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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.
Scant amounts of ram?
Someone mod this +1, Funny, please.
I'm running Office XP right now. Outlook is currently using 23M of RAM. Word is using 28M. (Windows 2000 + Office XP)
Word doesn't even have a file open, not even a blank file.
I don't count that as 'scant amounts'.
And it loads quick because that "Microsoft Office" icon in your startup menu preloads most of the thing during your boot/login process where you think it's normal for your disk to be thrashing itself apart.
Have they gotten rid of that "integrated desktop"?
Yes. I think that was everyone's single biggest complaint about StarOffice. They have also gotten rid of the "memory hog" problem with 5.2, which was that it loaded all five applications into memory and used up about 64MB of physical RAM whenever you wanted to load it.
Their big new feature is using an open XML format for documents. I also believe they have killed the problem where StarOffice took over all of your email clients, other text editors, etc.
I think this version of StarOffice is honestly the first one that will be a real competitor to MS Office, but I think it will really only be used by small businesses and individuals. Large corporations are already dependent on Outlook/Exchange/macros to do their work, and I don't see any large corporations switching off of those anytime soon (especially since there is no real groupware solution that Sun offers that compares with Exchange.)
Please note that Office (any flavor) does not take "scant amounts of ram". Rather, it hides ram used in the system memory used column, and actually preloads many if not most of the Office specific DLL's on boot up, whether you want them or not. The memory that appears to be used by Office, is only the glue code that links the DLL/OLE/NET components together.
The reason that Office appears to launch almost instantanously, is that most of it was already loaded on bootup.
Just a clarification...
jf
Would you expect Microsoft to do anything less
How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work????
Parsing isn't that hard most of the difficulty comes in getting all the different OLE objects embedded in the document to work. Star/Openoffice, Koffice, AbiWord can all format the fonts, layouts, etc, quite well. The problem comes when you have an Excel Spreadsheet embedded in the word document as a table. Then each cell of the excel table is a word document. Then you gotta think about Macros, VB, etc.
Getting these things to work right is hard even for microsoft. Where I work now I have an Access database (I should've demanded they use something else, but they already had it installed everywhere) deployed to over 20 sites. I wrote the database in Access 97, but making it work in Access 2000 can be very tricky. Not only that, but at some places some of the Visual Basic Modules won't work in 97... welcome to my hell...
Anyway the point being, Microsoft has trouble in making THEIR office read previous MS Office files. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for someone who doesn't have the specs to make an app capable of reading them.
Try Insight from bynari[bynari.net]. They make both a client (Insight) and a server (Insight Server). The client can talk to an Exchange server, and includes calendar, addressbook, and email, just like outlook, but on Linux. The server is feature-compatible with Exchange, and is built on exim, openldap, and cyrus IMAP/POP. Outlook clients can talk to the Insight server just fine, even transparently. I am demoing it right now, and it might just replace Exchange here, and allow me to run Linux exclusively.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
Here's Microsoft's Plans for XML. I think it's very interesting how they word things:
m /xmloffice.htm
.. People have been able to export Access & Excel documents to tab deliminated files for years now. Thats why they're not worried about XLM for those apps. People can already do whatever they want to spreadsheet files, etc..
Customers need to be more pissed off at Microsoft so they force Word to use XML.
http://www.microsoft.com/Office/developer/platfor
Because of the many benefits associated with the use of XML, customers have demanded easy, robust support for XML, and Microsoft has answered them. Currently, Microsoft is concentrating on Microsoft Access and Excel--the applications in which XML can have the biggest impact.
Access and EXCEL? They just want to keep Word as proprietary as possible. Word is the one people can't get in or out of. Of course they don't want to focus on XML for Word. Jeash
Tell you what...do what I did a few years ago, when I wanted to know why my nice beefy NT workstation was eating most of my memory, with no services running:
Install NT4. Note the available memory on bootup, before doing anything.
Install Office. Note the available memory after bootup, but before doing anything.
Do the math and wonder why JUST installing Office significantly decreased the available memory on bootup.
Start Office. Wonder why the used memory doesn't increase much at all. Hmmmmm.
A black box approach to be sure, but still very interesting.
jf
With all due respect, doesn't it seem a bit odd that a person demanding ASCII format would have a .sig that's an ideogram?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Personally, I wouldn't even say bundling is the issue with me - for me it is their shoddy business practices (rolls back to 1994 or so):
1. The internet is slowly being brought to the masses. Windows 3.1 exists, but need the WinSock TCP/IP stack to get in the net - fortunately, a free version is available, and is included by ISPs. Mosaic is also included...
2. Netscape builds and releases a much improved "Mosaic", called Navigator. Microsoft yawns, sees it all as a "fad", that the consumer won't embrace.
3. 1995 rolls around, and the consumer is raving mad for the net - Bill looks around and screams WTF!? Netscape is raking in money from sales of Navigator, creates Communicator which adds email, news, and web site creation tools.
4. In a mad dash, Bill throws out Windows 95, which had been worked on for a while, but had no internet capability (AFAIK). Rushes to make a TCP/IP stack (probably bought WinSock, knowing him).
5. Bill then sees that the internet explosion isn't a fad, and that he must "posess" it - rapidly IE is created, and is released for free to the masses.
At this point, things go crazy - because while Netscape isn't free - it is, sorta - but people for some reason are too stupid (or honest?) to figure it out: Netscape is "free" for students - simply check the student box on the download form, and you can download it for free - no authentication or anything required. Still, most people see it as expensive, and the marketing/FUD is done for IE to point out how expensive Netscape was (which it really wasn't that expensive - $70.00 or so for the deluxe version).
6. MS then "bundles" IE with later copies of 95, then fully integrates it into 98 - thus sealing the fate of Netscape, which went on to become a footnote (yes, I know it still exists, etc - but in the whole scheme of things, Netscape is just the tool, and not the company it was any longer).
It is this major undercutting that is a bad business practice - they saw that such software was cheap and easy to make, and thus had no "real" value, unlike an office package. But that doing so would leverage them into a whole new market, a much larger possible market - to market that office software to.
Now, Sun is doing the same thing - who knows if it is for revenge over Java or what - or if _they_ have some ulterior motive (which they probably do), which would allow them to leverage into another market...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
At the other end of the problem, the free software community is in dire need of a Samba-like clone of Exchange's MAPI abilities.
Right now, Linux still makes a better server than it does a desktop. I've replaced NT file/print servers with Samba+Linux; I've used PostgreSQL+Linux instead of MS SQL Server; but there is no way to replace an NT Exchange server with anything and still take advantage of Outlook's sweet MAPI groupware functionality.
I just don't understand why there isn't a free software Exchange clone out there. I'll tell you what - Exchange aint cheap; if a stable replacement existed for *nix, it would be one less reason for anyone to run NT Server.
Unfortunately, I'm not smart enough to do it.
$ strings WordFile.doc > WordFile.txt
$ less WordFile.txt
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
It's nice to see some reasonable competition for MS Office. I alternate between Office2K and Openoffice (633) with reasonable success, but there are a few things left to complete the puzzle:
1. Where's the Mac OSX version? OS10.1 is getting great reviews, but this is even more critical from a general marketing standpoint than from a Mac-head view. Why? Cross-platform compatibility is a great marketing lever, not because of a possible massive platform shift (unlikely) but because of uncertainty about platforms and compatiblity over the long term. (See #4 below.)
2. Some major features are not quite there: imho outlining is the biggest hole; people who write large documents or like structure really need it. Instead of just copying the MS interface, perhaps the existing SO/Navigator tool could be extended to provide a killer structure interface similar to Framemaker+SGML. That would be pretty compelling. Likewise, a quickstart feature (as just implemented in Mozilla) would help to silence the yelps about quick startup ( after long preload) of MS Office XP.
3. Sun/OpenOffice needs migration documentation & tools. For example, it would be nice to have a short whitepaper from Sun that describes (or better yet, provides a one-click tool) that reconfigures MS Office to save in known cross-compatible formats. Word files should be saved in RTF or a reasonably-documented
4. Marketing!! Star/OpenOffice has such potential, and if handled properly, can deliver a very compelling message. I'm no marketing guru, but imagine turning some heads with these advert leaders:
Jon (insertmyslashdotname@jetcity.com)
I think not...(*poof*)
Oh, don't you just hate it:
/. effect.
* Day 1 - You must register to download product, but server overloaded due to demand and
* Day 2 - You must still register to download product, but server takes ages to allow you to download. Give up.
* Day 3 - You've forgotten your password, re-register, to find that server's been misconfigured by some Sun intern SA who doesn't know his apache rewrites from his linux rawrite.
* Day 4 - You get registered, get the software, and find the file got corrupted in the download.
* Day 5 - Internet connection down, so nothing to do but work.
* Day 6 - Internet connection up, remembered password, downloaded product, ran of out of disk space.
* Day 7 - Having mentioned the product was out to your colleagues, a week ago now (without having seen it), you are ridiculed when they realise
you're still using MS-Office on the sly.
* Day 8 - Hurrah! Downloaded, installed and running. Success. Treat yourself to visit a conference that's on in town. Some bloke hands you a "special edition CD", featuring beta of staroffice 6. Go home to weep.
*WHY* is there this damn registration. *WHY* aren't there loads of mirrors (sunsite!!!!). You know they'll be dishing out the damn CD's eventually.
And they say the network is the computer....
and after all that, my downloads working, on day one.
strange things are afoot at the circle-k.
(no, i don't work weekends these days)
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.