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.""

Comments

China

[szcx]

Bottom line for Sun and StarOffice: If you keep aiming where Microsoft has already been, then your opportunities will be in China.

Is that a Bad Thing? China is a pretty big market.

Obvious innovations

[zpengo]

StarOffice never even *had* a paperclip. How's that for innovation and wisdom?

It's already there

[fobbman]

"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.

I don't understand

[JCMay]

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?

Re:Not without grammar checking.

[bahtama]

Word 2000 "capabilities" below:

Readability
____________________________________
Passive Sentences 0%
Flesch Reading Ease 51.1
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 11.0

Yeah, those are some mighty fine capabilities. A Word upgrade somehow changes the readability of the sentence. :)

Re:Microsoft's Real Competition - Itself

[sharkey]

That said, Office 2000 and XP seem to offer no real advantages/features what-so-ever over good old '97.

Office2000 had a much improved feature that had MY lusers drooling:

Clippy had acquired a 3D appearance!!!

You could actually hear the exclamation points rattling in their heads.

Re:Parallel to Win vs. Linux? +4 Interesting?

[Matthew Luckie]

+4 Interesting? did anyone read his post?

I've had some personal experience with newbies either considering Linux, or trying to use a Linux GUI (GNOME, in my case). Specifically, my extremely non-geek girlfriend who still uses MS Bob at home to write letters, who was blown away by the extra speed that came from adding some RAM to her old, crufty machine.

It seems the latest fad on slashdot is for a geek to claim they have a girlfriend, in this case this guy is asking us to beleive that he has a girlfriend that visits him.

Slashdot needs more moderation options:
Score:-1 Not Likely to Have a Girlfriend

Ask Slashdot: Slashdot and Girlfriends

[Jeff Probst]

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.