it's that bad, probably hasn't worked in a typical business environment.
The alternate notion that people can keep using MS Office for "the full range of functionality in Office", and use StarOffice for the vaguely suggested something else, is just as broken for an even simpler reason: most people don't want to learn more programs.
So maybe China (plus some smaller markets here, like students) is the best Sun can hope for. In a few decades, that may not look like such a bad thing.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
It's still integrated. Yes, they removed the "desktop" but users want seperate apps. they want to click on spreadsheet and get spreadsheet not click on word, click file,new,spreadsheet. Their first mistake was to integrate everything.. ABIWord is a better wordprocessor but is crippled with lib-envy... gotta have the latest libs to break compatability syndrome that all programmers lately love to do.
Solution? Kick your programmers in the head if they even think about changing libs from what is on the distro CD of the current releases, kick them hard to get it through. Second? remove bloat. make the converter a plug in and make that converter one way.. your file format as XML, an industry standard, will force MS to become compatable with you...
S.O. can become great, with a complete rewrite using no code from the origional.
Everyone seems to forget that Sun has a "relationship" with AOL ( Netscape, iPlanet, and so forth ).
Somehow, it seems to me that AOL could EASILY put StarOffice on it's AOL CD that it distributes to the entire world (plus the sun, moon, and stars).
Just think - AOL became the biggest internet provider by distributing their disks. It would be foolish to think that they could not become the largest office software distributor in the world simply by including StarOffice on the CD.
Sun would probably even help defray the distribution costs.
Just my $0.02 worth....
Besides, why the hell didn't you take the bait I so carefully prepared for you? :)
And it wasn't from WHOIS, it was from Squid.
First of all, stating that Star Office needs better filters is an exceptionally unoriginal thought. 99% of all posters say it, and it should be moderated as "Duuuh!".
The hypocrisy part is because lots of the people that post this, are the same that blast the Wine-project because "emulation takes away the incentive to port games or applications".
Why isn't this used here? If absolutely everyone could read Word-files, why should anyone bother using a different format? And using a proprietary format is to be at the mercy of the maintainers of that format.
Besides, saying that can never succeed before their import-filters are perfect, is like giving up already. The filters will NEVER be perfect. There is always quirks and added features from MS Office that breaks compatibility.
Finally I would like people to think about the quality of Word Perfect (was market leader at this time), was when MS Word arrived. Were they perfect? Were they even perfect when MS Word took over?
PS! I'm not against import-filters in any way, it is just focused far too much on.
That damned paperclip that keeps asking for help when I try to type!!!
-------------
Andy Tomaka
Well, next StarOffice will be shipped soon, and will have some improvements (like separate applications, do not try to get over desktop, etc.)
So, what do you expect from pro-Windows and pro-M$ cnet.com to post? Critique on bloatness of Office XP? Hail Sun for support of free software (when last time did they prise Sun for anything anyway)? Have you noticed that there is no real comparison between new SO and current offering from M$ in this article?
Come on people, when you read something over Internet, make a note WHERE do you read it.
Must apologize for drifting away from the topic, but speaking of features that "no one" uses, I'd like to vote for a new feature for StarOffice that, to my limited knowledge, MS Office lacks:
You can not imagine the horrors of being forced to use MS Office for some administrivial task but having the emacs default key mapping hardwired into the brain/hand circuit!
Control F to quickly move forward? No! You get some silly font changing window! You can imagine the process of discovery on my part when Control K and Control D and Control E do not function like I am accustomed to. Every application should allow the user to choose whatever mapping makes them happiest.
Sorry to vent, but it was a nightmarish experience for me!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
From my college experience it works like this:
Group project time, not all group members have MS Office just the Works program that came installed on thier bargain PC. So whoever in the group has the Office CD burns a few copies and gives it to the other group members. Lather, Rinse, & Repeat for each new group project. Thats exponential growth. So when MS kills all piracy with some new authorization scheme, kids will just copy and burn the best alternative...SO.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
yeah, well said. just goes to show how much i use it myself...
The revolution will NOT be televised.
is that the question is not "why switch to StarOffice from Microsoft Office", but is instead:
...
Why not save money instead of "upgrading" to Microsoft Office 2000.
Face it, you never use 99 percent of all those "features" Microsoft crams in there. So why bother about them?
For the vast and overwhelming group of office package users, StarOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office, and a heck of a lot cheaper.
Maybe in the US cost is not a big deal, but in the rest of the world it sure is
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
its an independent review written by someone not working for a major media Web site.
Independent, yes, but if it's an impartial, unbiased viewpoint you're looking for, a site called "msboycott.com" probably isn't the best place to start looking...
"WWW-Authenticate: NTLM" is non-standard, but it's what IIS uses by default for pages that require authentication. Allowing Digest authentication involves tweaking settings that would probably scare most IT drones.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
It's not. He was using HTTP 1.0, and server pretended that it supports HTTP 1.0, yet demanded an authentication method that exists only in HTTP 1.1.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Well, it's time then to consider to make the complete switch to linux : mplayer does the trick.
I use it for all my video pleasure (DivX;-), ASF,mpeg...) and the news page mentions full DVD playback support.
It's my number one choice, i'm not even looking for another one, never had reason to do so. They are still optimizing, and with each update, they get faster and better. It's a very active project.
They are also working on a GUI which looks really neat and is skinnable.
Yes, but then your domain ID and password would be sent across the network in cleartext.
Over HTTPS? Or you still believe marketdroids that told you that Basic authentication is insecure because it doesn't use some proprietary bullshit, yet Windows-specific authentication is secure even without HTTPS, EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE PASSING PASSWORD IN THE FORM?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There is literally no chance of being able to learn the code base without giving up your job or extra activities.
I stopped using Microsoft Office 2000 a while back, Outlook was a bug-pie, I found that I used Notepad most of the time, and Word 0% of the time. Microsoft Office apps generally have bells and whistles that 90% of people don't need. If somebody sends you a Word document, you can open it in Star Office and not have to stoop so low as to run Word. Star Office is free, version 6 will be out soon, and hopefully will be a step up. Even with Windows I only use WordPad if pushed (which is generally all most people really need). But people always like to have the most expensive stuff these days, not because they use it, but just to brag to other people that they have the money to spend.
I am not sure which Japan they surveyed to come up with the conclusion that the piracy rate in Japan is rather low...
I've been here for almost 11 years, and from what I have seen, I wouldn't be surprised if piracy rates were 50% or more.
So, yes lower than China/Russia/etc, but not what I would call "rather low."
My 2 yen.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
I don't like office. If I want to write something for myself I write it in plain text. If I want it to look pretty I write HTML. If I want to do a presentation I use HTML. If I want to calculate something I write a program to do it (I have never used Excel of my own volition, I have to use it sometimes because clients insist on "importing" csv files into Excel). If I want a database I'll use a real one, not a toy one. The only one I use on a daily basis is Outlook - because it's a company standard.
the mail/calendar tool you use was dropped and won't be in the 6.0.
There is a groupware-group at OOo which might change that one day, but definitly not for 6.0...
no.
the author is correct: IT folks don't understand 'users' needs. I surely don't if 'users' equate MS Office (or any replacement) as 'productivity suites'. 60-70% of the office files (ok, excel files) i've dealt with come to me as tab delimited files, i run my utilities on it, shove it into databases after some serious message to the data typically not possible on excel (at least not by the same type of 'user' the author is talking about) and then extracted from the database into a tab delimited file and sent back for importing into excel. the reason excel has a place here is that we don't have proper tools for users to access and use databases. in other words, those files (created with office) are what i call dead documents. they have no life of their own. they are created merely for creating those documents. the data in those files have a life elsewhere (ie. a database where that data can be used by others, by other application etc..).
.doc or .xls or whatever extension, that's not the right place to put your data if your data is worth putting anywhere.
...) even a lawyer shouldn't have to print paper copies. somebody in the courts just ends up retyping it back into word. to print it out and send it to someone else. who in turn retypes it back into word.. then prints it out; sends it to someone else who... (hey, endless loop detected. aborting.) how's that for productivity?
unless you are in the business of creating and managing tons of
i mean, how on earth are you going to keep track of which document has what after a couple of years. are you going to be able to query/search thru them?
but the most important of all, how are you going to 'import' that data into other 'live' applications? how's that for automation? how's that for integration? if you change your quotes in one of the spreadsheets, you're going to have to change many other spreadsheets manually. how's that for productivity?
Office has been a 'toy'. a toy to use with your printer. it wasn't possible for average users to print nicely formatted documents so there it was. apart from printing, what good is word? data exchange? well, nicely formatted XML with XSL goes much further. even better, if it's got any data that's worth anyone's time, it should be live... in a database (or XML, or...) and prefrebly with an access-application so that people see the 'live' data with the proper tools.
are we still printing? if yes, why? why do we need printed copies? (i know there are a few cases where it's handy but really
well, keep typing and retyping and print every once in a while and call yourself productive. i don't wanna understand you.
As much as I'd love to see my company embrace something like Star Office in lieu of MS Office during the downturn, I know that it just won't happen. It's far easier for people to stay in their comfort zones than to invest some energy in something that can truly save corporate IT real dollars.
That said, I think it's important that people not allow reviewers to make up their minds for them. Download it and make up your own mind after trying it out. You might be surprised at how much work you can accomplish with Star Office, and it will only cost you a bit of time.
Sun should drop StarOffice as soon as possible and avoid going the route Novell disasterously took in the '90s with PerfectOffice. Wedged between Win2K and Linux, Sun is already on rocky fiscal turf. Sun should concentrate on building its core business and growing it in the mid-range server market, as well as continuing its long tradition of tools and languages (Java) that have helped revolutionize the tech world.
no company is going to tell 40,000 employees to use unix on the desktop. the might ALLOW IT, but they arent going to make it the "official office suite" ... certainly not yet anyway ... probably for the same reason we refuse to install it on our 1500 user college boxes, it's a huge mess in large user environments.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
"Bottom line for Sun and StarOffice: If you keep aiming where Microsoft has already been, then your opportunities will be in China"
Let's get some facts straight:
1.) The first question I get asked when offering to install Linux on a non-technical person's machine is "can it run MS Office?" The slightly more informed ask me, "can I access my MS Office documents somehow?" The fact is, lack of a good office suite has been the largest stumbling block to Linux/BSD's widespread acceptance. Star/Open Office is an extremely important project right now. Don't underestimate it just because Emacs meets your needs. (I'm a vi fan myself.. Oops! *flame shields up*)
2.) Forget StarOffice 5.2. Go download the latest build (638 I believe) of OpenOffice (which will become StarOffice 6 eventually). Not only is it very mature and stable by now, but the new interface is very well done and so close to MS Office that most non-technical folks would be unable to tell the difference. It is extremely close to a feature-for-feature clone. Once the import filters are improved, it will be practically a drop-in replacement for MS Office.
3.) Just because Microsoft has already touched a market does not mean it belongs to them. That's what innovation is all about. The market for new office suites is not going to magically disappear when XP is released. Fact is, MS can't make that much of change to their office suite because people won't buy something radically different from what they're used to. And managers don't want to pay for new licenses AND retraining classes. That's why 'upgrades' typically include only minor improvements.
4.) Opportunities in China might indeed be a good thing as far as democratizing the world through technology.. especially if MS's product activation nonsense puts a damper on Chinese bootlegging operations.
The title of this article should be "Is OpenOffice Ready to Take on MS Office?" The answer is a very obvious, YES! But am I the only one who thinks Slashdot has been pushing way too much anti-Opensource FUD recently? I guess you could call it sensational journalism for nerds. (-:
Last week, at my office, I spotted one of my coworkers browsing the download page for StarOffice. The odd thing is, that he's using a windoze machine with the M$ Office stuff on it. I asked him with curiosity, and he simply replied that he would install it and use it because he prefers it to the other crap.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Slashdot needs more moderation options:
Score:-1 Not Likely to Have a Girlfriend
Oh, and about the CVS history. Many of the document formats include the history of keystrokes as the storage format, allowing an unlimited number of "undos." While this isn't CVS, it does cause that functionality (to a certain degree), though this could CERTAINLY be improved. So in summary, all these features you think aren't in MSOffice are in MSOffice. My theory is that these features aren't as desired as you think, since you, and a lot of other people who have read this thread haven't mentioned them.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Posted by Hemos on Wednesday September 05, @04:45PM
from the ain't-this-the-truth dept.
Some Guy writes: "Why are slashdot geeks in increasing numbers claiming that they have girlfriends? I remember when slashdot first started, a man's penis extension was the fact that he had a dual processor pentium pro running linux. Now it seems that 85% of slashdot "geeks" visit the page with Internet Explorer and claim that they have girlfriends." I dont know about you, but I want the old slashdot back.
One of the things that are needed to make people switch over to SO is a simple program to convert the thousands of office documents already on peoples fileservers to so fileformats.
Does anyone know of such progs?
I would guess the simplest would be a VB app that goes through dirs and subdirs doing "save as", but this would not be fast enough for larger fileservers.
hmmm....
Micro#### Office is an alternative to StarOffice, that, just like it, and just like all other applications BOTH OF THESE try to emulate, work.
Micro#### Office is capable of working with documents saved in StarOffice, as long as these are saved in certain old, oversized formats.
Therefore, if you use StarOffice and are looking an alternative that does about the same, but that requires you to pay, look no more! WordPerfect Office may be just what you are looking for.
To try and gain a competitive advantage, Micro#### Office adds a few features to lure you into you investing your money. It features an animated paper-clip for those people who feel alone when working on a PC. Just type something, and a light bulb will appear, indicating you that there are better ways to do the things you have always done. If you want to highlight some text, it *knows* that you always would want to highlight entire words, so it does so for you, automatically. And in fact, if you type in a string of equals signs, it will substitute it with a double-solid line because it *knows* that's what you always want.
StarOffice users should be worried about the invasion of WordPerfect (and Micro####) suites in their market space. The increased popularity of these two products may result in lack of appeal for this, sadly free, product. In fact, Micro####'s product includes increased security - you won't be able to download it for free from their Web site, lest Red Code attach itself to it in-transit.
Competition... what would consumers do without it...
Did we not learn anything from the crash? Free software is not better. Is it better now? Sure. Is it sustainable? No. A company like Sun can support a free product for awhile, but will eventually need to cut it, or find a revenue model once they gain traction.
...where's the money coming from?
The most ironic part about the tech boom over the last 2-3 years were linux developers in full support of open source and free licenses demanding stock options and high salaries from the companies they worked for.
Why are they calling what is now OpenOffice? Why are they speaking of what is now an Open Source program as if it is a program Sun makes money off of? Why are they speaking as if Sun is doing all the work or is the only party involved?
Before you ask if StarOffice/OpenOffice can take the place of MS Office (from 95 to XP) take a MOUS certification course. Office 2k and XP both allow you to write your own utility bars and whatnot so you can get a ton of work done at the touch of a button. A VB macro and some document templates and you can send out a form letter with database derived data to thousands of people by clicking a single button. If you're a smart office manager you'll completely customize Office for people's specific needs so they can click a few buttonsand have their work done for them. Opening Word documents and editing them is nothing compared to the real capabilities of Word. Microsoft's corporate masters may be a handful of jackasses but I think the Office dev team is a pretty sharp group of people. I really don't think open source groups have yet to release an Office suite that would impress me in the slightest. What ever happened to Applix? Oh yeah, Linux folk can't imagine using software they might have to pay for. Cheap fuckers.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I tried compiling Open Office, all i can say is that it doesnt have much of a future untill they fix the build system.
Open office requires 2GB of disk space and over 20 hours (or 40 i forget) to compile. The compile failed for me withing 5 minutes.
Its hard for developers to wade through all this bloat.
In its current state its much more productive for develoeprs to work on other office projects like KDE or gnome.
How about . . .
It's document format isn't host to viruses and trojans!
-- La1d, killed by a newt, while helpless.
True story, It was unbelivealbe how many people just used the cookie cutter wizard to present themselves for a job.
Hey, go with success. Obviously the guy who wrote the wizard has a job, right?
--saint
I applaud Sun on its efforts on StarOffice, but at the moment it just doesn't meet my expectations. I'd been using StarOffice to get an opinion on both of the suites and MS Office came out on top for one reason: StarOffice attempts to be a complete desktop replacement with its desktop-like main window. It seems like it's too much for me. If I wanted a desktop replacement I'd go with lightstep or something like that, not StarOffice. It's that all-in-one design that I don't really like and it seems like StarOffice 5.2 is slower than Office 2000, so I'm going to stick with that for the time being.
Personally, I just do not understand why there is a need for a complex document format as Word's in most corporations. Every single Word document I've seen produced within my company could easily be formatted in flat text, or a very simple text format with light formatting such as bold and color, like RTF.
I've talked about this with various people in the company, and they all agree. So why do we license it? Because the corporations we work with use it, and we need to be able to view their files.
In my opinion, you can get by with minimal formatting and features such as spell check, but to abandon office, you must have a way to convert other people's Word files into a usable format.
Our intranet is written in PHP and runs on Linux. We wanted to be able to cache contents of files posted to the intranet in a search engine. I use the strings command or wvWare for this, depending on the case. I can get what I need out of it.
The only thing I need on my Linux desktop now is Photoshop, or an equivalent (GIMP is not there yet), and life is complete.
And on the Mac I still use WordPerfect. It does what I need to use so I use it.
Feature-itis amd software bloat is something I avoid.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If you keep aiming where Microsoft has already been, then your opportunities will be in China.
:)
:)
Thanks for your concern, but most citizens here are not using legal copy of Microsoft's software, what'd be the incentive of using SO?
Wait a minute, I'm not trolling - I live in China.
Also, some people might have misunderstood, Microsoft has done a lot in making Chinese Office. Even now SO/OS/Moz/KOffice still have some problems in displaying/inputting Chinese, so the incentive of changing is further lower.
However, it's not without chance. BSA will come to China soon after World Trade, and the days of pirating MS Office will be gone. It's very unlikely a normal citizen who made US$100 a month could afford a US$400(or more) Office suite(professional could make more than US$1000 a month, even so....)
So would Microsoft lowers the price for the market? Very unlikely, because the problem of water goods still exist, and from their track record Microsoft will not do anything in favor of third world countries. *Wow* what a relief.
Also, Government is actually encouraging using opensource software in their support of RedFlag Linux.
I've been using SO since 3.1 (back when it was, *gasp*, seperate programs!). Now I use it on Windows, and I don't even have MS Office installed. My college has even installed SO on all the lab computers because it handles foreign languages better.
;)
All that and the fact that it's FREAKING FREE, yeah I'd say it's "ready"
I have never seen an organization as clueless as M$. The whole point of the 'Net (and of .NET I would guess,) is a create a collaborative work environment,
.NET.
.NET-3 for them to see what its really about.
MyNotebook, MyCalendar, MyPrep-H are all obvious rehash of the isolationist, PC-centric, lone-gunman, divide-and-conquer mentality we're evolving past.
This is absolutely NOT the purpose of the 'net, the Web not should it be the paradigm for
They will screw themselves with this the same way as they have with everything else. It will take until
But maybe by then we'll all be using Itaniums and G4 & G5 PowerPCs and the entire problem will disappear as M$ finally implodes.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
One way to get past the user learning curve issues is to work inside your organization to build up a community of clueful users who can be available to coach and train their colleagues.
This is a deliberate parallel to the development mode employed by Linux: Self-selection of the self-motivated, rewarded by recognition and tangible rewards. Encourage your power users to communicate and share tips and techniques, with each other first, then with other users. How about a tip o' the month award (cheesy but fun)? Develop programs to encourage and reward them for sharing their skills, especially public recognition and feedback at performance review time ($$$$$$$$$) for those who take the time and effort to share their skills and make the cube-dwelling troglo...err..co-workers... around them more productive.
Yeah, it's not hacking. There's not one line of code in all of that. But it needs to be done.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Chinese slanted eyes
Cannot use large monitors
Sales will not be good
RELEASED UNDER GNU PUBLIC LICENSE
Just tell them it has most of the features present in M$ office. This great isn't in M$office. This not so great is not present in staroffice, but (1)that feature sucks or (2)They are working on it or (3)You do not need it anyway.
Finally to close the deal:
OH!! You are pirating M$office. BTW, I heard the BSA may drop in...So, do you want me to leave the Cd here..
Heh..This plan works for me.;-)
2) Make it available everywhere. People use AOL because they made getting their software easy. They put CD's everywhere. Downloading it from the internet is not good enough. Very few people have a fast network connection at home and even if they did they wouldn't likely download it. Sun needs to provide it to all OEMs, carpet bomb the US with CD's containing StarOffice From Sun, etc. Yes this costs money but it won't hurt Office unless it is done.
They should have done the same with Java, instead of relying on browsers and others to distribute their software (JRE) for them - or relying on people to download and install it.
creation science book
Koizumi will lead Japan into Nationalism very soon, to revive the economy with defense spending, and foreigners will not be welcome! (they are not wellcome now, gaijin disturb Japanese peacefulness wherever they walk, but Japanese can not do anything about it)
chill out dude, he's joking.
its a sign of the times, however, when an inane post such as your own gets +5 interesting when it offered nothing to the conversation except some lame personal experience.
i mean really, who cares?
and if i was that guy, i wouldnt be worried what an imaginary person thought of me
Office 2000 has a massive advantage over 97 -- it has the first version of Powerpoint in which OLE actually works the way you think it's going to. You can paste Excel tables into a slide and then resize them without it looking like shit.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Actually, most large companies in Japan actually buy licenses for MS products.
My company is not one of them, but oh well.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Mail Merge that doesn't take a DBA to get it working.
That and performance will probably be the deal-breaker for us switching.
DCMonkey
"The network is the computer".... (TM)
It's hardly news to anyone that information exchange, collaboration and project management is an increasingly important area.
More interestingly, this is also an area where Microsoft is very weak. Microsoft NetMeeting? Don't get me started! At least there are a fair number of alternatives. (And some of them open source.)
MS Project? If anybody seriously bothered to compete with Microsoft Project, it would likely die a horrible death. Unfortunately this hasn't happened yet.
Part of the reason is, as always, the infamous integration into the MS product line. "You bought MS-Office. Now you have to buy MS-Project." -- or -- "You bought a Green and Yellow tractor. Now you have to buy the Green and Yellow airplane that goes with it. Otherwise you will fall down. And don't ask stupid questions, because then we will blow up your runway."
Another reason for the lack of competition in this market segment is that MS Project is considered to be mostly a toy. In industry I rarely encounter anybody using MS project as anything more than a mediocre Gantt Chart drawing program. There are of course believers who consider this to be the pinnacle of project management, but my expectations of a project management application goes a little bit beyond this.
Try to set up 300-600 tasks in MS-Project 98, for a few months worth of project. Attempt to do some resource leveling, critical path analysis etc. What happens?
a) It will crash immediately.
b) It'll spend 2 hours of CPU power, and you'll then get a screen full of nonsense and sub-optimal resource allocation.
c) It will corrupt your file.
d) It could be any combination of a, b or c.
Try to share the data with your coworkers, on the web. You think MS-Project (98) will let you export a Gantt chart in any human readable format? Bwwahhhhaha... think again. You have to print it as Postscript, convert it to PDF and then post it on the web.
Now, if the software really contributed to the solution, instead of being part of the problem, it would let you delegate responsibilities, and collaborate amongst multiple Project Managers/developers/workers/supervisors etc. And it would do this over the web, so that your *NIX developers didn't have to crank up Vmware to get an update. NOW were talking.
Industrial strength project management software is not cheap, but the lower end of the market appears to be somewhat lacking competition. If SUN approached this segment (which is indeed the segment they are addressing with StarOffice) they would stand a pretty good chance of setting a standard. Heck... would I object to installing StarOffice to get my hands on a half decent piece of PM software? Not at all!
Conclusion: I think there is an opportunity here, and I think the cost of executing on that opportunity is relatively small. I also believe that the benefits are greater for SUN than for other types of office software. Heavily networked applications are closer to their core competencies, and will to a greater extent contribute to driving the demand for network computing.
Disclaimer. I have not yet used MS-Project 2000 so my assumptions and conclusions might be inaccurate, biased, unfair, annoying and un-American. According to MS, Project 2000 will solve any problem anybody could possibly have dreamt of having. Just like the last version, except that the new one will additionally make coffee for the development team.
-- Fortes Fortuna Adjuvat --
... at work. 30 or so users now, against 10 with M$ Office, and only because of some complicated macros we have in Excel. And they'll convert, slowly...
People bitched a bit to start with, but now I'm getting people say they're getting used to it, and they like this and that about it...
The only valid complaint we have now is that it's big and slow. So we're waiting on version 6. We'd use OpenOffice but it's spell checker doesn't work yet.
I didn't think much of the article. I think you'll be hard pressed to find an organisation that needs more than StarOffice. Most of the resistance I've seen is purely resistance to change. And the change is fast enough. People aren't so stupid that they can't learn that the button that used to be 'here' is now 'there'. And those smart enough to know how to used advanced features in M$ Office can figure out how to do it again. Anyway I noticed most people stopped asking questions after about 2 weeks.
One question about the article:
WTF is Word-compatible email?
Is it the same as people-compatible cars or something?
I've been using StarOffice for about 2 years now. I don't use anything else anymore. I like it and it works fine for me.
Someone else above said it crashed all the time for them, I've never had a crash. I use it on my old MSWindows box and my new spiffy Linux laptop.
Many people made the correct point that the SO filters for MSOffice programs are less than perfect. This is true. Get over it. Isn't it the case that the definitive source for MSOffice formats is in the code? The filters will never be perfect. That's part of Ms strategy of course, and it's been quite successful. The Halloween documents of course made quite a thing about the benefits of having a proprietary undocumented format.
The point about long load times is true, but I have hopes this will be improved in the unbundled SO6 due into beta next month.
I was also suprised to see someone above say that they used the MSOffice grammar checker. I've used it occasionally for a laugh. Spell checkers are a great idea - anyone can mistype a word, but I'm not convinced about grammar checkers. If you don't know how to say what you're trying to communicate I don't think the grammar checker will help.
Some people have also commented that they need this or that feature that SO doesn't have. That may well be true, however we're talking about a sophisticated audience here. If you examined the word processing and spreadsheet documents produced by 100 random people, you'd find the following :
- Most people only use the bold, italic, table, font, page number and heading features in their documents. Some very few people use the table of contents features.
- Most people use spreadsheets ONLY to make lists because they can't work out how to use the table features in their word processor.
I have always thought that Sun's strategy here was to reduce the revenue stream for MS. Every SO user represents several hundred dollars less for MS on a sale of MSOffice. The cost to Sun of supporting the SO effort is far less than the money they prevent from reaching MS. And the zero-cost is an important part of this. It means a home user can just install it without needing to reach for his/her credit card, and a commercial user can just install it without needing to chase up a purchase order or invoice. I'm consulting at the moment, and the first thing I did when it got here was to install SO on my machine - I couldn't have done that with software I needed to purchase.
I'm starting to ramble, so in conclusion:
Does SO have all the features of MS Office? No.
Is it good enough to replace MSOffice for the vast majority of people? Yes.
Note that on its Office pages, Microsoft doesn't claim to have a trademark on the word Office. However, it has registered "MICROSOFT OFFICE XP" as a trademark. I can't give you a link to the USPTO's trademark database query results because its URIs refer to states and not queries.
Yes, Office XP can still save files in the Office 95 format, which most free software WYSIAYG editors can interpret well.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So now I have to check all converted documents in a copy of word on my laptop before sending them out to customers.
Or convert them to a PDF. A PDF will display and print the same on any computer with a PDF viewer such as Ghostscript or Acrobat Reader.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You don't need to use Microsoft Office or StarOffice just to present slideshows. I just use Emacs to write slides in HTML 4 and CSS and Mozilla to present them. They'll work on any machine with a browser that supports HTML 4 and CSS, no Microsoft bloatware required. And they zip up really tight, meaning a single floppy (or an equivalent 6 minute download) can go further provided you aren't using any big media files.
Want to make changes to the styles across the board? Tweak the stylesheet. Want to make deeper changes? Tweak the server-side included files. Want to pull slides from a database? Write the slideshow engine in PHP or Python.
It all boils down to your priorities. You can spend $500 on an Office license and $50 of your time to learn it, or you can spend $50 worth of your time learning basic HTML and CSS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you are a veteran "rank and file" clerical worker, you are probably intimately familiar with Word or Excel and changing office suites would cost you a lot of lost hours.
Enough hours to cost $500, the equivalent of an Office license? As geekoid mentions below, if an employee costs the company $50/hr (wages, payroll taxes, benefits, utilities, etc.) then a free(beer) program would have to need 10 hours to learn to make the program cost more than MS Office.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A word processor that doesn't crash and can read and write everybodies pretty docs quickly and easily.
wvware + emacs + either L^aTeX or mozilla?
An email application that doesn't crash that can read, write and query everybodies mail and attachments.
This has been solved (mozilla 0.9.x or even the command line mailers). Do you expect it to support SMTP/IMAP/POP3, or do you expect it to support every webmail service under the sun?
A database that doesn't crash that easily reads, writes and manipulates everybodies data formats.
Perl, talking to PostgreSQL. "Everybody's data format" is SQL; what popular relational database doesn't support SQL?
Will I retire or break 10K?
...and I bought it in 1999. Look at pp. 381 - 385 of the manual.
Oh, that's right. I'm posting on Slashdot.org.
RTFM!!!
It mangles the word doc as it appears on screen, not printed.
What I need is an Access substitute. One that comes bundled in the suite, and doesn't require configuring MySQL or PostgreSQL. Make it work "out of the box" and you've got a winner.
The iteration function in both Calc and Excel allow you to set a bound on the value change per iteration. In Calc, when the value of a cell changes less than the set bounding value, it stops at the previous value. In Excel, it shows the changed value even though the change is smaller than the specified bound.
.25 - .5 - 1.
Run this experiment. In Excel 2000, Go to Tools -> Options -> Calculations and set the Maximum Change value to 100, and use the values from the previous poster's spreadsheet. Even though any change is going to be smaller than 100, Excel will run one calculation and print the results anyway. You can "singlestep" (repeatedly hitting F9) through 20 iterations or so until you get 0 -
In StarOffice Calc, it will run until you reach the boundary. It will not step past. That's why it doesn't converge any further when you hit recalculate.
I think the StarOffic behavior is better, because it allows you tighter control over the incremental values. If the last value where the change is > x is n, you have no idea how large the change at n+1 will be!
If using the full features of MS Office spares you a total of 10 hours on 2 years (that's like 2-5% in productivity), then it is worth it.
Control, alt, delete. MS Office would be more likely to cost you when you lose productivity to reboots because the underlying operating system (Windows 9x) is so unstable, and the alternatives (Windows 2000 or a new computer with Mac OS X) are so much more expensive to deploy company-wide than Linux86, one of the supported OpenOffice platforms.
Will I retire or break 10K?