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Gateway To Use Corel Over MS For Office Suite
djellusion writes "Dealing yet another blow to Microsoft, Gateway has announced that it will be using Corels Wordperfect office suite instead of Microsoft Office. I can only see this as a good thing because friendly competition creates drive for better(less clippy) products. Can I order my system with no office suite please?"
Friendly competetion is a concept Microsoft has never understood.
All they teach at high schools and colleges now is MS Word due to the widespread acceptance of it over the last six to seven years. Now, because of higher prices caused by piracy, there is a market backlash against it. Most users will pay the extra amount for Microsoft Office, for it is the program they "grew up" with using. So, all HP and Gateway are doing is lowering their visible cost and making it cost extra for the premium Microsoft Office package, which is exactly what free market should encourage.
Wow. You got to hand it to Gateway. This call took some serious courage to make. The days of reprisals from M$ for not using their software are probably over, but it still is impressive to be the first big player to take advantage of it.
I just hope it pays off for them in being able to sell their computers for enough less that people buy more of them!
Ben
Must refrain from blowing my top because people are assuming that the rest of the world can deal with their files in yet another format...
I completely agree!
Why not OpenOffice? It's free and it rocks.
The only problem I have with it, is that it's support for formulas in text is not great at all, but I use LyX to overcome that problem.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
What will really happen is that people buying the low-end machines will then borrow a copy of Office 97 or Office 2000 from a friend and copy it.
this is not a sig
Too bad for Gateway then. Less people will be buying those PC's. Its just a fact.
I have not seen the word "facehugging" before, but it's wonderful and describes the situation perfectly. I commend you, Sir.
My deviantArt site
Who needs all the extra features of MS Office anyway? the great majority of home PC users (and some offices also) don't even use any of the advanced only-in-MS-Office features. All people need is a simple word processor with simple features such as spell checking, printing, changing fonts and colours and inserting images. Hell adding a spelling checker and a bit more to WordPad would have been enough for daily use.
Then there is the spreadsheet. Again, same trend applies here. Who has seen anyone at home actually use VB scripts or insert OLE objects to do weird stuff with Excel ? Not the majority I can tell you.
Just include a simple usefull wordprocessor and spreadsheet and you are set. Who needs MS Office?
They have changed their logo more than a year ago. The new one is, for example, here..
See a doctor.
There is nothing comparable (as a PIM) to Outlook in Windows. Symbian's Evolution approaches it for Linux (albeit lacking PocketPC synch support), but this is about Gateway's Win boxes.
ACT! comes close, but it is skewed too strongly towards Sales and Marketing executives.
Intro of an Outlook-free office suite is going to bring the hammer down on a lot of IT guys from various corner offices. And MS, of course, no dummies they, recognize and continue to play to this strength.
I write and business model professionally, and find OO.o's Write and Calc more than satisfactory; it ain't about the word processors and the spreadsheets. It's the PIM: how it handes and/or integrates with the e-mail client, how friendly it plays with both Palm and PocketPC PDA's, and how easy it is to mirror at the exec's home box.
I'm open to recommendations in this area, but I've looked around enough not to be hopeful.
I have not seen any good office suite reviews in a LONG time. The last was MS Office 2000 vs. Corel 2000 over at cnet.
Anyone know if there are any reviews with the massive amount of suites. Koffice, open office, star office, ms office, ms works, corel office, applix, easy office, lotus smartsuite, siag office, axene, newdeal, 602Pro, etc..
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I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know. - Garry Shandling
What this says to me is that the laws of economics hold true at Gateway.
(1) Gateway is struggling to compete against the "Dudes at Dell" who lead in education and business as PC suppliers
(2) They are looking to sell a lower cost system with major functionality so they have to include SOME office suite
(3) They look to Corel for a lower cost licensing option and I feel certain Corel gave them a sweetheart of a deal
(4) SO WHAT'S NEXT? Well if you are already shipping systems with your lowest end hardware and a less expensive productivity suite, the next obvious place to look is your OS. By offering a Wal-Martesq Lindows or Dellesq Red Hat option, you can offer an even less expensive system AND reduce component configurations since Linux doesn't require as beefy a system as OSes from Redmond do.
Humm, add a coffee bar to those Gateway Country stores and in 2003 they'll be the hacker hangout in ever mid-sized town.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
While there are now dozens of books available about Star Office, most (if not all) are useless. Star Office has quite a lot of features that are documented very poorly.
(As an aside, she's holding off upgrading to Open Office until the database integration is more complete. Her primary use for an office suite is the database.)
IMHO, OpenOffice still has a ways to go. It's not enough that all the functionality is present, it has to be present and accessible in an intuitive manner. I don't mind OpenOffice. I use it at home, and at work (where I've had a license for MS Office for like 4 years) mainly as a viewer, and sometimes as a creator. However, my girlfriend (an average- to power- user) does not like it. There are many little annoyances. Like, for instance, if tables, things that look like date are AUTOMATICALLY CONVERTED TO DATES, no matter what you do. Is the preference in auto-complete? No. You have to right click the cell and turn number recognition off. If you look in the prefs, you will find it is under the "Table" setting. Do you think users will automatically look at preferences for tables when a number is auto-completing? Apparently not in the case of my girlfriend. It took a few days to figure out what the fuck was going on (it would NOT happen outside a table). Those few days is plenty time for a user to get frustrated an throw OpenOffice in the trash bin and just reinstall MS Office. So while the functionality might be there, the hard problem is really usability (hell, most people don't even USE most of the MS Office functionality). Add to the that not-quite-right look and feel, and it give the impression to the average user that they are working with a low-quality piece of software. Until OO can stand on its merits, it will have to make sure to keep up with the latest MS look and feel (well, it should as a matter of principle). Complain about them all you want, but MS users (and Mac OS users) have come to expect a certain consistency in the UI.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Was it Windows 95 that ended the diversity? Or had Office been the de facto before that?
Both destroyed diversity. Windows95 was the cheap system for dummies, but it carried lots of incompatibilities and conflicts. Some were created by dodo developers at Redmond, others were the result of a smart and well-weighed campaign, where M$ exploited the difficulties people had on adapting products to the new OS. In a few monthes this nearly wiped out every concurrent from the market.
One of the main loosers in this fight was exactly the WordPerfect suite. Back then it belonged to Novell and they were poised to make a serious concurrence against M$. But it is curious that everything Novell went nuts when Windows95 came. Their Netware network client was unstable in every detail, it took nearly an year to see a stable version. Quattro Pro, a very powerful and popular spreadsheet, which was much better and more stable than Excel on Windows 3.1, couldn't work on Win95. And while I didn't like too much of WordPerfect, the thing suffered the same ills as Quattro. And Paradox, the equivalent of Access, a very popular veteran among databases, died in unglory, due to the fact it never returned the stability of the old days.
There were also several tools like QEMM and SuperStack that died in similar ways. Some of this was due to the fact that we were enteringthe true world of MBs of RAM. But many of these systems died because of the crapyness of Win95
Yeah, well if you are a user of TeX and it's progeny, you'll never find what you'd consider great formula support in a Word Processor. They'll always get something a little wrong if the \eq's are complex enough. The only good eq setting I've ever used in a word processor environment was an add on that worked in .tex and rendered images for the word processor to embed.
Now if OO were to have as good an interface to tex in its math editor as LyX does it could really help it to find a niche market among secretaries at Math & Sci departments. Especially if latex were an output format.
Let's face it, TeX has had the hell beat out of it w.r.t. setting math. There's a reason TeX is still at a version less than pi and has been for years.
must refrain from reminding you that openoffice can read/write Word documents so no one needs to deal with another format
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Regardless of whether people here do or don't , most of the people who are buying Gateway-type computers LIKE the Microsoft suite of products. Most of these people, politics aside and given a choice, would take Word any day over WordPerfect and would take Excel any day over 1-2-3. That's the reality of the marketplace that MS Office dominates - in fact, it's the very reflection of MS Office dominance.
So what this means is that the Gateway PC is going to have to be cheaper - when you factor in the lost MS Office - then competitors. What's it worth having MS Office vs Corel's suite ? $100 ? $200 ? Whatever number you come up with, that's how much the Gateway is going to need to be cheaper (assuming an otherwise equivalent feature set).
If Gateway's PC is not cheaper on a feature-adjusted basis, then people are going to buy their PCs from Dell, or IBM, or HPQ, or whomever. LOTS of companies have been substituting other office suites in the past, and they did NOTHING to threaten MS hegemony, let alone provide a modicum of competition. IBM did it with their line of PCs years ago, bundling WordPro and 1-2-3 right after their Lotus acquisition and when MS Office was not nearly as dominant as it is now, and I'm sure their sales were hurt as a result. Now WordPro is history while MS Word rolls on.
This isn't news, it's just Gateway trying to cut their costs.
Wow. You got to hand it to Gateway. This call took some serious courage to make...impressive to be the first big player to take advantage of it.
Other than HP and Dell (August).
You obvoiusly need less life and more slashdot browsing.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Idunno, I'm still mad at MS for egotistically naming their proprietary document filetype *.doc, which was already being used for general text files, thus meaning that every freaking old doc file I open that's plain text launches in Word and I have to wait all that time for their slow-ass program to boot.
I can tell you why they didn't use OO, support. Its cheaper to pay Corel $8 or so for an OEM version and let them deal with support questions than to give away OO and have to deal with supporting it yourselves. Telling your entry-level users to RTFM or "You've got the source, fix it yourself" isn't going to cut it.
Formatting issues? That's, frankly, a silly comment, since WordPerfect has it all over Word when it comes to formatting. In fact, WordPerfect formats with 100 times Word's precision (1/1200" versus 1/12"), which is exactly why some problems can crop up with printer or video drivers. If you're not familiar with WordPerfect (which you clearly are not), you won't know how to troubleshoot problems.
Word *does* have advantages over WordPerfect: for one thing, more flexible variable handling. But formatting is undeniably inferior.
Compatibility is a problem, yes, but the same goes for Word's compatibility with WordPerfect and Lotus's compatibility with either. Sure, if everybody would just knuckle under to MS and use the latest version Word, there would not be compatibility issues, and we could just rent our software from MS the way they want to.
For most people, open source alternatives are okay. But for advanced document production (i.e., legal use), StarOffice and OpenOffice are inadequate.
TANSTAAFL
Oh, god, how true that is. I'm astounded that any sane human being can tolerate having any Real software installed on their machine. Their products are intrusive, virtually unconfigurable memory hogs. Not to mention frequently being nearly impossible to uninstall without registry hacking. Bleurgh.
Is that it will put pressure on MS to lower its large-scale OEM pricing to Gateway (and others), which is how we wound up with office-preinstalled-on-everything in the first place. The net will be lower prices to consumers, and maybe some lost revenue to Microsoft, but if you are predicting the decline and fall of Office as the standard you are being way too unrealistic. Still, I think it would be really nervy to offer Open Office bundled on all computers.
Can I order my system with no office suite please?
That's an option that too many online vendors seem oblivious to. What if I don't want an office suite? And no operating system? And no sound card? etc...
Forcing it on you doesn't seem right, nor does it help bring the cost down.
It's about the way in which the program works with documents. WordPerfect has always looked at documents differently than Word and its knock-offs (OpenOffice included). For me, a stubborn hold over from the days of WP5.1, it's all about Reveal Codes and the way in which codes work in WordPerfect.
Now, if someone would finally come up with one standard document format, preferably one like html (code based) but with a better system for printing, then life would be good.
Anyway, for now, there is a standard format and it's called plain text. If that doesn't work, PDF is pretty much universal in the Windows world. Not sure about PDF under Linux.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
So, yeah, Word sucks, but the point is that everyone uses it in certain arenas. So you're forced to use it if you deal with OPD a lot (Other People's Documents). Also, in Word's defense, it is profoundly easy and intuitive for people to use. And once people get used to it they are loathe to switch to something new to figure out.