Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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
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..
-
I'm too shy to express my sexual needs except over the phone to people I don't know. - Garry Shandling
A tip: I would suggest adding some sort of AI so that if a user does the same thing (and potentially fails) over and over again, then some sort of message or tip could be given to them. This could probably be made less obtrusive than Clippy. For example, if OO had just popped up a tooltip that said: "You have deleted an auto-completed date recognization several times - to turn this feature off go...blah blah". That would have saved a lot of frustration.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
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.
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.
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.
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.