Slashdot Mirror
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.
A measly $75.95? Phew, surely there can't be a comparable office suite that's any cheaper than that!
An apt name change, considering the overwhelming majority of potential users under this plan.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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.
Wonder if they think charging for it will make people more likely to use it.
Everyone does know that the only reason Sun bought StarOffice was to have something to annoy Microsoft with, right?
I still say they're missing PIM functionality. Figure out a way to get Evolution to work with it seamlessly. I run Windows and would glady switch away from Office if I could read/write Word documents, Excel spreadsheets -- and duplicate my Outlook PIM/e-mail functionality (and still synchronize it to my PDA).
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.
XML is just a method of storing structured data as a rooted tree. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It's become popular not becuase the technology itself is particularly revolutionary-- the technology is simple. It's become popular, rather, becuase of a number of very versatile, useful, well-done parser libraries that (for example) let you save and retrieve your structured data to and from XML without much fuss or work at all. As opposed to mucking about with file pointers and binary data and such yourself, and probably misusing a free() call somewhere and segfaulting. (There is also the associated neat ease-of-parsing technologies, like schema and XSL, but i won't get into that.) One such parser library was written by microsoft, and is part of ".NET". This is why microsoft is pushing XML right now; it's a development best practice. Or something of the sort. Not because they are moving toward XML as an "open standard".
(The fact it has a sexy acronym, and the fact that nebulous connections exist in people's minds between anything XML (no matter how useless) and the very useful technologies like SOAP and XSL that have sprung from XML, doesn't hurt.)
XML does not support interoperability in any way unless everyone agrees on common XML grammars for a specific task.
Unless Microsoft releases the XML schema for their new-office XML format, then the new MSWord format will be every bit as much unusable gibberish as the old MSWord format (except the new gibberish will contain a lot of > and < symbols, and begin with a standard tag identifying it as an XML document). Microsoft seems every bit as xenophobic as they'd ever been, and have given no indication they will release such a schema for any reason unless they are forced to as part of a court judgement terminating the current antitrust case with the states. And probably not even then, unless the court order is carried out by armed national guard members storming the Redmond compound.
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.
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.
No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML
Sure they would. They'd just do what they do now; embed the WMF data (perhaps as Base64) into <mstag> and <mstag/> tags.
XML doesn't mean shit, only that the data is organized in some kind of fashion. It does not guarantee that the data is open and accessible
Wow. You guys are really all missing the point here.
The reason that Gartner expects StarOffice 6.0 to take away 10% of M$ market share in the productivity suite arena is because it's a paid product offered by a reputable, known viable vendor.
There are a whole lot of people looking to get out from under Microsoft's licensing/upgrading set to take effect this summer. Sun's offering may entice them to jump off the fence.
While open source is ready for the enterprise, the enterprise is not necessarily reader for open source.
What does that mean? It means that most enterprise class shops won't go for something that a) isn't supported by someone on the other end of phone and b) they aren't certain will be available in 5 years because of vendor viability.
Sun doesn't really give a damn about all of us - they are targetting a larger market that will provide a longer-lived revenue stream.
And take a bite of out Microsoft's chunky a$$ at the same time.
I don't like OpenOffice. Font support sucks and some of the compatability with MS Office products is less than acceptable. Given that I absolutely have to be able to read/edit MS documents, that is an imperative.
Will I pay for StarOffice? Hell yeah. I'd rather give it to Sun than MS any day.
StarOffice came first - open office is the release of the code into the open source community. StarOffice isn't originally Sun's, but was offered as early as 1996. Sun picked it up (to the dismay of many, myself included ) in 1999.
You can read about the acquisition here
OpenOffice did not come first, StarOffice did. Sun released an earlier code base to the open source community and continued with its own development.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
JALALABAD -- March 26, 2002 -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced a donation to the Ministry of Jihad (MOJ) of al Qaeda that will make StarOffice[tm] 6.0 (branded CrescentOffice[tm] in Islamic markets) an office suite of choice in madrassas throughout the Muslim world. Today's donation will provide unlimited access to one of the world's largest open productivity suites based on open source development. The technology will be available to be replicated and distributed to the students, teachers and administrators of the educational institutions governed by the ministry. The discussions today are a major expansion of the existing relationship between Sun and the MOJ.
"In the quest for learning and understanding, there is really no greater tool than technology," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research, Sun Microsystems. "With this contribution of software, Sun and the Ministry of Jihad will work closely with students, educators and suicide bombers to enhance their ability to compete in a global economy, while opening the door to greater productivity and achievements throughout the Islamic world. Sun Microsystems will provide al Qaeda with the office productivity tools they need to destroy all Zionists and Crusaders. Allahu Akbar!"
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
<ms-word format="screw-you">
</ms-word>pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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.
Sadly, you are probably right. Slashdot readers sit around bemoaning Microsoft's virtual ownership of the PC software market. But when some other company introduces a supported, professional, competing product, much of the discussion on Slashdot centers around:
1. Encouraging people to download free software instead of buying the new product.
2. Creating open source projects to replace the package being discussed.
3. Getting the package without paying for it.
Today was just another great example on Slashdot. First the announcement of Opera 6 for Linux. I lost count of the number of times that people suggested the use of Mozilla or some other free browser to avoid paying for Opera. At least one person posted registration codes. Others posted ways to disable the ads that pay the bills for the ad-supported version.
Now we have the announcement that StarOffice 6 will be sold for a mere $75. Are Slashdot readers celebrating the fact that Sun is going up against Microsoft in the office arena? Nope. The discussion centers around using, and extending, OpenOffice instead of purchasing StarOffice from Sun.
Microsoft management is probably thrilled by what they see here. A major competitor announces a compatible office suite that runs on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It's priced at a fraction of the price of Microsoft Office. And what do readers on Slashdot, a group that should be a prime audience for the new package, do? Look for ways to avoid buying it.
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.
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.
My God man??
Are CRITICIZING XML????
Are You MAD?
(wouldn't shirts that say "XML Sux" be cool?) ; )
Cheers,
-b
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.
The commercial version includes a talking paper clip.