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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."
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.
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.
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!
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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$-based machines have, virii, trojans, major OS flaws.
They must also have no entreched application base that require windows, like some of the worse accounting packages. Love to see a port of Quickbooks and Peachtree to Linux at least, to help the masses be willing to think about it.
Enterprises fortunately aren't tied to these stupid accounting packages, and are already using distributed applications for the important stuff.
Well, that would make sense.
My theory behind this support is that the two programs are VERY similar (they literally are based on the same code), so Sun is just trying to open another cash flow by offering support for a program that is essentially the same as the one they currently support.
For example, if you offered support for your own proprietary version of notepad, wouldn't it make sence to offer support to notepad as well. You get paid either way, so why open as many channels for money to flow through as possible.
So, the reason that they don't offer support for OSX is because they don't have any experience with it themselves, otherwise they probably would.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
I had used a version of StarOffice on Windows 2000 a few years back, and found it to be somewhat slow and occasionally counterintuitive.
However, for ~6 months I have been using OpenOffice on my Windows XP box. I was prompted again to make the switch because I desired a German dictionary as well for the spell checker. It's a lot speedier than I remember StarOffice to be (and I'm still running on the same machine).
I have kept around MS Office at my wife's insistance, but I do all my work in OOo, especially because I work frequently on Linux at school/work (and am using it more frequently at home, too). I love the pdf exporter, and my documents (albeit, never very complex) have imported just fine.
"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
If OO competes too well with M$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
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
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.