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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.""
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.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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 dont think thats true from what I have read. StarOffice 6(not released yet) will be based on the openoffice code. Staroffice 5.2 is a totally different code base. Ive been using openoffice builds and they are far better then staroffice 5.2, and they also open microsoft word docs perfectly.
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
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
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?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
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.
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?
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"?
I'm not so sure being all rah-rah for Sun to overtake MS is all that bright an idea...
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.
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?
I work for Computer Associates (ca) who has 18,000 employees. We use Unicenter TNG/Unicenter BNG/Unicenter/or whatever we are calling it this week to do keep a constent inventory of applications installed on everybodies machines. I dont' have the numbers in front of me right now, but the last time I looked the count was 2.15 computers per employee. Of course some people do not have a machine, most have just one, but developers have more, like 2 or 3 I keep 4 :)
That is ~39,000 pc's not including build machines, or file servers. out of that, almost 8,000 X86 machines have Linux, BSD, or Solaris installed. of those, ~4,500 have star office installed, while ~3,500 have Koffice installed. While a machine with an app installed, is not a machine with someone using that app, queries that I ran show SO saves files extentions on >4,000 machines, and >2,100 users saving files with Koffice.
Another way that I know that we have an active NON-MS Office movement going on, is we had enough support calles to the help desk that we now support KOffice, and Star Office. Just my $.02, but might be relevent to the topic...