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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.
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.
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.