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Sizing Up StarOffice 6.0
The installation was dead simple, and therefore better than most software: I popped in the CD, and with about 10 minutes of point-click-whirrring, the software was installed. The only notable aspect of this process is that the CD included (and popped onto my hard drive, with prompting) a new Java runtime environment (Sun's standard JRE, version 1.3.1). The helpful timer that accompanies the install is conservative, which is nice -- it started out estimating 14 minutes for the "transferring files" portion, but quickly dropped down to less than five.
Having not touched StarOffice for a while, it's nice to see the features in OpenOffice trickle in -- most importantly, getting rid of the monolithic desktop makes it actually usable to those of us who hate screen-hijacking software. And at least on this 1 GHz, 256MB laptop, even "bloatware" features like auto-correction are snappy enough not to be bothersome.
Two small notes on Roblimo's review for anyone curious about using SO under Windows: The Windows version does claim to open "WordPerfect (Win) 6.0-7.0" documents, which is at least a start toward WordPerfect compatibility. And under Windows, the nice X-Window style one-click text transfer isn't an option. One more note for 6.0 Beta testers: you can download a patch from Sun to extend the life of the beta from March 31 to June 3 2002.
Since "office apps" are coming up, I want to point out a friendly issue to fellow linux lovers:
Linux is not totally mainstream yet, because:
A) No adobe photoshop yet. GIMP is inferior, don't even try..
B) StarOffice is very slow, and not 100% compatible with MSOffice. Microsoft word is still the preferred word processor and such.
~shrug~
PayPal $$ if you sign up for free offers (eBay, cred cards, e
If I installed MS Office and found that it also installed Visual Studio without even warning, I'd start leaving horse heads in Gates' bed. So WTF is the above doing in the "good" part of the review?
Roblimo mentions something about creating and editing pdf files, and appears to implie this is included in Word and Wordperfect. To my knowledge it is not, it requires the purchase of a $200 piece of software from Adobe.
Roblimo then goes off apparently comparing the price of retail editions of Office to Staroffice. Keep in mind, most companies already have Office from Microsoft, so they'd be paying upgrade prices. There are also various discounts available, especially on the Select license agreements, OEM bundles, etc. XP Standard is more like $200 and XP Professional around $300.
But then he makes a claim that this substantial savings($100-200 per desktop) would prove you were "a company that respects its stockholders (or a government agency that respects taxpayers)". But what justification does he give for this? I don't see it.
$100-200 per machine is really quite a small amount of money in the big picture. If I have staff that already knows how to use MS Office, sending them to a $500 training course to learn how to use Staroffice negates any cost savings from software licensing. Even if only half my staff needs training, that's still substantial. Then what about productivity gains? Will I be able to do the same work in Staroffice as MSOffice in the same amount of time? Will it take more time, less time, etc?
If I give a project to someone and it takes them an extra day to complete because they used Staroffice, once again we've completely lost the $100 cost savings.
Those are factors that come into play when making corporate buying decisions, and it is something that Roblimo clearly doesn't grasp or understand. The review he gives of StarOffice does not go into near enough detail to prove that it is a viable product.