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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<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.
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.
My God man??
Are CRITICIZING XML????
Are You MAD?
(wouldn't shirts that say "XML Sux" be cool?) ; )
Cheers,
-b
I understand it's for fun but please...
Avoid mixing "islamic world" with "Al-Quaeda" and avoid mixing Jihad with war/fight.
Al-Quaeda is a minuscule minority of the islamic world and does not represent it.
Jihad is an extremely broad term which sometimes means war, and most of the time doesn't.
Almost all americans and many europeans have a problem understanding these two things, and through this ignorance make wrong judgements of the muslim world and muslims, it would be good if you could avoid strengthening that by mixing these things together.