Google Pack Adds StarOffice

derrida writes The GoogleOS Blog has the news that Google Pack, their collection of applications, now includes StarOffice. 'It will be interesting to see why Google didn't choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.'"

Comments

Ask That Question Again

[photomonkey]

From the summary...

"StarOffice includes...tools for Microsoft Office migration"

I think that they suspect that they can wean people off some of the Office stuff rather than just forcing them to go cold turkey.

Re:Ask That Question Again

[Groggnrath]

rather than just forcing them to go cold turkey

Isn't this how Linux got Ubuntu? People don't like massive changes all at once.

Re:Ask That Question Again

[watchingeyes]

Or perhaps they're planning on some future integration between Star Office and Google Docs (Star Office using Google Docs as a backend online storage option with on-the-go editing and collaboration features over and above Star Office's default set come to mind...).

Re:Ask That Question Again

[fmarkham]

From the StarOffice FAQ http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/faqs/t echnical.jsp#q_13:

Q: What are the differences between StarOffice 8 software and the OpenOffice.org 2.0?
A: StarOffice 8 software is a commercial product built on OpenOffice.org's open source code to provide the best value, multi-platform Microsoft compatible office suite aimed at organizations and consumers. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the leading open-source project aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community. StarOffice includes licensed-in, third-party technology such as:

• Spellchecker and thesaurus
• Mail Merge Wizard does not have the ability to send mail merge documents as emails.
• Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
• Select filters, including Asian word processor filters
• Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery
• Migration Tools and Macro Migration Wizard. The converted macros does not run in OpenOffice.org
• Sun Java System Configuration Manager for Solaris, Linux and Windows.

In addition to product differences, StarOffice offers:

• Updates/upgrades on CD
• Sun installation and user documentation
• 24x7 Web based support for enterprises and consumers
• Help desk support
• Warranties and indemnification guarantee Training
• Professional services for migration and deployment

Obvious

[LowSNR]

StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration. I'd say they just answered their own question. Google wants to court MS Office users. Is this a surprise in any way?

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[jolyonr]

Either that or some kind of favour for a favour. And exactly what that involves I really don't want to know.

Jolyon

$69.95 U.S.

[krischik]

Did I miss something? I allways thoght that StarOffice is a commertial product - One you actualy pay for - $69.95 U.S to be precise.

So how does google do it then?

Martin

Re:$69.95 U.S.

[kaiwai]

Actually, its a free product in Solaris x86/SPARC - as for Windows, ever thought that *maybe* Sun approached Google and will use that as a way to get people to atleast *try* StarOffice 8 - then if they want support and so forth, to pay for it? Its all about getting the Sun name and brand out there, making the name known by non-technical people; making it more accessible rather than it being viewed as the domain of the purely UNIX geeks.

For me, I hope Indiana/Sun hook up with Google and use the Google hype, and integration with Google and Indiana to push it further out there as an alternative to Windows.

Re:$69.95 U.S.

[dn15]

Did I miss something? I allways thoght that StarOffice is a commertial product - One you actualy pay for - $69.95 U.S to be precise.

So how does google do it then?

I present two possibilities for your consideration:

1. Google made a deal with Sun for promotional purposes. I doubt they were selling many copies to begin with but might make good advertising for the Sun brand.
2. They pirated it using BitTorrent and are now illegally redistributing it.

I'll let you decide which one is more likely. ;)

Re:$69.95 U.S.

[stm2]

StarOffice education license was free, at least in version 7.

Re:$69.95 U.S.

[niceone]

I present two possibilities for your consideration:

1. Google made a deal with Sun for promotional purposes. I doubt they were selling many copies to begin with but might make good advertising for the Sun brand.
2. They pirated it using BitTorrent and are now illegally redistributing it.

Using Slashdot logic: 1 involves "deals" and "advertising" so it is probably evil. 2 involves piracy and BitTorrent so is probably just fighting the evil of copyright and outdated business models. And Google do no evil, so must be 2. Am I right?

People don't want choices

[Asmor]

I'm going to give the summary the benefit of the doubt and assume the question was intended as why they don't include both OO.org and StarOffice.

The answer, of course, is that people don't want choices. Be happy that Joe Schmoe might even consider installing some weird program that's not made by Microsoft, don't expect him to decide whether he wants OpenOffice.org ("What is that, some website?") or StarOffice.

Google chose what they thought would be most useful to most technically-disinclined people.

Re:People don't want choices

[McGiraf]

OpenOffice.org ("What is that, some website?")

duh! every Joe Schmoe knows websites ends in .com

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[tha_mink]

'It will be interesting to see why Google didn't choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.' Ahem...isn't that enough? Tools for MS Office integration being a must_have these days and all....

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[tomhudson]

Or maybe they recognize that some PHBs won't go with "free", and StarOffice has the needed "we can get multiple licensed copies for a fee" thing going ...?

... and that google may want to encourage a more diverse ecosystem, with more vendors, as a couterweight to an either-or choice - MS-Office or OpenOffice?

What google did wasn't evil - they're supporting StarOffice, and this will help continue to develop the product. Competition is good, mkay? :-)

Staroffice without Linux...

[neapolitan]

My previous hospital (a very large tertiary-care facility) made the switch from Microsoft Office to Staroffice in late 2005. I had a decidedly mixed experience.

At first, I thought it was the coolest thing around -- can use opendocument formats and pdf. Unfortunately, the administration set them up on Windows 2000 workstations instead of switching to Linux. After several weeks of use, for the majority of tasks there was *no* difference (typing memos / patient letters, simple spreadsheet stuff.)

However, for anything more advanced (pivot tables) I found myself relearning stuff (StarOffice calls it a DataPilot). This wasn't too bad.

My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between .ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the .bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow. There were also many small incompatibilites with Excel importing.

Openoffice / Staroffice is also definitively slower than Microsoft Office on startup and for most tasks I used. After awhile most doc's / staff members griped, "I am just saving the hospital money that I would never have seen anyway, why do I have a headache using this generic stuff when we could just have the real thing?"

Don't get me wrong; I use Linux exclusively at home (except for one WinXP box for VPN to work through a Juniper client that is a pain under Linux). I use OpenOffice at home.

However, for the enterprise the average user doesn't care that the IT department will save a few hundred thousand dollars a year -- they just want what is better or faster, or lacking that, what they already know how to use. The average user also doesn't care about the open source philosophy that you and I do.

The hospital still uses Staroffice (at least when I left) and you could request a workstation to be equipped with Microsoft Office if needed. I wish that the hospital had gone with Linux workstations, with Citrix / virtualization of apps that are Windows only, which would have given the clear benefits of Linux (stability, no spyware installed, etc.) with Staroffice.

The short story is - Staroffice in itself was slower and (from the average user's perspective) not as good as Microsoft Office, the current standard, and was perceived as an inferior product. I *really* think that had this change been bundled with a switch to Linux on the desktop, which would have enhanced the user experience (no more popups / junkware slowing down the system) it would have been a great thing; but by itself it was not that useful. Again, just one user's experience, but this was a large corporation with thousands of workstations.

  - Anybody else have similar experience with ditching Microsoft halfway in the corporate setting?

Re:Staroffice without Linux...

[Budenny]

I took a small organisation to Linux and OpenOffice. The secretary/admin had only ever used MS Office previously. It was acceptable. There was a clear reason: money was very tight indeed. This certainly helped, it wasn't just ideology, there was a legitimate motivation rooted in the organisation's values of limiting overhead spend. There was a certain amount of confusion about small details of different operation of spreadsheets. The issue is, they are very similar but not quite identical. Most of the things she was used to worked about the same however - particularly filtering. However, pivot tables/data pilot turned out to be very hard to get used to. Mailing list label generation in Writer was another difficult point. I am terrible at this stuff myself and found it quite hard to teach. Well, hard to learn first.

Linux by contrast, the OS, turned out to be easy for everyone. It was indeed very stable. It turned out to supply lots of other free specialist software that we needed, and the people who needed it, not having run any proprietary equivalents in the past, just learned the new stuff and quite liked it. We created a couple of accounts for different people who work on different days, and they liked having the freedom to arrange their stuff how they liked.

Multiple desktops are one of the surprising things in Linux for new users. You must always teach them carefully and show people how to use them, and once they get used to them, they are something that is used all the time. What they really like is being able to leave one bit of work exactly as it was, move over to another workspace, do something else, and come back to exactly what you left as you left it. If you do move people to Linux, don't neglect to teach this. They will really come to appreciate it.

The big deal with calc turned out to be not the differences, which were a small irritation, but spreadsheets themselves. To get what we needed done, we ended up having to use array formulae. If you do this you will find that the average intelligent and computer literate person, even one who has worked quite a bit with spreadsheets, simply stops here. So we ended up with a spreadsheet that had a sort of mental 'off limits' tag on one of its worksheets. This works, I don't understand what it does, I don't want to know, if it goes wrong I will call up x and have him fix it. But this was a function of spreadsheets and arrays, not the way OO handles them.

There was a sort of side effect for our own admin. She left us, but before she went I watched a couple of other part timers being taught how to use the system, and the general account was, its a bit different, this is how it works, when you get used to it, its fine. But there was a definite increase in confidence that had come from mastering some new stuff, which at first had seemed rather forbidding, but had turned out to be adaptable to need.

If you do this, you have to understand you are asking people to do something unknown and a bit frightening, and absurd as it seems, something they really do not know whether they can do. I got the feedback a couple of times that 'I was so nervous about this, but I've actually learned it better than I thought I would'. You have to very much take the line that it just takes a bit of time, let them make mistakes, be instantly available when they need help, never get impatient. Pick the right time to explain just the right amount of what lies behind things. If you get them through the first few steps, the increased confidence will take them the rest of the way.

One of the most reassuring things you can say to people as they start is: you cannot do any damage to the system. Explain that they are signed on as a user, there's a backup of all the data, and nothing they do is going to damage anything. This is enormously reassuring.

All in all I would say, go for it. If you focus on the needs of the users and helping them, there's no reason it won't succeed.

Re:Staroffice without Linux...

[Actinide]

My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between .ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the .bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow.

Few things irritate me more than a meeting that insists on .ppt, and which won't let you plug your own laptop into the projection system. But there is a solution for this: export your talk to .pdf using a mechanism of your choice (embedding all fonts of course), and display it full-screen in Adobe Viewer. I've seen the occasional startled-looking convention centre IT drone when I've made this request, but even the most blinkered of them are able to accommodate it.

OK so you don't get to use any movies this way, or animated builds, but you can at least build text in by using multiple pages which differ only by a single bullet point if you are that way inclined (Apple's Keynote can build a .pdf in this form automatically, presumably other presentation applications can as well). And on the plus side you get, pure, guaranteed cross-platform compatibility - something powerpoint has never been able to do even between different versions of MS windows.

Re:Staroffice without Linux...

[solferino]

definitively/definitely

Re:Staroffice without Linux...

[rainer_d]

If you do this, you have to understand you are asking people to do something unknown and a bit frightening,

The Head of IT in the German city of Schwäbisch Hall had the oldest female member of staff demo some day-to-day work (via a beamer) to the rest of the staff on the new linux desktops.
When the rest of the staff saw that even the old lady could master it, they couldn't complain about the system being "too complicated" whithout putting an egg on their own face...
This (true) story always reminds me of the morale that psychology matters even more than technical facts and orders.

It makes a huge difference...

[sykopomp]

...my coworkers refused to switch to OpenOffice, even though it was completely free. The dealbreaker? lack of clip-art, templates, etc. It's more likely than you think. Most of us might not care about silly things like that, but most people that I've run into tend to rely heavily on clip-art and templates.

Re:It makes a huge difference...

[Ash-Fox]

...my coworkers refused to switch to OpenOffice, even though it was completely free. The dealbreaker? lack of clip-art, templates, etc.

On Ubuntu, Kubuntu: sudo apt-get install openclipart-openoffice.org

This gives openoffice the clipart from http://www.openclipart.org/

As for templates, there are some in OpenOffice, just not many.

StarOffice is blog aware

[sagefire.org]

I am guessing that Google plans on using the Star Office blogging add-on to bridge the gap between desktop app and web-app.

Imagine writing a document and telling it to save to your Google account online and then being able to work with it remotely via Google Docs and blogger (also owned by Google).

Then again, maybe Sun has an aqua-native Mac OS X port that they have been secretly working on? That would make it much more attractive too.

Eric Schmidt is no dope. Seeing a Google-Sun collaboration does make me think of all of the old Apple-Sun rumors. And, Schmidt is on the Apple Board.

Basically, Star Office is OpenOffice.org + extras. So, if he could make a deal to distribute that for free, why bother with Star Office - "extras" at all?

Re:But still can only install to C: drive...

[xsspd2004]

Wait until it downloads, pause Google Updater, grab the temporary file from D&S\AU\ApData\GU\cache. It should be an exe once it is downloaded. Rename it to something meaningful and presto, StarOffice. You can install wherever you want.

I don't really see what makes it any more compelling than OpenOffice.org so far.

Warning, I didn't read the EULA, so proceed at the risk of Google Street View taking a picture of you running around your house in the underwarz.

Re:Google Docs Backend for StarOffice

[watchingeyes]

I'm hoping they do (I would switch to StarOffice in an instant, even if I have to run it through Parallels). However, there have been other things in the past that have seemed blatantly obvious to me but that Google has either taken 3 years to do or else have never bothered doing, things that seem obvious to me...

(Group chat in gchat, web clip for igoogle vis-a-vis OS X Leopard [I actually wanted this BEFORE Apple even introduced it], desktop gmail application that provides identical functionality instead of having to use it through clients with crappy interfaces, Google calendar auto-syncing between mobile devices; pcs and the service itself, desktop client for Google notebook with support for offline use [Google gears support would be less than ideal, but would probably suffice]....and, well, the list goes on and on, so I'm not hedging any bets on what Google will do).

Re:why Google didn't choose to include OpenOffice.

[DrXym]

More likely because it is better.

StarOffice 8 might have received considerably more QA testing that OpenOffice and has some value added content, but two years of bug fixes and enhancements say OpenOffice is better.

The situation is a bit like Netscape was with Mozilla. If I recall, Netscape 6 was based off Mozilla 0.7 or 0.8. But by the time it had been tested and released, Mozilla was already several versions beyond. As long as you were prepared to trade off stability, you were better off sticking with the open source version because it was usually faster and had more features.

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[jlarocco]

Uh, no. Google pack appears to be very much targeted at home users.

Unless you get to spend all your time at work playing with Google Earth, fucking around with RealPlayer, using Skype, IMing your friends, and playing with photos.

In which case, I want to work with you.

Re:The reason? Who cares!

[m2943]

Every business person I've talked to says freedom takes a back seat to utility, price, ease of use and ease of migration any day of the week.

Well, then you're talking to stupid business people. The kinds of "freedoms" that "free software" guarantees are not some ideological gimmicks, their purpose is to reduce costs and business risks.

Most companies aren't choosing Linux just because it is open source, that is merely icing on the cake [...] They are choosing Linux for its cost, stability, etc etc.

Linux has low cost, high stability, and (most importantly) low business risk because it is open source.

Now, as for StarOffice, the fact that OpenOffice exists greatly reduces the risk of shipping StarOffice for Google because it means that if Sun screws up on StarOffice, Google can switch to OpenOffice with few problems.