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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.
Companies will keep their installed versions of Office and won't even care of upgrading to Office 12 ?
Like those great failures, Yahoo and Google?
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?!?)
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?
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
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
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?
God forbid someone would want their documents to be usable by other groups they work with or that someone would want citizens to be able to download government documents and read them in a program they already have. Sure, OpenOffice is free, as long as you have heard of it, and have broadband, or a couple of days to spend downloading. Haha, nobody likes dial-up users anyway. Screw them.
Oh man, the fact that moving to an open format will prevent 98% of the population from being able to read government documents without downloading or buying a new program they've never heard of and don't want is great. I'm surprised people in the government didn't think of this sooner as a way around the freedom of information act. Just give everyone copies of documents in formats they can't use.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
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.
Gee, where did anyone say you had to have Open or StarOffice? How about PDF, that is an open format is most likely te primary way files will be made available to the public. Not to mention there is nothing stopping MS from supporting OpenDocument either, which I believe was really the goal of this hard line approach. It is simple economics, if they want Mass. as a customer, they will deliver what the customer wants. It certainly wouldn't be difficult from a technical persepctive since they already support dozens of obscure fileformats already (WordPerfect 5.1 anyone?)
Finkployd
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."
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
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?
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"
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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.
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
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 $100. At that price it's not worth looking at alternatives that are "nearly as good".
Other than not supporting Microsoft, what's the benefit to the alternatives.
If history is any guide, M$ 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.
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?
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.