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.""
StarOffice never even *had* a paperclip. How's that for innovation and wisdom?
Got Rhinos?
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!"
"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.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
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.
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?
People always scream about change. But it happens anyway. Otherwise Microsoft would never have become a monopoly.
I remember when a million secretaries were dragged kicking and screaming from WordPerfect to MS Word.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
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.