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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.""
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!"
StarOffice is free. That's kind of the point.
But, but, but, SO is FREE.
First of all, Sun will be charging for support contracts, so not quite free for most corporate use.
Also, IBM tried offering SmartSuite essentially for free to shops they had a relationship with. They were also bundling it with their PCs and selling it very cheap at retail. The result was that they got very very few users -- I worked for a place that tried to standardize on it, but rampant MS Office piracy and document compatibility pretty much killed that idea.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Outline mode!
And it was pretty damn easy to come up with that. In fact every time the discussion of Office alternatives come up, it's like ripping the bandages off the wound. Even before you asked the question the bleeding had already started again. "Outline mode! Why the hell isn't there a word processor out there besides MS Word that has a decent outline mode?"
I'd pay for a Linux word processor with a decent outline mode. I don't know why no other word processing vendor (up to and including whoever the hell owns WordPerfect these days) has been able to match a feature that MS Word has had for a good ten years.
If you know a program that has one, let me know. And I'll tell you why it doesn't cut it.
I hate being addicted to MS Word, but I can't write anything more than about six pages long without outline mode.
Oh, and Star Office font handling sucks.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
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
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.
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.
For about a year, I've been moving her to a Linux-based Ximian GNOME desktop when she visits here. Windows now just exists for playing DVDs. I held her hand through the early stages of figuring out where her programs are, warning her when I broke something (software upgrade addict), and calmly answering questions that are blindingly obvious to me. She has her own desktop, icons and panels for the programs she needs, and even a direct link to her Hotmail account.
One day, about a week after I installed Ximian 1.4, she was stuck here, alone, for a couple hours while I ran out to get something. I'd planned to walk her through the Doorman sequence later, but by the time I came back, she'd walked herself through it. I felt rather proud of her:)
The lesson? Hand-holding early on can overcome a lack of familiarity with an interface. It's much easier to do when dealing with only one person, as opposed to thousands of employees, but good, clear, simple documentation and setting up a clean, obvious desktop/interface/whateva for the poor users can go a long way in alleviating peoples' fears of "breaking" the computer, or not knowing how to fix something.
That's not to say certain geniuses won't still find ways to break stuff and not notice the blindingly obvious, but enough forethought and help can prevent a lot of trouble and backsliding later.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I use windows and I really tried to start using StarOffice on my home computer. I use MS Office at work daily, and while it certainly is not a perfect piece of software, after using it StarOffice just felt hopelessly slow and annoying to use. I tried to get used to StarOffice for several months (partly because I hadn't found any better free alternative for Windows), but in the end I decided that it doesn't justify it's huge harddisk footprint. The problem certainly was not lack of functionality, but the user interface and the performance. All the time I was noticing small things that didn't work the way I would like them to work.
I am now using 602Pro PC SUITE 2000 on my home computer, and while it only has a fraction of StarOffice's features, I like it a lot more.
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.
I own my own business and can use anything I want. So when I came time to buy general office software I tried everything I could get my hands on to see what felt right, looked good on the screen, seemed reasonably bug free and was easy to use.
I think I'm pretty typical in that features I don't use every day were still important because having a feature I never use costs me nothing but not having a feature that I might need once in a blue moon is a PITA.
I happened to try Star Office first but it was anything but intuitive. It also seemed too much like a commercial for itself. Then I tried MS Office and it was clear that Star Office was a knock-off. I decided that if the best Sun could do was copy something in a sort of bizarre way, that was good reason to buy the original.
My choices came down to MS Office on Windows or MS Office on MacOS. I chose the latter mostly because documents are easier to read on screen. These were by far the most expensive packages but that's not a big consideration when you think about how much time you spend using them.