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StarOffice 8 May Be MS Office Killer
UltimaGuy wrote to mention an eWeek article that seemed topical, given the recent discussions about the OpenDocument format. They're running a piece discussing StarOffice 8's killer position as an alternative to Office. From the article: "However, whether StarOffice 8 can succeed as a wholesale or partial replacement for Microsoft Office will depend on the organization thinking about making the switch. Several improvements in StarOffice 8 are aimed directly at improving compatibility with Microsoft Office-formatted documents, but converting complex documents between the two suites' formats will in some cases require tweaking to preserve document appearance. In addition, while StarOffice 8 can be extended through macros and scripting, much like Microsoft Office can, these extensions won't migrate to Microsoft Office without being rewritten. However, StarOffice ships with a Macro Migration wizard that will aid in the migration of Microsoft Visual Basic macros to the StarOffice Basic macro language. There's also a Document Analysis wizard that helps determine where trouble spots might lie in the transition to a StarOffice format."
Same headline as usual I see. Everything "may" kill the leading product, but the chances of it happening are slim to none. The reason they're the leading product is the average person trusts them, the average person has no idea what star office is and won't care. If they're lucky they'll get 10% market share, if they arn't they'll llive for a few years and then die hopelessly.
I like muppets.
But in my experience, %99.9 of things labeled a Foo Killer never even come close to killing foo. iPod clones / competition are a prime example. Every two weeks we get an article about an iPod killer, and then we never hear about it again.
Microsoft intentionally breaks things from release to release so that different versions of Word and Excel are incompatable and exibit the same problems that you see on star ofice and open office.
If they have the magic-bullet that can detect all the different versions and convert them to a decent representation of the document they may have something.
Hell, simply marketing a Microsoft office document converter will make a company very rich.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
MS XML will keep MS Office on top for years to come!
In the end, it's not going to matter how open ended and interoperable StarOffice or it's file format is, it's going to come down to what's more convenient at the present time. For companies, this means swap everything over to StarOffice, (possibly) retrain their staff, as opposed to waiting out for Office 12, upgrading to it and having everything work the same.
However Microsoft has already alluded that users of Office 12 may need to be retrained anyway, so SO8 and O12 may be on a fair playing field, and actually come down to quality of software, something Microsoft has been paying a lot more attention to recently.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Anybody can build a word processor. Take a 1st year college kid's programming project. Add features. Add features. Repeat. Spreadsheet, same thing. The question is, does Star Office contain a perfect replacement for OUTLOOK? If it doesn't, there's no chance in hell it'll be used outside of the geek community. On top of that, is it 100% scriptable by office clerk types, like MS Office is?
As long as StarOffice/OpenOffice.org startup time is I/O (HDD speed) bound it wont kill anything.
I'll wait for the "Netcraft confirms: Micro$oft is dying!" article.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Companies will keep their installed versions of Office and won't even care of upgrading to Office 12 ?
I'm hearing this for quite a few years now. When did I first hear this? Ummm...2001? Get real, guys. This isn't likely to happen anytime soon. MS Office may be from Microsoft, but don't underestimate the product. Nothing can beat it right now and it doesn't look like anything will in the near future.
Like those great failures, Yahoo and Google?
Star Office 8 will make a wonderful contender that will be in Massachusetts govt list of consideration. This will shut up those who thinks you can't live without Microsoft Office or those who thinks OpenOffice is not there yet. Best part is it supports OpenDocument too. I feel OpenOffice 2.0 and Star Office 8 will give MSOffice a run for it's money. MS days are numbered.
I like competition, in fact I like it alot (go Yankess!). Anyway, no single program is going to kill MS Office. Or any MS product as widely used as Office. Maybe a second version, maybe a third but it is going to take time.
There are just too many people using it (MS Office) right now, and as we all know people can't handle change. This might be the start of the downfall of MS Office but it is in no way the killer.
First they need to get popular. Then that popularity needs to spread among Information Services people. Businesses need to show an appreciation for the product and want to share that appreciation. They will tell others businesses and that will spread the word.
But programs like this need to learn how to walk before they can run with the big dog.
It's hardly going to be a 'killer' when even MS Office starts up faster under WINE (no preloading). Open/StarOffice is a colossal mess of old code inherited from StarDivision -- it's immensely slow, bloated, memory-hungry and inelegant.
Oh sure, no doubt 500 geeks with 3 GHz machines will reply "It's fast on my box" but so what? There are TENS OF MILLIONS of circa-1 GHz 128 MB PCs in businesses and homes around the world, and for them, OOo is so much slower than MS Office it's almost unusable. Kudos to the OOo developers for eliminating a massive target market.
Get out into the real world, see what kind of desktop PCs the majority of companies are using, and you'll realise why OOo's comical bloat and sluggishness is a major issue.
Oh, and now with 2.0, you need Java -- an entire language, virtual machine and supporting libraries -- just to get some fundamental features. It's laughable.
And it just goes to show that, no matter if something is 'open source', one company can still be in control (Sun pushing Java in the most inappropriate places -- Run Macro?!?)
Will it be adopted by businesses around the world? Will it come standard on your Dells, HPs, and Macs? Will it look and feel practically identical to the current Microsoft Office? Will it be able to connect to Exchange and Sharepoint servers for collaboration?
If your answer to any of those questions is "No", I fear the answer to the headline will be the same.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Isn't there space in the market for a company or app which converts from MS to StarOffice? And/or what are the licensing implications for a large, multi-site company to purchase one single copy of MS office and have their IT department use it to convert incoming MS files into StarOffice format?
Freedom? Since when is treating one proprietary format (.pdf) different than another (MS' .doc, .xls, etc) "Freedom"?
:
d ex_reference.html
Had you actually read the article you'd know that those responsible for the decision are aware of this:
"On the question of why Adobe's PDF format meets the definition of "open format", state officials said it was a "grey area" but that Adobe's legal and licensing terms were deemed sufficiently open."
It's consederably more open than the MS formats
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/pdf/in
"The PDF specification was first published when Adobe® Acrobat® was introduced in 1993. Since then, updated versions of the PDF Reference have been made available from Adobe via the Web. A significant number of developers and systems integrators offer customized enhancements and extensions to Adobe's core family of products. Adobe publishes the PDF specification to foster the creation of an ecosystem around the PDF format. The PDF Reference provides a description of the Portable Document Format and is intended for application developers wishing to develop applications that create PDF files directly, as well as read or modify PDF document content."
Do I agree with you that the pdf decision can be considered problematic? Yes, absolutely, however there aren't that many alternatives, are there, whereas there are alternatives to MS formats.
Since the spec is published and there exist independant (open source) implementations of that spec, I would consider it "open". Apparently so do Adobe and Massachusetts. It doesn't have to be governed by comittee or some non-profit to be open (to me). PDF is fully documented, and anyone can make their own implementation. That's a fully open format.
Please, do tell us how PDF is a closed format. Bloated yes, awkward yes, not suitable (and not meant) for editing yes, but closed?
I've used every version of word since 5.0, WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x and now OpenOffice, plus others.
.doc file format. I use OO at home, but I don't expect my Corporate Overlords to bother switching. Ever. They would have to think too much about something they regard as beneath their notice - that, and the admin staff would likely scream bloody murder. They'll allow a retraining on 'new features' of Word, but if you try to explain that 'gee, this would be a perfect time to try a new/better/free/different/similar alternative to Word, since the file formats a re new...' you'll get absolutely nowhere - they 'know' word, and that is powerful motive for maintaining the status quo
It shouldn't take more than 15 minutes of looking at the menus - which are almost identical for most end-user functionality anyway - to grok OpenOffice.
Inertia keeps MS Office in place - the vast majority of the functionality of Word, for example, is either unused or not-understood anyway. I am asked *weekly* how to insert tables, align text, etc., by people who have never used anything else but Word for their entire professional careers. Say 'mail merge' and you get blank stares from most users, IME.
Yah, it has fine functionality - my only substantive gripes with Word are the price and the opacity of the
Replacing MS Windows or Office or Outlook or what have you with a better product _might_ happen one day. But I think that just as people will continue to have heart attacks, to pay too much at the pump or be confronted with social ferment and civil unrest because of their stupid governments, people will make do with 'good enough' software that 'gets the job done most of the time'.
The reason being that most people relate best to what they understand and how they think. And that is in most cases: average. So mickeysoft and most other corporations are in the business of selling average. Average is where the numbers are, average is where profit lives.
The thing discerning people should be gunning for, is not 'replacing' current mediocre software, but making sure that the interchange of data remains moderately simple for those of us that care about quality.
DRM, application lock-in and other information sharing roadbump nastyness are the real issues. World domination is a stupid goal, but making sure the information elite still can talk to the unwashed masses is essential.
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
Come on, they've been calling it an MS Office killer since it's release. It's not going to kill MS Office, especially when it's ability to read office doucments.
You guys need to understand, "open standards" mean squat to the users, they are only important to the techie types. Most people are NOT looking for an alternative to MS Office and aren't not going to be swayed with out something really amazing
Gadget News at Gizmo.com
StarOffice I don't think will kill MS Office. However, OpenOffice.org 2.0 if the marketting is done right could be what Firefox 1.0 was. It could bring a good amount of MS Office users over. OOo 1.x didn't do it because it was missing too much stuff. The interface was very different than MSOffice, many features didn't exist, and file compatibility was poor. All this has been corrected, and with a good amount of marketting and press coverage it could be huge.
Has it been designed with security in mind? One of the types of files you can't trust as an email attachment is a word processing document such as Word Perfect or Microsoft Word. You might as well open an executable as a word processing document. If I get a Word document or a spreadsheet, I write back and tell the sender to use plain text, I can add formatting myself if I want it.
Has the ability to run executable files, delete files, be sent to didgy websites and other stupid actions been copied from Microsoft?
If not, this would be a great selling point: "Star Office documents are safe to open as email attachments!"
Personally, I think that more appropriate killing would be of those who think that the Soviet Russia and old Koreans jokes are still funny even after their 2 billionth iteration, which Slashdot probably reached several years ago. Add the moderators who continually mod them as "Funny" to that list. (Not advocating violence here. Just dreaming about it.)
Sorry.
A Soviet Russia joke that actually works on the right levels? Unpossible!
Another office suite that's dead on arrival. See you in a couple of years. I'm sure it'll be the same story.
All three of the properties in the subject need to be covered but you will see a weakening of Office's grasp.
Compatibility isn't 100% (probably never will be, it's a moving target). A company with the resources can migrate and test it's current documents to see if savings can be made.
In terms of features it is lagging a bit, there needs to be some killer features integrated. Being able to interogate databases, embedding SQL reports or statements into documents to bring back data or information etc..
Price is much cheaper (even free if you're confident about using open source).
Netcraft might not write a article, but Microsoft is indeed dying, just in another area, and every bit counts to chip this illegal, suffocating, behemoth of a company out of our lives. See here
So: FreeBSD is going to kill Linux, Linux is going to kill Sun, Sun is going to kill Microsoft, Microsoft is going to f-ing kill Google, and Google is going to ... kill evil?
:P
My, America *is* a violent place these days, isn't it?
I just started a new job where I am forced to run Windows. We use Groupwise for our email. I've got to say that Evolution's mail client runs circles around Groupwise. I sure hope Novell incorporates Evolution into Groupwise.
StarOffice 8 will be a 'MS Office Killer', about as much as firefox will be an 'IE Killer'. There's a lot more to being a 'MS Office Killer' than just being able to view/edit Word documents and play with Macros. I know for my company, we have several apps that tie directly into Excel and actually require Excel (I work for a CPA firm). They could give StarOffice away for free, pay us to stop using MS Office, and even offer to install it to all of our PCs for us and it still wouldn't be enough. I suspect many other firms are in the same boat. I hasn't heard of any of our venders ever mentioning support for anything other than MS Office.
Perhaps StarOffice 8 will be the 'MS Office Killer' for home users that use it to write letters to Aunt Sally.... or perhaps for Jonnie IT that just likes to 'different' so he can think he's cool.
Oh well.. nice hype tho.
It seems the grammar checker [does it have a grammar checker?] is not working right:
From StarOffice 8 Demonstration
"Create new database or connect to exist ones"
Man... talk about nazis!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I am going to tell you something: MS Office WILL fall. So will Windows. History tells us it will happen. The only questions are when and how.
It's a safe bet that "when" is not anytime in the near future, so "several" to "many" years soonest. So is StarOffice 8 an MSOffice killer? No. And Sun knows that. So on to the "how."
What they hope to do is get into just a few businesses. Openoffice.org for the home, StarOffice at work. They will get better at compatibility. They will get the name out there. Empires don't topple in a millisecond. It takes chinks in the armor. Google is a chink. Firefox is a chink. AIM is a chink. Linux is a chink. And StarOffice wants to be one too. None of them was a threat 5 years ago. Now they are all forces to be reckoned with. Anyone trivializing the role of StarOffice needs only think back a few years ago and remember what these other things were then.
- Mozilla mostly sucked; there was no Firefox.
- Google was the best search engine, but was definitely not the main one: Yahoo, Hotbot, and Alta Vista ruled.
- AIM - actually, all of IM - was barely used. Only ICQ was really established.
- Linux was still 2.2 and was pretty much unusable by non-techies.
StarOffice 8 may not be the nail in the coffin, but it IS significant. It's the first useable drop in replacement with commercial backing. And in a few years, we'll see where it's at. If that's not news, I don't know what is.
BetaMax might be the VHS Killer!
Napster might be the RIAA killer!
Open your eyes! Sure, here in techno-savvy land it looks like StarOffice has the potential to vreak the monopoly of Microsoft when it comes to document productions, but we have to be honest - millions of people are not going to jump ship just because an open source product all of a sudden had another release. Just the mere idea of switching will likely invalidate the millions of dollars companies spend on Microsoft Premier Support packages. The ubiquity of Microsoft Office is going to be the key factor here.
Moreover, accepting nothing less than total obliteration of any competition is childish and leads to psychological inability to manage the many situations in real life when this turns out to be impossible.
Sorry for the OffTopic, but this kind of mindset is too frequent and springs out in a lot of disparate places.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
Just had to beat a dead horse today? I can't see how anybody still finds that funny.
Unlike most of the Soviet Russia jokes that get thrown about carelessly, this one actually works on more levels than one, and in the same way that the original joke did. (Hint: one of the Soviet Union's symbols was a star.)
Here, like this: "I've used OpenOffice applications infrequently, and while I wouldn't describe them as perfect, they show some promise of being a solid software title in the near future.", or "I love my OpenOffice suite! The features are just right for what I need!", or "I'm not much of an OpenOffice fan. Their performance leaves much to be desired."
Not like this: "It's better than Microsoft!" "No, it isn't!" "Yes it is!!" "No, it isn't!!!" etc...
This story deserves to be modded +5 Funny.
(Seriously, we should be able to mod the stories.)
In Soviet Russia, dead horses beat you!
There's a single reason we wouldn't migrate to StarOffice. Because when we save the document in "OpenDocument" format, there's no guarantee that the person that needs to recieve that document (outside the company) will be able to read it.
And that folks, is the crux of the problem. If we can't have compatibility outside the company, it's much harder for us to make use of the product. Fortunately, OpenOffice is free and we can always send a link with our document. "If you cannot open this file, please download OpenOffice, from OpenOffice.org -- a mere 2623523523 megabyte download."
There has to be a better way to start getting Office out of the workplace but I don't know what it is. Either way, I use Office at home and work ONLY because Outlook is in the suite of products. Maybe when Mozilla's lightning comes out, I can go completely open source but until then, Office it is.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
The bottom line is: Star Office can never beat MS Office, because it emulates MS Office. To send MSWord and PowerPoint to their well-deserved place on the ash heap of history, will take a replacement that shoots higher. It's not good enough to match the MS Office feature set and be cheaper. The cost of the software is trivial, compared to the lock-in that comes from familiarity alone.
For an Open-source office replacement to kill MS, the word processor has to be better than Pages and InDesign combined. The presentation program has to be better than Keynote. The spreadsheet has to be better than Lotus Improv. Not better by a little bit, either: they have to completely blow MS's products away. They have to make the deficiencies of MS's products glaringly obvious to anyone who spends a couple of minutes comparing them.
Until the Star Office guys aim that high, they won't make a dent in the monopoly.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The Basic script language that StarOffice uses is poorly documented. At a minimum I need a method to crawl through the document object model. In Star I could not find a decent opbect model reference much less examples of how to access portions of the document. Even worse, I could not see how one could develop custom add-ins using Toolbars and Buttonbars. And as another tiny annoyance, how do I support custom metadata? The OpenDocument format is less than clear and I don't see BuiltInDocumentProperties or CustomDocumentProperties like in Word documents.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Wolf!
Most PHBs are never going to go for switching to StarOffice. There is a definite advantage from the business perspective of a single-source vendor for office software. For one thing, interoperability between different software functions at a company. For another, better forecasting of costs.
Sure, StarOffice may be cheaper in the long run... but I don't know how much it will cost me to change over. I know that I'll be under or at budget with MSOffice. The risk of going over budget (for many in management) precludes switching to another *Office package. It's not about total cost in many companies, except at the very top -- managers don't want to stick their neck out.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Office 97 is the best version of office ever, simple and clean, office 2000/2003 has nothing i want.
I think the biggest mistake os StarOffice/OpenOffice is not supporting Mac OS X out of the box. A package that is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris (I work for Sun
Are there some publicly available complex Office documents that could be used to test compatibility? I hear a lot of complaints about how StarOffice-saved files look different in MSOffice, but I've never seen that happen myself. Could someone please post an example? That way office suite programmers could use it as a test case to debug their layout engines.
What I'm hearing is, "you could achieve compatibility with MS Office, it's just a pain in the ass and not worth anyone's time."
I can't help but think that all of the effort put into mimicking the dominant product could be put into creating unique and valuable features.
As long as OpenOffice is not able to execute VisualBasic Macros and other Office Macros, OO will not be much of a choice. They say that in OO 2.0 / StarOffice 8 they can (partially) execute VBScribt, but what about plugins? In the firm I'm working we have a lot of excel plugins that connect to different databases, so a change to OO / SO is not possible (altough I would like to).
There was also a talk about that on OpenOffice.org conference. Grab Erwin Tenhumberg's talk from: http://ooocon.kiberpipa.org/media
You know this reminds me of a cartoon one of my philosophy profs showed me in university:
There's a church with some grafitti on it reading:
God is Dead
-Nietzsche
and a gravestone reading:
Nietzsche is dead
-God
Oddly, I'm not sure I believe StarOffice is going to kill MS-Office any time soon.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
oh bollocks! this OSS cameradere is great and all, but StarOffice? MS Office Killer! Its not happening sunshine! When we stop looking at OSS through rose tinted spectacles, and MS through a crosshair. We'll (OSS community) understand excatly why microsoft is the goliath corp that it is, and from that we can actually begin to improve OSS in an cohesive, controlled and overall a community effort.
It failed in Russia, its failing in China, but E-Communism is the one that proves good old Karl right! Down with the Bourgoise, BEGIN THE DISSOLUTION OF MICROSOFT SERVERS AND GIVE THE SPACE TO SOURCEFORGE! WE'RE FREE MY COMRADES!!!
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Honestly, if StarOffice, or OpenOffice for that matter, does not seemlessly integrate with SharePoint, I'm not seeing a major switch for any organization that is using SharePoint. The combo of SharePoint, and the soon to be released v3 with Office 12, forms a massive killer app that corporations would be crazy to move away from. MS stays a step ahead of the competition by upping the ante on what is considered useful in the organization. Now, someone create a MySQL based portal, using Mono, support SharePoint web parts, and include the hooks that allow MSO, OO, SO, KO, and WP to integrate seemlessly and then you have a MS killer. Until then, OO and SO will remain also-rans.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
StarOffice and OpenOffice or AnyotherKindofOfficeClone won't replace Office so long as their major selling point is compatibility with Office. If someone is looking for their first bundle of office applications, then StarOffice has a chance. But, why would existing, satisfied, MSOfifice users spend cash to replace Office with something whose claim to fame is that it is (almost) compatible with Office? Why endure the hassle of running macros and conversion programs to convince StarOffice to digest your MSOffice documents when you already have MSOffice to do that job quite nicely, without the conversions and the macros.
Anything that has a chance to replace MSOffice needs to deliver capabilities that are an order of magnitude better, and it needs to inundate the marketplace with shiny shrinkwrapped boxes.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare
Um, isn't that a little offtopic? StarOffice is cross platform; they're targeting corporate Widows users who are running MSO. The installation of StarOffice (or OpenOffice) is a breeze, it is really just double clicking a setup file.
I do agree with you that the package management and inconsistent (and rather ugly) GUI's of Linux will prevent it from being an OS for the average Joe for quite some time, but it's a fantastic server and the desktop has made enough progress that it is suitable for some government/corporate/educational settings (where there is an IT guy to handle all the config nonsense). We'll see what happens I guess.
But IMHO, Sun, Apple, and the FOSS community have learned that the best way to eat at MS isn't by pushing their respective OS, but by pushing superior cross platform apps that are easy to migrate to. Once you're not locked into a platform by your apps and trust vendors other than MS, a platform shift isn't as big a jump as it once was. How many home users do you know that considered or purchaced a Mac after falling in love with their iPod, or IT managers who are giving OSS another thought after seeing such gems as OOo, the Jakarta Project, or the Mozilla Foundation?
At one organization where I was sysadmin the powers-that-were were perfectly open to the idea of moving to Linux on the desktop. They had exactly one firm requirement: complete ability to read and write Word documents. After a lot of experimenting with OpenOffice, KOffice and Abiword, I wasn't able to give them an assurance on that ability. Yeah, I know, it can be done theoretically, but I found plenty of instances with our real-world documents where the porting didn't work at all. And so Linux went out the window.
Y'know, Word once played second fiddle to WordPerfect. But WordPerfect was a fairly simple and transparent format, and our friends at Microsoft zealously supported the WordPerfect format, and so were able to make inroads into WordPerfect's market share. Microsoft doesn't want that done to them.
All of which is an argument for an open document standard.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
All the (*) Microsoft Killer talk is old. I think what new vendors ought to do is to change the way of thinking that Microsoft has cultivated in its users. Show people that things can be different. But I know someone is going to say that that has been tried already. Honestly * Whatever Killer is a product bound for doom.
-Dickens
>> Microsoft intentionally breaks things from release to release..
Well, of course. That's great marketing strategy.
It is also Microsoft setting the rules for the game the open source challengers are playing. Their determining the design specs for StarOffice/OpenOffice. As long as MS can do that, open source will be a distant also-ran.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
At my last job, I was the lone OSS user in a sea of technophobics. Kind of odd for an Internet based distance learning company, but we won't go there now.
The owner had a hard line that Microsoft was on top because they were the best, and anyone who said different was just plain stupid. "If it was worth anything, it would cost money" was a phrase I heard on the few occasions when I brought up OSS.
OSS started to cheap in when several members of the sales staff found their IE installs no longer functioned. They'd all installed the same bit of spyware, not knowing what it was, and the Network admin claimed the only way to get things running again was a complete reformat.
While their computers waited in the queue, I installed Firefox on all of them. The sales staff was very happy, especially when I showed them how tabbed browsing worked. One of the sales guys even switched to Firefox for good. I liked this, because it meant the web developer had to remove the javascript he'd put on the intranet that blocked non IE browsers. He was genuinely pissed to learn the site worked fine in Firefox.
I also found that downloading the IE installer files from Microsoft and running them locally would get IE running again, but that's not relevant.
Next came the corrupt Excel documents.
The sales staff somehow managed to corrupt Excel files to the point where they no longer opened in Excel. The entire computer would blue screen when they tried. As these spreadsheets tended to contain data for students that had to be added to the system, the files were critical, and it would look VERY bad if we had to go back to the client and ask for another copy. (i know, backups. The sales staff did their best to avoid them.)
So I had them e-mail me the corrupt documents. They opened fine in OpenOffice, so I would just save them back to Excel and mail them back.
A forward looking salesman found out I was going on vacation, and wanted to make sure someone else would be able to "fix the broken files" for them. Mind you, I'd been telling him what I was doing all along, but he'd steadfastly believed there was some kind of black magic involved.
I installed OpenOffice on his secretary's computer, and had him watch while I talked her through the steps necessary.
File -.> Open
File -> Save As
He was very happy, and they the sales staff spent the next hour installing Open Office on all their machines. They didn't USE if very often, but it worked perfectly when they did need it.
And then I left for another job, just before the new corporate owner fired everyone in the company. My timing was damn near perfect.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
...for violating the Draconian Mind Control Act
I've been using the 6.5 java client on linux at work.
Seems to work ok for me. The archiving performance is much improved over the win32 client. That thing used to sit there forever if I selected more than a hundred messages or so to archive.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
The standard "in soviet russia" joke (nearly obligatory in every thread) is rated -1, troll, while this post is rated 5, but instead of "interseting" or "insightful" (it's both) it's rated "funny."
Christ, Taco, switch to coffee or Red Bull!
(BTW, tha capcha is spelled wrong; it's "irritate" not "irrigate"!)
Microsoft requires sales to drive development. To drive sales they "encourage" upgrades as much as possible. Most businesses, though, have been through expensive (both in terms of people power and money) Office upgrades several times in the last decade. They are understandably getting more and more gun-shy about upgrading yet again. For the home-user that simply needs to create documents for themselves, the competition is even more stiff. Several of my non-IT-concerned friends have not upgraded from the Office that came with their computer. Their Office does everything they need and they understand it. They see no need to go through the disruption of upgrading. Without the upgrades the funds to supply Office development will decrease. MS could raise prices, but that would prevent more people from upgrading. They could (as they have done) break backwards compatibility, but that also makes folks fear upgrading.
-LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
Hmmph. Reminds me of what a wise Editorial Services manager once said. She was told that a certain conversion process was "99% reliable." She said "It is useless to me unless it is 100% reliable, because unless it is 100% reliable we will need to proofread it again, and proofreading accounts for more than two-thirds the work we do in preparing a document."
It doesn't matter if most of the simpler conversions do work, because it takes just as much time to inspect a conversion that works as it takes to inspect one that didn't.
And the better the conversions, the worst the problem--because you'll tend to let your guard down, and the errors that do occur will be infrequent and subtle, but just as serious.
This was a department that prepared NIH grant applications and papers for submission to scientific journals. The NIH grant applications were limited to IIRC twenty pages and had to be submitted on preprinted forms with boxes print on them for the text of the application. It was not rare for scientists to use every square millimeter of available space. If a conversion changed a line break and resulted in a line spilling over to a 21st page, it was a disaster.
And, guess what: equations need to translate.
They found that out the hard way: when they submitted a grant application in which the text had been munged by some "transparent" conversion... that had changed all of the alphas and betas to A's and B's.
Now, you'll say, "but this same problem exists when you transition from one version of Microsoft Word to another." And, yes, you'd be right.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Roast beef on wheat sandwich in a public park is to 12oz Angus steak with baked potato and nice California wine in a restauraunt that requires reservations (or you could sneak in through the kitchen).
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
MS Office has evolved well beyond a simple suite of Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation software.
I'm no fan of MS but I can recognize that the office package is much more than just the programs. The major program used by most businesses is Outlook in combination with MS Windows Server 2k3 as a domain controller. People use outlook and exchange because they work with other things, like the Blackberry server software (which, if you can believe it, is even more unstable than exchange.)
I love open source and use it whenever possible. The problem with MS stuff is that everyone uses it, it's compatible with software from other vendors, and there are a lot of programs built on top of it. If you don't have full Outlook compatability (including calendars, address book, etc. because all these things are stored on the exchange server) then nobody will seriously use your software, point blank. The open source alternatives do not (no, they don't, I have several people at my office who try to use them and they don't work right; calendars get out of sync, address books get wiped, etc.)
You're not going to beat MS at their own game. Their marketroids are very good at convincing CTOs they need the latest and greatest MS product, and if you use them as the products are supposed to be used, they work well enough. SharePoint is already the most popular corporate intranet platform, and it's integrated with Office as well. Office is a client/server package, and if you want to replace MS Office, you have to be compatible with the server.
Try opening a Word 2003 document in Word 97, or Word 6, dude.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Many folks I know are very interested in an alternative office suite when the subject comes up. They do not have 200-300 bucks to spend on MS Office and wouldn't spend that kind of money on any software program anyway.
...
The difficulty, though, is that whereas you can buy MS Office by walking in to almost any computer store, getting hold of Star (or for that matter Open) Office is very difficult. Where I live it is hardly ever available except online and that rules it out for anyone who doesn't have access to broadband. You can often get it off magazine cover disks, but ordinary Joe's find computer zines extremely forbidding.
The same is true of Linux. A major PC store I know in central Londond doesn't stock a single copy of any version of Linux. I wonder how much marketing dosh MS are slipping them
If an alternative to MS Office was easily available then I reckon a lot more folks would be using it. Even then, many home users still wouldn't use it even if they wanted to. They are running old machines with, say, Win98 and only 32 or 48 megs of ram. For them, I'd guess that MS Office 97 still does the job for a few notes from, say, a second-hand stall or car boot. But I'd be a little surprised if new versions of an alternative could run well in such modest resources.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
For businesses, the cost of MS Office isn't too draining. Sure, to the folks working there (outside of the Accounting department), $500 sounds like a lot of money to put into each computer. But, when you think of the money that the company is already making overall AND the productivity of the person using that $500 piece of software, it's a small price to pay. Now, if you are in a small business, maybe that $500 looks steep. In those cases, an alternative to MS Office is understandable. However, in a company of substantial size, $500 is pennies. You'd probably find more than that being blown daily on company expense accounts, quality assurance rejects, and unnecessary "business lunches".
Love 'em or hate 'em but Microsoft has better backward compatibility that almost any software company...sometimes to their detriment. They get beat up all the time on /. and elsewhere for not making great leaps forward because of their concerns with backward compatibility. It's not like their complete idiots. If they wanted to they could throw Office and Windows legacy code out and start fresh. But if they did it would piss their customers off.
Show me your proof that MSFT intentionally adds incompatibilities to new versions of Excel etc.
"the average user has major problems with the gui being slighting different and commands being in different menus."
Like the interface changes from Office 6.0 to Office 2000 to Office 2003 to Office Vista etc?
yep, the average user has problems adapting to that. But they eventually get used to it.
I don't feel like it...
You need to add the price of Outlook to the price of StarOffice to make the comparison. The vast majority of small offices buy the MS stack for two reasons:
1) Support is cheap: you can find a monkey-me to fix (find the right patch) by throwing a brick.
2) The stack includes Exchange/office: Many Word-Processors & Spreadsheets, etc..., that are roughly the same for most purposes. But MS lookOut includes decent scheduling built in & that they are used to using.
You can throw VB scripted crap in, but those are the biggies for the Small Business sector.
- It's my $.02, and I want it back
I can't beleive that no one has pointed to it yet: http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.0rc/index.html
This is not my Sig.: Give me $.02 anyway, I want it.
You mean I can download the source to Yahoo and Google?!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
^^ very good point, just another reson why a linux consolitadion effort is just not a vaild path to take! ThaFooz is right on. extending his point a little, the keeping microsoft at the top of the list (so to speak) is no longer (IMHO) just simply better driver support, or better X or better Y, its now a case of no choices, there is no opposition to Windows on x86 for a home user (nobody suggest that ur average home user can run linux with no problems, cos you'll be wrong!) Apple are on the verge of a make or break (do or die :p) deal to start on x86 (even though it already been hacked on) so that may redress the balance slightly but i doubt it, but as Foozmeister says its all about the ability to switch OS without switching apps, and thats a good direction that we're heading in. lets just wait for KDE4 Plasma hey :D
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
"However, StarOffice ships with a Macro Migration wizard that will aid in the migration of Microsoft Visual Basic macros to the StarOffice Basic macro language. "
Most of the programming work I do is at large banks in the area of securities valuation. That means lots and lots of analyzing my client's godawful ugly math and writing the algorithms that tell them what they want to know on a daily basis.
Why, in the name of all that is good, won't these stinking Office Suite hack-shops write a good fucking interface for external languages? VBA sucks the monkey's ass. And because MS changes their object model every release anything moderately complex breaks and/or can no longer be modified when the outsourced techie drones (no offense) come and upgrade everyone to the next MS stack.
I would be in heaven if I could write some of this shit in python or ruby or Lisp (+ gasp! (many tearsofjoy)), and see it continue to run if I switched from MS Office to Staroffice or gnumeric + whatever db...
It's not just the document formats that need to be open/standard. Its the interfaces for coding these stupid things.
All the more so because there are so many opportunities in the workplace for little off the cuff programs based on silly little spreadsheets that make everyone's life a zillion times easier. Not everything needs to be a J2EE/.NET ballbuster. But migrations and upgrades really should not be this difficult.
imagine writing your custom excel functions in perl and they will also run in Star Office.
That would impress me.
(sorry for the incoherent rant. i am just waking up)
You are correct in that, people run what comes on the computer. This is gradually changing, you *can* get Linux and other open source apps pre installed, but it is at a glacial pace still.
Lets face it, the bulk of all word processing is pretty basic -- letters, memos, proposals and other basic functions. And management in many organizations are starting realize this. Even more importantly, they see the ridiculous prices that Microsoft charges them for a tool that has existed for many years and they don't like paying it. Several hundred dollars for a program that most people will only use the most basic features of and that hasn't changed for many years*? Ha ha. What a waste of money.
Okay, I'm preaching to the converted, but as someone working in a mid-sized business in a very competitive industry (read: thin margins), I am starting to see this happen. Management (both senior level and IT) are seriously looking at OO and other open source projects where I work. Not because they think its better, but because its good enough to do the job and won't waste money that can be better used elsewhere.
As to vendor lock-in, I definitely see this as a problem in larger organizations and in ones that have specialized needs. But for most small to mid-sized companies this doesn't apply (and probably doesn't for quite a few large ones either).
The change won't come from direct confrontation with MS's main base: large, heavily integrated organizations. They have invested too much to change easily and even when they choose to change it takes a long time. It will come from the smaller players that need to adapt quickly and continually just to survive. By the time the big integrated companies change en-masse, the game will have been over for quite a while.
* yes, I know it has changed (and in many, many ways), but the whole everyone knows Word = wordprocessing (and excel=spreadsheet, etc) cuts both ways. MS may have lock-in with the file format and familiarity with the interface, but people also resent repeatly paying big $$ for more-or-less the same thing. Another $400 for a new word processor? didn't we just buy one a few years ago? is the old one broken?
You can't kill the competitor if the average Joe hasn't heard of you.
Zing!
Office is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet. When I can edit documents online from a web page and it looks and feels like an application then you know no one is going to buy MS Office ever again. The real question is who is going to build the AJAX suite and what pricing model will they use.
We've all known for years that "Applications Are Not Possessions". You can't own "Word". You can have a CD with a copy of Word on it, but you can't own it. You can put that CD in a nice shiney box and fool people into thinking they can own data... but they can't. No one can own data.
For year's MS has fooled people into thinking they were buying products when they were actually buying data. Software building is and will always be a service. Let me repeat that for those who don't get it. You can't own data, making data is a service. There's even a word for making a service look like a possession, it's called "Productizing." MS got rich by taking something that was infinately reproducable and selling it like a commodity. Great marketing.
AJAX will kill that. When people realize they can pay $15 a year for the service of word processing online, Word dies and the people who make $15 a year on a million customers win. Send me the royalty checks.
Have a gmail account? Try the rich text editing for composing emails. Yeah, that's just some basic features now, but what you see is the very beginnings of a Google replacement for Word.
random underscore blankspace at ya know hoo dot comedy.
The fact that SatrOffice does not run for the Mac shows the weakness of the product. Mac zealots are easy picking for an Office competitor. That's why Microsoft makes a version of Office for the Mac, they know that's a possible leakage point. Sun seem to be clueless about this. Nobody seem to realize the combination of two things. How many things really take hold when they are release for Mac (USB ports, Mp3 players, Music downloads (legal ones), etc) and how much companies like Microsoft realizes this... If the competitors don't see it, Microsoft can (and does!) get away with a half-baked effort.
Non-sequitur. You can base your business on open source without necessarily making everything you produce, using those open source tools, available under an open source license. Same way the letters you write in Microsoft Word belong to you, rather than Microsoft.
there was an article about how Firefox is peaking out, but their marketshare is still in the single digits.
.001% of documents they receive from outside the office. Sun needs an aggressive marketing campaign to address this fear.
"'It looks like Firefox has hit the push-back point,' said Geoff Johnston, an analyst with WebSideStory. 'We always knew there was a finite number of early adopters out there and a finite number of Microsoft haters who would switch to something new, but we didn't know what that number was. It looks like we're approaching it.'"
So, how is StarOffice going to be any different? Granted, users have to pay for MS Office, but it still comes as a pre-bundle option at a significant discount from all of the PC manufacturers.
Where is Sun's marketing campaign to raise awareness of StarOffice with the non-geek crowd?
Better Product != More Marketshare; Apple has proven this time and time again.
The problem is that people are afraid of spending money on a product that's not going to be 100% compatible. StarOffice could be 99.999% compatible, and users are going to be worried about the
Anti-MS wishful thinking doesn't make things a reality. Anyone who has seen the demo of the next MS Office knows it is doing some pretty cool things that Star Office doesn't begin to touch. The reality is that Office 2003 does plenty that Star Office 8 doesn't.
With the new ms office due out next year; take the visual stuff, the PowerPoint objects look amazing and have some awesome features. Outlook for example finally is taking advantage of the tasks and integrating them, Excel has allot of improvements, even Word is better (auto preview comes to mind), Access is getting an intuitive interface, and just look at some of the collaboration tools that are coming.
My point is this... these anti-ms people say "MS doesn't innovate" and "MS Sucks" so often they start to really believe MS doesn't innovate in any area, and their developers can't make a good program. Its fun to joke about MS, but my re-occurring theme on Slashdot is that these guys are just intellectually dishonest.
People say MS is going to get "killed" whenever there is a new open source product that is ALMOST as good as most of the commonly used features of a 3 year old MS product. Come on... really.
Your problem isn't that your "I hate MS" message doesn't get out to the masses. Your problem is that it does. People here you, and when they try the MS product; the world doesn't end, it works, and they like. It gets the job done.
MS didn't bundle Office with the OS, they offered a cheap alternative (MS Works), and people chose the more expensive. Get over it already. Its not news everytime someone makes a product to compete with microsoft.
Even if... StarOffice or OpenOffice offered a superior, free product, the suits will not care, because they see Microsoft Office as a defacto standard. Anything else is chintzy, cheap, shoddy crap that only used-car salesmen and pedofiles would use. Really.
Here's a dramatization to illustrate the status symbol aspect of office suites:
Two suits are sitting across from eachother on an airplane. They both have AISLE seats damn it! Aisle! (Note: when asked for a seating preference, all respectuable suits quickly and forcibly answer Aisle!)
Suit1: Here's the floppy with our annual sales report on it.
Suit2: Thanks.
Suit1: You should be able to read it fine, it's a Word Document.
Suit2: Oh, no problem, I've got OpenOffice.
Suit1: What?
Suit2: OpenOffice, it's a free office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office; Word, Excel, etc.
Suit1: Uh, okay, whatever.
Suit1, thinking to himself: What a frikkin loser.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Its true, the average user doesn't know, and doesn't care. Most can't name an alternative office suite, whereas at least people have heard of Netscape and Firefox. I bet if you install StarOffice on someone's PC, they'd just refer to it as MS Staroffice, or maybe MS Office star.
A fifth grade teacher once gave us a lecture on the definitions of the words possible and probable.
Possible means something may happen.
Probable means the chances of something actually happening are good.
StarOffice killing MS-Office is a possibility. It's also possible that I will win the Powerball jackpot on saturday.
Neither are very probable, though.
see subect.
If you want to kill MS Office, why not go at it in a roundabout way? Unique, useful features, useful templates and novel ways to adapt them, extremely easy and fun presentation creation, again with useful templates and novel ways to adapt them...
.doc...
In other words: make people want to have and use Star Office (or any other FOSS Office) regardless. No company in their right minds is going to use Star Office INSTEAD of MS Office if they have any meaningful document exchange with the rest of the world.
But they might want to use BOTH.
I have Neo Office (OO for mac offspring) and can't think of any reason to use it over MS Office for Mac (of course I applaud the effort and am glad that there is an alternative, I just don't use it, is all). Apple's new Word Processor, Pages however gives me compelling reasons to use it over MS Word whenever I want to have good looking layouts without the usual effort. And well, of course I can save the result as
MS Office killer? Not while Office remains the de facto standard. Which won't change when every other software project treats it that way as well. I might however stop using Word altogether in the following years, depending on the direction next versions of Pages will take.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
For home/student use the Office Suite is quite cheap (I've seen Office 2003 for around $100 at Staples for a three-home user license). Microsoft is competing with stealing by pricing Office very low. Even for SMB and Enterprise users, sticking office isn't that much--on the purchase of a new machine Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PPT, Publisher and Outlook) costs about $190; I suspect enterprise customers are paying less than $100. At that price it's not worth looking at alternatives that are "nearly as good".
Other than not supporting Microsoft, what's the benefit to the alternatives.
Have heard such arguments a lot...and still we hardly have more than a couple of applications which really kill MS apps. For eg: ....Name one which is widely adopted ...
Thunderbird kills Outlook...Yea right, Thunderbird is still too crappy to even compare to Outlook 2003.
Linux kills Windows
The only closest thing is Firefox, which is doing pretty good job:)
And that is the reason why Massachusetts won't accept Microsoft Office. They want to have all of its documents being read by ANY word processor, now and into the future.
What was Microsoft's response? There are third party filters to convert to OpenDocument. What? You mean a software company can't write their own filters to support an Open Standard. Instead the new ads for Microsoft Office touts new features that 90% of the users would never use.
My resume was written orginally in Word95 and then converted to Word97. The transition was not smooth but I got it working. I tried using it in Word2K and that was useless. It couldn't handle the table structure correctly.
I was so fed up with the transitions problems that I downloaded OpenOffice.org to make sure all my personal documents were secure. Well it turns out that OpenOffice was able to edit it even better than Word97. I will no longer trust Word for important personal documents.
No
Explore your creative side
Regardless of what anyone says about the benefits of Star Office and/or the open document format, I won't start using it until Google Desktop for Windows and Spotlight for my Mac can index the contents. Until then I will (reluctantly) stick with Microsoft Office.(Man, I feel like I'm repeating myself)
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I'm totally looking forward to OpenOffice becoming more of a standard. As a writer, I love using OO for most of my writing. Especially when I'm including a large amount of screen shots into my documents. OO handles the load so much better than MS Word. Try including 10 or more screenshots in a Word document and it chokes. Plus, I hate it when I get an assignment and the client requires the use of a MS Word template file. Now it looks like I may be able to convert these templates over to OO?!? That would be great. I'm all for it!
TheTiminator
"Am I supposed to stop that because they are popular now?"
:^P
And here in lies the problem that StarOffice is up against. But I digress, let me get to the real issue...
You damn Yankees fans! How can you even tell if your a real fan or not? You guys have had it so easy for the past, well, longer than I've been alive! Even the name "Yankees" is just an insult! You guys are not part of New England, you are not "Yankees". Please change your team name ASAP. I suggest "Yonkers", which is at least actually in NY.
Can you believe the standings? They must engineer this stuff. See you guys in Fenway, budy.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
While moving between star, open or microsoft office is trivial for technical people, the average user has major problems with the gui being slighting different and commands being in different menus.
I'll have to interject here. My job requires me to interact with people who often are upgraded from MS Office 2000 to 2002 or 2003 and the biggest complaint and call ins about those upgrades are on the Mail Merge GUI changes. These are actually the majority of calls on sucessful Office upgrades (rather than people calling in and saying "My Office gets a fatal exception!")
The steps when to three on a pop up on 2000 to a 6 step process on the task pane (which most persons upgrade to 2003 request for a way to turn off).
These are mostly average office workers who know nothing about Office other than the original way that they were taught, so this increases support and training costs for those upgraded even on just Microsoft products.
Personally, I think Microsoft has a bad habbit of over complicating things and not putting the minimum desired options on the screen at the same time. However, Office Vista might change that trend, but we will have to see.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If history is any guide, M$ will offer a "switch to classic view". They knew some people wouldn't like the color changes and new start menu in XP, and implemented easy ways revert back to the classic view. I would bet on M$ implementing the option to revert back to classic view.
70% of statistics are made up.
What word processor are you using now that guarantees everyone can open your document? Inside your company you can standardize on anything and it will work. I know companies who cannot read Microsoft Word documents, because they are still using WordPerfect 5.1 on dos!
Send a document to me in Microsoft Word format and it is hit or miss. Microsoft word does not run on FreeBSD, so I use Koffice (which is better than open office IMHO), but it cannot open everything. Like all good open source it is getting better every day, but you are taking a chance if you want to communicate with me and send a Word Document. In fact I will often just hit delete rather than open a Word Document, even at work where I have Microsoft Word installed on a windows machine. That is just me though.
OpenDoc is the closest to a universal format we have. It isn't perfect, but it is good enough for almost everyone which is why almost every company is switching to it - except Microsoft.
Imagine you are a contractor who has to work with that government. You essentially have 2 options: Run both OpenOffice and MS Office or run only OpenOffice. Even the most brainwashed TCO-zombie won't be able to deny which option is cheaper and easier.
So these companies will likely switch over to OO, too. Of course these companies have contact to other organizations and persons, so these will likely switch too. (For example most employees want to run the same software at home as they do at work)
Office won't be unseated anytime soon.
Depends on what you think of "soon". Not within this decade but maybe in the next.
Don't forget about Joe Sixpack who bought the $400 Dell on sale for school, then realized that it only comes with Works suite, which has Word, Outlook Express, and Works. He gets to school and finds himself needing to make presentations and use real spreadsheets (not Works crap), but he was planning on spending the remaining $300 that tuition left to his name on books, not Office Small Business Edition. I see potential for Star or OpenOffice to appeal to him. Of course, it would have to be able to share with Microsoft programs effectively. If he can't deliver his presentations on whatever computer the professor sets up for the class or share his spreadsheets with his project partners, it won't really work for him. Does anybody know how the interoperability is going the opposite way the article discusses?
is that the documents in M$ Word are stored an 'core dumps', state maps of the douments at the time they were stored.
.doc files are so hard to figure out. You have an enormous amount of cruff left in there.)
There is no way to NOT infect one document with the contents of another opened during the same MS Word work session. Apart from the confidentiality aspects, this can lead to some real legal problems for the user specially when linking or embedding other documents. (Imagine being able to get the contents of a previous document and being able to get to or at the spreadsheets which were used in a confidential document when you're just typing up a letter to your mother after a rough day of litigation. That's why the size of
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This is not the killer. The killer's arrival will not be heralded, it will be acknowledged after the fact. The killer will be simultaneously lauded by O'Reillly and dismissed by Dvorak in its rise. Then there will be silence. The office revolution will not be an event, it will be millions of small, barely noticed events.
Item - StarOffice is still butt-ass fugly. UGLY. If it doesn't look like something people will want to use, it will not catch eyes in an office and get people interested in what it actually does. Sad, perhaps, but true. Not sad if you have aesthetic self-respect and think your software should look good as well as work well.
Item - When you're biggest advertised features are tools to make it possible or easier to migrate between MS Office and other platforms, you're already sinking. File interoperability must be transparent and totally taken for granted, not a fucking tool. The tool paradigm for file interoperability pushes file translation back into the user's face, the last place it should ever be. Who sits around wishing they had an easier way to translate files? Nobody if they have a choice of not worrying about translation at all, and that's what MS Office offers.
StarOffice - downloaded often, used sometimes, rarely noticed. And it will stay that way until the product stops being managed by gearheads.
I think you underestimate the importance of open standards. OpenDocument format makes this time around different than the previous attempts to kill MS Office. After Massachusetts drove a stake in the ground saying "letting MS own (and change) the format of all of our information is a Bad Thing" and after they demonstrate that migration to another solution is possible, other states will follow suit. Schools may also follow, but that is another discussion.
Then Corporations then have an easier time justifying it. They don't like the MS upgrade treadmill either, or the threat of a BSA audit. They don't like paying more than they have to for licenses. With Office 12 coming out they are going to have to retrain either way. Since others have paved the way they are not out there alone taking a risk in leaving MS. Why stay with MS?
Once StarOffice reaches critical mass, driven by the OpenDocument standard, there will be little reason for anyone to stay with MS.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
It seems that people just use office apps for things that they shouldn't be. There's no excuse for this in a corporate environment (and will end up costing you quite a bit of money as soon as you can no longer read the format du jour!) If they'd stop that, there wouldn't be any issues. Shared data should be in open formats. Period. Letters to grandma or whatever, sure, go ahead and use any word processor you want. Nobody else needs to edit those letters but you, so know yourself out.
My best guess is that MS's monopoly over the Office suite market will end when China, India, South America and co. become important in the software market to lead large-scale changes.
We all know that the functionality of OOo is good enough for the vast majority of users. Why don't most of us switch? Because of switching costs. The file format is critical because it's how we send documents to each other. And most of us need to send and receive files from vendors, customers, and peers without pissing each other off with obscure file formats that impede work flow. Plus, since everyone knows and uses MS, there's a familiarity benefit - we've all used it at school, at work, and we have friends who use it.
In the places where computer penetration is much lower than "the West" the network benefits of using MS software are much, much weaker. I.e, since few people have MS Office installed, there is minimal file format advantage or familiarity advantage to using MS Office. Also, in those places, the relative cost of MS Software is much higher than the open source alternatives. Even if MS released a USD 50 Office + Windows combo in China, that would be the equivalent of at least a weeks labour for the average worker there. Plus, that would invite rampant grey market imports back to the West.
IMHO, I think that it's inevitable that the rapidly developing nations will adopt OSS, especially OpenOffice. When that portion of the global computer market becomes large enough, we'll start to see mass migrations in the West as well.
In the words of another slashdot poster that I can't seem to find anymore
:)
Seriously, the only way I can see MS Office loosing ground is if there's no preinstalled versions on new pcs, no more closed format documents (and don't get me started on their so-called 'open' XML), in other words: vendor lock-in. Plainly: it's not going to happen unless they are forced ... but given how the previous lawsuit worked out, that's pretty unlikely.
Microsoft Office has not always been the leader in office software, and it will not always be the leader in office software. In the height of the Roman empire, the Romans seemed invincible, and no power could wrench the Mediterranean from their hands. Fast forward a few centuries, and the "empire" is a shadow of its former self. Hopefully we wont have to wait centuries for Microsoft to decline, though.
When plain text isn't enough we need to use Microsoft formats because so many people can read them. We can't use other formats because only a few people can read them.
So, let those of us who don't like this change it. It isn't going to happen overnight, but over time it can happen.
What an individual can do
As one person, you can't do a lot, but you can do a little. As the saying goes Many a mickle maks a muckle
Whenever you need to send a document, send it in OOo 's native format. You'll get a reply back saying 'I can't read this', to which you reply with something like one of:
Obviously you have to pick your moments. Not a good idea to do this to an important client, or with your cv when job hunting, but other than that just do it!
One thing an authority (business or academic) can do
Mandate that documents sent by applicants / suppliers are in OOo format. If questioned about this explain that you use OOo internally and can't risk any mistranslations
For hardware vendors
There's a local chain store that sells their own house brand of (sometimes rebadged) computer accessories.
In recent times I've noticed that they are filling the unused portion of the "driver" CDs with OOo. So far I've received copies of OOo with a TV tuner card & an ADSL modem.
No idea why they have chosen to do this, maybe they just see it as a low cost way of making it look like they can bundle software like the "big boys"
So, if you're sending out a CD and there's space on it, pop in a copy of OOo.
Summary
There's many ways to get people to adopt open software. Evangelism is one, giving it to people is another, even forcing it down people's throats.
Let's get out there and get the world on open software.
If Sun was not as anti-open source as Microsoft, they would release StarOffice under the GPL, then Microsoft would really be screwed.
But from reading Slashdot, I can only conclude Sun is the even more against open-source then Microsoft.
What good is it having two closed source office suites?
19^H^H2000^H1^H2^H3^H4^H5 may be the year of LINUX on the desktop.
The SUN StarOffice product is now at v8, and supports MS Windows, x86 Linux, Sparc and x86 Solaris. MSFT's Office product will be at v12, and still only supports MS Windows and Mac OSX.
If SUN really was interested in challenging MSFT everywhere, they would also produce a Mac OSX version (and, for that matter, a PPC and Sparc Linux version, too.) Just how difficult can this be for the OEM, who has the source code?
...has been around for years, is free, and so much like MS Office that you't think it would have overwhelmed MS Office by now.
But there you have it: as good as OO is, as much like MS Office as it is, and even though in some ways it's better, folks still go out and spring the big bucks for MSO.
StarOffice? If the freebie OO hasn't barely dented the MSO dominance, how on earth will SO? It'll get a health chunk of the paying market and be the darling of Microsoft haters, but the hoi poloi will still flock to MS Office.
i run a small computer shop in a small town south dakota, and we are pushing oos when ever possible (with support). one of our happy customers in in shool and she needed M$O for her accounting class, well, she did not have the $$$$$$ and i told her about OO.o. she is very happy and getting her home work done.
one more convert and one more lost sale with out piracy.
aww the constitution