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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."
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!
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.
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.