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Sun to Offer Support for OpenOffice.org
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge.com [ed. note: Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN] is reporting that Sun announced today they will offer both free and for-pay support for OpenOffice.org. The story says the cost will be about the same as that it is charging for StarOffice, the proprietary cousin of OO.org."
Each time I demonstrate Open Office to a friend, they are surprised that such an interoperable (With MS Office) office suite exists. My favorite is to provide them with a copy of the Open CD, which has a number of free and Open Source Software distributions.
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troll blacklist. Please mo
This means they don't have to spend as much money on usability testings... Use the customers for feedback.
This is a good thing, though. Not because the Sun support will really help all that many folks, but because of the appearance of legitimacy it lends to OOO
Very true. This is really more about PR than anything else. Remember, it's much easier to promise support than to deliver it.
And a big plus: it flips a solar middle finger at Microsoft. Jyahh!
No, this is all about Sun trying to stay alive. They've been flipping the finger at Microsoft for years and where has that gotten them (same with Oracle). If they hadn't been so focused on Microsoft and tried to create strategies to combat the commodization of their hardware, perhaps they wouldn't be in the position they're in now.
I mean let's be realistic...if promising application support is big news from Sun, then they're about on their last legs.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
If OO competes too well with M$word, then Micro$oft is likely to make their next version incompatible with OO or incompitable enough that people will be reluctant to switch. Then there's "shovel wear", the mass of M$ stuff that they charge you for (it's in the price for that new computer) but they pretend is free, which fools the masses into believing the only reason to use OO or other non-M$ wear is to save a buck.
-Turnip Onion --- Neither micro nor $oft. Linux is a fine tool.
A true PHB will NEVER run out of excuses, they'll just constantly come up with wierder and stupider ones.
My latest stonewall to implementing something quality vs. something venduh:
"We are pushing to remove all freeware because of liability concerns."
Which translates to:
"Even though we have hundreds of trial-expired, unlicensed copies of Winzip, countless installations of Acrobat Reader, numerous installations of unlicensed trial versions of system tools, IIS, etc., we're not going to let you install PostgreSQL for development testing because we're idiots and our heads are filled with warm, tasty tapioca pudding."
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Nice troll, but in case you haven't noticed most of these Office programs are a lot more complicated than your average everyday application. You could probably spend weeks learning how to use the various features of Word alone. Sure, if you're going to use it as a plain text editor it may seem easy, but once you start getting into advanced formatting and embedding objects into the documents it gets much more complex for the average person.
In many cases, I think the real reason companies, or managers, to be more specific, don't want to use free alternatives is simple CYA. Suppose a company buys a software package that doesn't work as advertised, say, from Microsoft. In a case like that, who catches hell from upper management? Not the manager who approved the purchase. Microsoft, or at least the sales rep, catches hell. This doesn't mean there'll be a satisfactory resolution to the situation, but it decreases the likelihood that the person who appreoved the purchase will get in hot water.
Suppose, OTOH, that a manager decides to go with OpenOffice on the advice of one of us here. Will OO.o work as well as MS Office? Most likely, yes, but that manager, who probably doesn't have much experience with it, will develop ulcers worrying about what might happen to him if something goes wrong. If he has money that he can spend on MS Office, he'd rather do that than get called on the carpet for trying to take the cheap way out and making a huge mess of things.
If you want to advocate open source alternatives in a business environment, you have to do so in a way that will present little risk that anyone's job security will be on the line. Making the software available for people to take home might be a good plan, as would be installing it on machines with no equivalent commercial software installed. For instance, at a company I worked for, the computers in our call center had no word processing software installed, and management was adamant that pirated software would not be tolerated. So, when some of us techs needed to write up a support manual, someone suggested StarOffice, which was then downloaded and installed. Many people had never heard of it, but it definitely made a good impression. Turns out that we were closed down before the software had a chance to spread to other desktops, but many people were exposed to it, and good exposure never hurts.
What I'd really like to see is some of the low-end PC makers bundling OpenOffice with their machines. This would add value to the machines in the minds of consumers, and it'd get the program some extra exposure. eMachines, Systemax, are you listening?