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StarOffice 6.0 Beta Available
Lumpish Scholar and 753 other people wrote in to let us know that Sun has released its beta of Star Office 6. CNET has a blurb about the release as well. I was hoping that Sun's site might be unclogged enough to try it out myself, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards today.
Shelled out a myriad of cash for Microsoft's Office XP, a few weeks ago.
Despite how much you might hate the company, this is one hell of a product. Launches in seconds, takes up scant amounts of ram, hasn't crashed yet. It's going to be a tough one to beat... especially since every area where it excels (no pun intended), Staroffice falls behind (what a hog!).
Whatever happened to it having been released open source? Where is GStarOffice with GTK+ widgets and Gnome integration? At least KOffice works well with the rest of the KDE apps...
Is StarOffice not Open Source anymore? Anyway I'm sticking with KOffice and MS Office on my boxes.
I really don't get it, where's the Source?
I'm with another poster. KOffice is far preferred right now.
Because aside from sucking, Microsoft understands that their market grip is in proprietary file formats and protocols.
I believe it was back in the Halloween documents that they talked about "complex or subtle protocols and file formats" as a means for holding/gaining market share. You simply have to understand the goals in architecting and designing a protocol/format and parser. For most of us, it's simplicity and robustness. For Microsoft, add in the difficulty of reverse-engineering as perhaps more important than robustness, and clearly more important than simplicity. Lest you think that this is just a weapon against lil'old Linux users, don't forget that it's also a prime tool to keep their own users on the upgrade wheel. How often has it been said that the first MS Office user in an office eventually "forces" the whole office to upgrade, simply by passing around files in the latest default format.
The flip side of this is that the most robust things are generally also simple. IMHO it is inevitable that MS has had to trade off robustness in order to bring these difficult-to-reverse-engineer protocols and formats to market. In other words, it's deliberate foisting of second-rate goods counter to the customers' best interests.
Up until this Fall, the market has LOVED it, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Spoken like a typical /. luser.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
You go and download Open Office (same friggin thing, almost) from www.openoffice.org and be off with it.
NO SIG