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StarOffice 6.0
Lawrence Teo writes "News.com,
Infoworld.com,
and
eWeek
are all reporting that Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which will be released on May 21, will cost a measly $75.95. That's less than a quarter the cost of Microsoft Office. Details are also available at Sun's own StarOffice 6.0 website." Sun's press release mentions the new features, although if you're familiar with openoffice.org, you've got a pretty good idea of what StarOffice has to offer. An anonymous reader also points out that Sun has effectively one-upped Microsoft's various schemes to get its software into schools by making an unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education.
You can already pre-order it here
Wow. Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also planning their so called next-gen Office which is also supposedly based on XML. That zdnet article is pretty interesting.. it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm getting .NET-phobia) and StarOffice.
That was a consideration. Sun's decision to charge is based on research that showed enterprise users were not adopting StarOffice 5.2, the previous version of the product, in a significant way because they questioned Sun's commitment to a product it was giving away for free and which did not come with support and training.
Seems that there are a lot of "Why StarOffice, and not OpenOffice.org?" posts out there. To make things easier, here's where you can find the differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
No, the code base is the same. Sun released the code base but didn't fork their own development separate from Open Office.
As others have said, Open Office is missing components (db, fonts, templates), though.
From the General FAQ:
Q. What are the differences between StarOffice 6.0 software and the OpenOffice.org 1.0?
A. StarOffice 6.0 softwre is a commercial product aimed at organizations and consumers while OpenOffice.org 1.0 is aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community. StarOffice includes licensed-in, third-party technology such as:
In addition to product differences, StarOffice offers:
As for me, I've installed OpenOffice 1.0 (I'm a TeX sort of chap), buy I can see this being great for businesses.
SteelX wrote:
.NET-phobia)
.Net's crown jewel (and the bane of privacy organizations everywhere). Hailstorm (supprise, supprise) has fallen flat on its face, and now Microsoft announces that it too will be joining Office. Also joining Office will be the subscription fees to pay for Hailstorm (and while you are at it, Microsoft hopes you will pay for Office over and over again too).
> Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also
> planning their so called next-gen Office
Actually, that was Microsoft being caught with nothing to offer when a new competitor had a new version. They can't let a competitor be in the news without blabing about themselves, so they mumbled some things about their next Office version (due in another six months to a year at the earliest). Of course they are still trying to get people to upgrade to Office XP, when many are still running Office 97, and I've even heard of one person who was still on Office 95.
> it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm
> getting
Here's a nice story that might make you feel better. Once upon a time, Microsoft spent much time and money researching a brilliant new idea. They brought it to market, and named it Bob. Poor Bob fell flat on his face and immediately died (I believe the cause was terminal stupidity, but I could be wrong). (Un)fortunately, the cute cudly assistants from Bobland were rescued and went to live in Office, where they lived happily ever after (until Microsoft recently made them disabled by default).
History, thankfully, repeats itself (because Microsoft never seems to learn). In the late 90's, Microsoft spent much more time and money researching the Millenium Project (yep, Millenium also starred as the alien that Godzilla nuked in "Godzilla 2000 Millenium"). Millenium used Java (and a JVM named "Borg") instead of C#, but it was basically the same thing that Microsoft is bringing to market under the name of ".Net". Hailstorm was to be
Sooner or later, every product of Microsoft's that people hate will be bundled with either their OS or their office suite. With any luck, both Windows and Office will become so universally hated that people will switch to all the better alternatives that are out there (and more will come the more people want them).
What happens when you embrace and extend Godzilla? Nuclear heartburn!
See "Godzilla 2000" (released in Japan as "Godzilla 2000 Millenium") for details.