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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.
Does anyone know if there will be discounts for multiple purchases? Ie, if a company has 1,000 users that they want to switch to Star Office 6.0, will Sun give them a discount, say to $50 per seat? (Granted $76 is cheap, but corporations are always looking to save that extra buck.)
;)
I see that there is a Star Office Now program (here), but that looks to be for vendors.
If Sun makes it so that large companies can get an even further discount, it would seem to me that they'd get even *more* people switching, which could only be a Good Thing (tm).
libertarianswag.com
Sun's web site mentions that StarOffice 6.0 will maintain "interoperability with other desktop suites," such as Microsoft Office. Sure, they can offer this, but will Microsoft counter it by obfuscating their document formats even more? Microsoft, may not intend to do this, but because Office has the ability to put so many things (Word Art, equations, movies, strangely placed words, etc.) into documents, the parsing process becomes a nightmare.
.doc files, for example, are fairly simple to parse and import. But, when it comes to importing embedded objects like equations and Excel spreadsheets, the parsing process becomes far less trivial. I've used X-based programs, namely Abiword and StarOffice, to read from and write to Microsoft document formats, and it's not a pleasant experience. One of my more recent trials resulted in corrupted documents, in fact. Backups were made before attempting the export, of course, so this isn't meant to be a rant, but the fact remains that the number of features Microsoft Office has is proportional to the number of points at which a program that imports or exports their formats can break.
Currently, bare Word
Anyway, that's my experience with the matter. I won't be leaving Microsoft Office any time soon. Your mileage may vary.
A little bit of research on your part would go a long way; OO does not have a database component (i.e. like Microsoft Office's Access), nor does it have some file filters, fonts or the clipart that StarOffice has.
For me, the database component is required, but I would plunk down my $80 for SO to "help the cause" -- I use OO right now on both Linux and Windows and under Windows, it rocks. It rocks incredibly hard. Linux OO has some issues like fonts and startup time but being able to open (and save) Microsoft documents without issue is great.
I'd love to see a KDE wrapper for SO/OO; having access to all the office functionality through DCOP and have the damn thing look right would be nice. I've tried out OpenOffice, KOffice and HancomOffice. At this point I would say OO is in the lead, with KOffice gaining ground fast. Hancom was nice but just too ... odd.
The one feature which I need in StarOffice which is not available in OpenOffice.org is the templates. As someone who frequently needs to do quick presentations, templates are a must. Now if there's some project out there that produces templates specifically for OpenOffice.org, that'll really be sweet. Any takers? :-) Perhaps there's a need for a new SourceForge project.
BTW if you're interested, the diffs between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are available here. That may contain other reasons why people would prefer StarOffice instead of OOo.
Users should decide whether or not that package of features is worth 75 bucks.
Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move
Or why not make it available for free to all US Schools? I imagine because having the entire K-12 system in china run on star office is considered more of a 'coup' than just having it available for free to various US groups (which it really is, in the form of Open Office). It is just great propaganda to use.
Customer: So.. umm who uses this?
SUN: Well nobody really. Except 12 million chinese schoolkids, who will eventually grow up and live in what is become the world's largest economy.
Customer: Righto. Sign me up.
You instantly gain a few million users and spite microsoft in one fell swoop. I imagine MS is now plotting to get back at Star Office someway - most likely by changing MSoffice formats to make them harder to read.
I think it odd but likely that charging for Star Office will facilitate it's spread. People do look gift horses in the mouth, but charge them 80$ and they go away thinking, "cheap! neat!"
-pyrrho
People don't "think" they need MS Office, it's what comes bundled with their machine along with windoze, so that's what they use and stick with it along the upgrade path. The last machine my parents bought (a 500Mhz el-cheapo e-machine) a few years ago came with star office 5.2. They now uses it exclusively and haven't had any problems. Guess what? now my dad wants to buy star office 6 because, yes, it's an upgrade to what he's got. The real solution is to get more OEM's to bundle something other that MS Office with their machines.
In this NGO where I help out from time to time, there are a few computers and I have installed OpenOffice to see how it will compare to the current solutions. Well, the reason why it's not working for us is, we have a lot of documents written and some still being written in WordPerfect for Linux. In order to use OpenOffice, we have to export to .RTF. The problem is, some Finnish characters are lost in the process. Don't ask why, I have no idea.
Anyway, you see the problem. So I am wondering if StarOffice 6.0 has the possibility of editing WordPerfect docs?
Sigged!
Microsoft effectively beat Netscape into unconsciousness by bundling their free browser into Windows, but even with monopoly power they would never bundle the office suite for free. Office is Microsoft's big money maker. This is going to severely piss them off!
I like it.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
You know that somewhere over at Sun, they are brainstorming about their future and somebody's asking "what do we need to do to say we have the World's (or Asia's, or Who-ever's) most popular office suite?"
They've gotta be trying to position themselves with a product they can call number one in certain market niches, preferably pretty large ones. Trying to create a de facto standard in China seems like a great way to do it. They might not make any money at first, but the beauty of software is that it doesn't really have any marginal cost until they develop upgrades or offer full support.
If they successfully penetrate the Asian markets, they can leverage this sort of credibility in their marketing to paying customers around the world.
Also, if it works but MS makes MSOffice formats harder to read, MS could end up stabbing themselves in the foot - Don't use MS, you can't talk to 3 Billion potential customers/suppliers/partners with it. Pretty good FUD if you ask me. Maybe US businesses would start using both MS (for the West) and Star/OpenOffice (for the East) together for Global compatibility until enough people do that that they can eventually drop the more expensive solution (MSOffice).
Lots of maybes, but if StarOffice has a chance to break the MSOffice gridlock, this is exactly the kind of bold ambition they need to shot for and exactly the kind of motivation that is probably behind this strategy.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Here I am, setting up an Adabas database as well as working on some StarBasic scripts to automate my eBay transactions and related e-mails, and it turns out that version 6 has no browser, e-mail client or true database application (the three things I need to make the scripts do what they're supposed to do). Heck, I'm having a hard time finding out if I need to look into translating the StarBasic into JavaScript for 6.0.
I'm about ready to spend the $35 for the boxed product just to make sure I have access to the software when Sun stops supporting it. Then and only then can I even consider moving on to 6.0, and I will probably end up having the two installations sitting side-by-side.
The features that died with StarOffice 5.2 were fairly useless for the personal user (their own browser and e-mail) as well as large enterprise networks (their own database structures), but damn it if they weren't useful for us middle-of-the-road types. Unless I grab one of the last copies of 5.2, I might as well invest in a copy of Office 2000 for Access 2000, Outlook and the VBA to use between them. That or learn how to script/program for real...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I will use it as much as possible to see when/where it fails to meet my neads. I have Star Office 6 on my GNU/Linux machine via my mandrake support. That will be another nice comparison.
.....
If it meets only 90% of my needs then MS Office is dead in My Office!
So far looking good opening my old Word docs. But I use Word mostly for creating documentation so actually I expect OO to do just fine. I'll be putting a note in my doc's that if anyone has problems reading them that I will provide a PDF
ouch! I hear a Squeal! Is thata pig?
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
"Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it."
I wouldn't be surprised if it does. When it comes to buying applications, most purchasers believe in the addage "You get what you pay for." While StarOffice may not be above and beyond what OpenOffice can do, the price tag demonstrates to most buyers that it's a "real" program and also suggests that there is guaranteed support behind it as well.
After all, look how well RedHat is doing compared to competitors. Or how much Mandrake is taking off as they establish a similar model.
Yes, StarOffice 6.0 includes a filter for WordPerfect 8 documents according to the technical FAQ. According to the general FAQ (and somewhere else that I can't find right now), the WordPerfect filter is licensed from another company, so it won't appear in OpenOffice. I won't be holding my breath waiting for a WordPerfect filter in OpenOffice, because I gather that it is quite difficult to convert WordPerfect files to other formats.
So where's the OS X version? Or Classic Mac OS for that matter. I've got at least 10 machines that would run this instead of warezed versions of Orifice if it was available for Mac. If they can make it available for a 2 other Unices (leenooks and eyeriks), why not OS X, arguably the UNIX w/ the largest installed desktop user base?
Seriously, I'd buy 2 or 3 licenses for this if I could run them on my machines.
--
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
I believe due to some testing fluke, I was able to purchase and download StarOffice 6.0 last week. The Price was $75 I don't recall the extra $0.95 but what's the difference.
I wasn't paying much attention to the updates so I was a bit surprised that all of the integrated mail and scheduling tools were gone.
The products that remain seem to be excellent with improvments in graphics and ease of use. I haven't used them enough to really be an expert, but they seem to be clean.
I'm highly dissapointed with the lack of scheduling and email. The integration with the Palm OS was a huge advantage for me and I was planning to push this suite to clients in large part on the merits of the clean Palm integration. Nevertheless, it seems to be a win.
Now, I need to find someone who will write a clean integration tool for the Palm on Linux functionality. KPilot is a mess and J-Pilot doesn't intigrate with any other desktop apps. Sigh....
I would be more than surprized if the next version
of Office is all about locking you in and locking
all other office suites ( well, at least their
file formats) out.
It will be all about trying to maintain their
chokehold on the desktop and nada about empowering
the user.
Grease is not the Word.
Sleaze is the Word.