Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is good because now Open Office will compete with Microsoft Office on *every* level.
While I personally can't see the need to pay for programs that are easier to use than my electric toothbrush or mom's VCR, I bet lots of less-than-dextrous-office-chimps have oodles of questions and concerns about the new office programs.
Where this really hits home is in those dreaded product direction meetings; now we can fight for OO by saying things like, "well it comes with Sun's free techsup and if we extra care, we can order it at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft product support!"
Buh Bye Billy Gates; I knew you shouldn't have pissed off most of your users.
Is there a reason then a user would not just buy StarOffice if they wanted this support? is it CALs?
I tried OO.o for a while. I was quite surprised to not find newsgroups particularly for OO.o. Would it be difficult to have these newsgroups created and propogated to the various servers? That way users can help each other in an easily reachable manner.
alias uptime="echo '5:33pm up 22342352324 days, 6:28, 2124315623 users, load average: 2432.40, 12312.31, 123123.19'"
Seems to me this is may be the sort of large enterprise lip-service support that comes with most software. Basically help with and install issue or maybe a bug, but if you want help with how to do something - you are still out of luck.
Better than offering support as described above (which should be free IMHO), would be to get O'Reilly et al to write looks about OO.o and the migration from office. Even specific edditions for Office 97/2000/XP would be applicable.
That would be better that someone helping me install the software.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
This might be enough to make me go back to OO. I'm using Office at the moment because my university centres its first year Computing-for-Idiots course around Office products, so using OO means extra work figuring out how to do things by yourself.
boom boom boom
Yay, another phone number to call and wait in line for - I'm sure that MSO users will relish the benefits of installing OOo and waiting in the phone queue to Sun for support - can we look forward to extra fees too?
Seriously, this is excellent news IMHO, given that Sun already has the infrastructure to support SO, they can leverage the same for OOo.
As others have (or will) point(ed) out, this is no guarantee for more market penetration, but I'm sure that small business users will be able to at least feel more comfortable with the concept of a central support point.
Of course, it will take some time until end-users will leverage the Internet for support. To this day it still amazes me that users will phone me to solve their IT problem - generally in the form of: "I'm getting 'error 43b: The widget cannot be broken.' errors, how do I fix it?" - my response is to uhm and ah for as long as it takes to type the error into Google and hit return.
The user is continually flabbergasted that I know the answer. I then tell them that I just used Google, how I used it and that they could too - for some reason they still call me... go figure.
Go Sun!
|>>?
But The more people that switch to OO, the more attractive switching to Linux becomes. If your company is already using OO then they could switch to Linux and let their users keep the same office suite.
In Conclusion: Go OpenOffice Go
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
I thought the original line was'Nobody gets fired for buying IBM' ;)
Clearly OO is a great piece of work, Non-profit and other organizations without any budget to speak of (very small companies) will have a huge impetus to consider OO and Shrike for the defacto desktop standard.
Especially companies with no interest in being vulnerable to the myriad of afflictions M$-based machines have, virii, trojans, major OS flaws.
They must also have no entreched application base that require windows, like some of the worse accounting packages. Love to see a port of Quickbooks and Peachtree to Linux at least, to help the masses be willing to think about it.
Enterprises fortunately aren't tied to these stupid accounting packages, and are already using distributed applications for the important stuff.
Why does it matter, CoboyNeal posted an informative comment, just because he is trying to gain karma points by having a similar name to CowboyNeal doesnt mean that his comments aren't good, dont moderate because of his name, moderate because of his comments, and if you have to, moderate me as offtopic/flamebait for defending him.
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
My guess is that it's not TRUE support (ie You can't call up and ask how to align your margins just so).
It's more likely that this is just "Put the CD in the tray, click this, then that, etc."
OR, since StarOffice and OpenOffice.org are so similar, Sun feels that they can support both (I'm guessing this wouldn't be the free support). To be honest, it makes sence to try to open a new cash flow, because the products are VERY similar.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
Try building a master document with MS Word. You'll need support to keep it from jacking up your subdocuments or becoming corrupt. Oh yeah, I also love the background save feature which says it has saved (even though the network might have gone down in the middle of the save) and when you reload your document there's nothing but garbage.
Have you tried OpenOffice on Win2k/XP? I tried it and recall it was pretty decently speedy - mind you this was a while ago, so my memory would be faulty. These days I use Office XP, despite the feel-bad MS factor, since I have lots of document exchange to do with Windows users, and I don't want my files to be imported "almost right".
Well, that would make sense.
My theory behind this support is that the two programs are VERY similar (they literally are based on the same code), so Sun is just trying to open another cash flow by offering support for a program that is essentially the same as the one they currently support.
For example, if you offered support for your own proprietary version of notepad, wouldn't it make sence to offer support to notepad as well. You get paid either way, so why open as many channels for money to flow through as possible.
So, the reason that they don't offer support for OSX is because they don't have any experience with it themselves, otherwise they probably would.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
I had used a version of StarOffice on Windows 2000 a few years back, and found it to be somewhat slow and occasionally counterintuitive.
However, for ~6 months I have been using OpenOffice on my Windows XP box. I was prompted again to make the switch because I desired a German dictionary as well for the spell checker. It's a lot speedier than I remember StarOffice to be (and I'm still running on the same machine).
I have kept around MS Office at my wife's insistance, but I do all my work in OOo, especially because I work frequently on Linux at school/work (and am using it more frequently at home, too). I love the pdf exporter, and my documents (albeit, never very complex) have imported just fine.
"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
With support now for OO, and with their Java Desktop + Suse Linux (Due out Dec. 12) coming with tech support (including "migration support")they might JUST have a combination that can best M$, and actually compete for the average user's desktop. That is, if the initial install is at least as easy as Windows. I'll let you know next week.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I followed the OOo users support newsgroup for several months. To be sure, a large number of questions concerned installation details. But there was also a great deal of help asked for, and given, concerning ways to convert procedures from MS Office to OOo, and how to handle interchanges of some specialized data files between the two. And also ongoing discussions of several things that could be lumped together as "best practice" development.
I think the support news group is one of the more critical parts of making OOo a success. There is a lot of good energy there.
Interesting, maybe this is the main reason for them providing techsupport. Imagine Dell giving you an option to have OO bundled with your new system for free. Preinstalled OO! Now that would be competition for MSOffice on yet another front(ie home luser).
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.
It begins to get double edged though. Do you upgrade to the new MS office which saves in file formats that your older MS Office intalls (and other people using older MS Office suites) can't read - or do you cross grade to OpenOffice where you can get free upgrades and (due to the open nature of file formats)no more file format issues on upgrading? Hmmm.
As long as the next Office with the major file format changes arrives before OpenOffice gets too much of a toehold, it will work. On the other hand, if it arrives too late it could blow up in MS's face.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Much like the Stock Market, a company's future success has nothing to do with its past successes.
Sun is one of the historic companies in the Valley and has given the world some amazing technology. I want companies like Sun to thrive but unfortunately the vagaries of the business world suggest that companies that fail to adapt often become roadside litter.
You can chalk it up to FUD or whatever conspiracy you choose. Facts are facts. Sun is a company that is on the cusp of becoming irrelevant very quickly.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Microsoft Word 2003 stores its documents in XML.
Not by default. MS Office PRO is the only one that even does it at all. They did it so that it could be integrated with XML web services on a corporate network.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
To my way of thinking this is where the honest money in the IT business should be made: Support, Support, Support. Instead of paying lawyers bundles of cash protecting intellectual property, train and pay support personnel that can actually help people. I have the crazy idea that a lot of people might be willing to pay for such service especially if the service were effective and, hence, not outrageously expensive. There is, of course, the obvious caveat that the so called nerds that don't need that sort of thing won't be anxious to pay but there are still a lot of semi-computer-literate users out there that could benefit and know it. redsilo
Sun is one of the historic companies in the Valley and has given the world some amazing technology. I want companies like Sun to thrive but unfortunately the vagaries of the business world suggest that companies that fail to adapt often become roadside litter.
Large companies with enough bright people on the payroll will survive changes in business model. It seems that Sun has historically been a company which has attracted and kept a decent number of intelligent employees, and their management seems to be smart enough to keep a positive image among their principle clients (geeks) during a time when it's popular for geeks to hate big businesses.
Um, I hate to rain on this parade, but I downloaded Open Office 1.0.2, used it for a couple of months, and was thrilled...at first. It was really great to be able to use free software. Worked great.
.doc and .xls, just in case, and I am sure glad I did. After several months of use, I started to notice weird errors in my Excel files. The screen on Excel was all wigged out, and some of the formatting was trashed. I had to go back to older versions of my files, and re-enter data. Not fun.
Using OO, I saved my existing files in the Microsoft file formats as
After 3-4 months of this, I recently switched back to MS Office, whereupon I found that my Excel files had weird errors, which I now manually had to go fix. In addition, sometimes I couldn't type in the data entry box, or see what I was typing. Similarly, my resume in Word lost its proper formatting and bullet points. I am not at all a happy camper about this, and have fully switched back to MS Office.
Don't bother to write me about how much better OO 1.1 is, I've got work to do. I'm a small business owner, and I don't have time for this nonsense. It's easier just to pay the hardware vendor a couple of hundred extra dollars every 3-4 years, when I replace my PC. Time is money.
For the record, I don't use Macros or anything fancy, just normal Excel with some formatting, and I also use 'window freeze' and group/ungroup. This is all on Windows 98.
Trying to steer away from standards and compatability doesn't always work.
It's intersting to note that back in the days when WordPerfect was the main word processor that everyone used, it too tried exactly the same file format tactics that Microsoft tries today. Before MS Word was popular, Microsoft went to special effort to support WordPerfect formats as reliably as possible. WordPerfect, on the other hand, only supported Microsoft formats on the order of 95%. (After all, why make it easy for customers to switch to the competition?)
There were several things going on, but certainly one of them was that people were deciding to go with the product that would most reliably support both formats than with the product that didn't support key parts of one of them. The result was that MS Word won out, having promoted full compatibility with competitors' products. Meanwhile WordPerfect faded into obscurity.
It might seem to be a disadvantage to be compatible with competitors. Sometimes it's a disadvantage not to be, though. This is especially true if the competitors initially have a market significant enough to be noticed (even if it's small), and offer full compatibility with your product.