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StarOffice Significantly Delayed
Emil S Hansen writes "ZDNet has a story about StarOffice being delayed until late 2000. The reason should be that they need some more coding done. 'Remaining efforts necessary to complete the Star Product offering relate primarily to additional coding, testing, and implementation.' But they should go into beta around spring/sommer 2000. " The original release was apparently scheduled for the end of this year, so this is fairly significant delay. However, as the article notes as well, the main competition for them, Office 2000 will not be out until roughly the same time. I should have been more clear - this is in reference to the Internet versions of both Star and Microsoft Office.
Update: 11/12 04:47 by Nik. ZDNet have corrected this story. StarOffice is not delayed until late 2000, but until the second half of Sun's fiscal year 2000, which, confusingly, is the first half of the actual year 2000, which Sun had already announced as planned.
For a long time, even after Sun announced their intention to develop an applications portal, Microsoft claimed that consumers *didn't* want to run applications over the web. It wasn't until shortly after Sun's announcement that MS also announced their plans.
We wouldn't have a web-based Office 2000 from Microsoft if it hadn't been for Sun. I think Microsoft made that quite clear before their about-face, that they didn't intend on developing one.
Most of their products were developed, not becuase of Microsoft innovation, but because someone else announced that they were going to do it, or were already doing it and Microsoft wanted that market, possibly to also protect the markets they had.
Look at IEFirst, would there have even been an IE if Netscape hadn't existed. Microsoft developed IE simply because they were scared of Netscape.
Second, Netscape 1,2 and 3 were undoubtedly better then IE. It wasn't until Microsoft had closed Netscape out of the market that Netscape didn't have the funding to be able to continue to innovate. The only reason that IE is better then Netscape now is that Microsoft cut off Netscapes only way of generating the income to continue to innovate.
To say that IE is better then Netscape because Netscape wasn't as good is like me tripping you in a race and claiming that you lost because you were too clumsy.
Also, when Mozilla comes out, then we'll see which is better :)
-Brent--
For a LAN however, Sun's whole idea is to subvert the PC paradigm. At my company, for example, we don't have hard disks on our desks. We use Sun servers and NCD X terms. Every time we need to do some word processing, we pull up a Citrix NT session in an X window and run Word.
Yes, it sucks. It really sucks. But that's how dominant MS Office is. Even at a committed Unix shop, we need to be able to generate and read Word files to interact with the rest of the world.
So, for an office without PCs (what Sun wants everywhere) running StarOffice over X is a hell of a lot better and cheaper than running an NT session + MS Office over X, which is what we're doing now.
When you look at the BIG picture, the TCO of going with X terms or the new SunRay type appliances is much less than a PC environment for a large company. Removing the WinFrame/Word part of that equation makes it look even better. StarOffice may not integrate effectively into the PC paradigm, but that's not really the point.
The point is that Sun doesn't have to compete with Microsoft on the PC desktop. They just have to make it possible to do business without a PC desktop, without any MS products. Then you can run your office on SunRays or super PalmPilots or that neato FreePad thing. It blows the whole thing wide open when you break the Word monopoly, which is really Microsoft's crown jewel.
Sun absolutely should not try to compete with MS on its own turf, that being marketing and fast releases, quality be damned. It'll never beat the Redmond hype machine. Sun's strength is in a high-quality product with better value. It should stick with that strategy because it's the single biggest advantage is has over MS.
Your insinuation being that Microsoft Office2000 is a shoddy piece of work, slapped together hastily as grist for the upgrade mill.
I have not found this to be the case. I use Outlook2000 and Word2000 in my regular daily work, and have few complaints. O2k is leaner, faster, and more reliable than O98 while at teh same time added features I've been lacking. Word2k has some excellent XML features that make my job a ton easier, and it still boots in a matter of eyeblinks.
When I downloaded StarOffice at home (nine hours - gak) I discovered that their metaphor appears to be "steal from the superficial appearance of MS Office but don't supply the back end support". I wasn't satisified. While I did observe crashes and bugs, their development would require heavy feature implementation rather than patches if they want to supplant the MS Office titan.
Microsoft Office may enjoy it's dominance partly due to the monopolistic operating system structure MS holds, but I think you would have a difficult chore proving that it is not the most complete, powerful, and intelligent office suite around.
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
> The new features offered in Office 2000 however useless do seem to be more abundant.
The uselessness of features is generally true of about 95% of the functionality for any given user of an office suite. I agree that most of the features in O2K are decidedly not the type of functionality that the average person is interested in; it is important to note, however, that for each time that a user actually does use one of these obscure features, the following generally hold true:
- That user experiences a major boost in productivity because an otherwise tedious or complex task has been automated or simplified;
- A document that has used one of these obscure features can be edited by pretty much any other installation of that office suite (assuming either full install or ready access to the installation source);
- The more a user can use the obscure internal functionality of an office suite, the fewer obscure function-specific applications the user will need to acquire, run, and distribute;
- The fewer specialized applications an office needs, the less of a support headache that office is going to have.
Thus, the average word-processing user has little use for things like column layout options; multi-editor, multi-version markup tools; flowcharting; advanced statistical analysis tools; and other niche functionalities. To users who need that one little feature, though, the ability to use the same office suite as everybody else in the office saves incredible amounts of time, effort, and frustration.$0.02,
Sundiata
Remember, kids, it's only premarital if you plan on getting married.
So is StarOffice. But the web versions of either product have not been released yet.
And don't forget, if it wasn't for Sun, there would be no web version of MS Office. Now that's what real competition does for consumers.
Microsoft does nothing on their own. Whatever they do, it's because someone else tries to do it better. The problem is that they prevent the competition from competing and then go back to doing nothing again.
-Brent--
I'd love to get a copy of StarOffice that worked under libc-2.1. If anything that should be their primary emphasis, but I have a feeling it's more like Sun wanting to get their portal integrated in it. Sun's pledge was primarily aimed at integrating Sun's portal and advertising Sun products through the word processor and not at improving the word processor itself. But any delay is a good delay. It just allows us unemployed C++ coders to show off while the suits with their PhDCS credentials and certification watch their schedules melt away.
The will is there, due to Microsoft's pricing, for corporate IS shops to give StarOffice a try. They'll try it now, or they'll try it in six months, because MS isn't going to drop their prices any time soon.
What corporate IS shops don't have is the will to keep trying it. They'll allocate the resources to give it a test run once. If they find it to be a piece of junk, there aren't likely to be any second chances.
Sun absolutely should not try to compete with MS on its own turf, that being marketing and fast releases, quality be damned. It'll never beat the Redmond hype machine. Sun's strength is in a high-quality product with better value. It should stick with that strategy because it's the single biggest advantage is has over MS.
They really should have said something about the fact that the article was about the web-enabled versions rather than the normal ones.
Personally, I don't see *any* reason you would want to run an office suite off the 'net. Just makes it easier for them to deny you access to critical software so that you go out of business. (Outta be great for M$, whenever they want to control a new market, they just make sure that the competitors are using O2K web version, and poof, they no longer can make documents.)
Maybe running one off a local server, like X can work, would make sense, but not for anything but *maybe* a spreadsheet, or a database. But since hard drives are dirt cheap, why would you want to waste your bandwidth like that? You'd have to upgrade to gigabit just to survive. I mean, 100 single user version licenses probably don't cost any more than 100 multi-user server licenses. Oh well.
The SEC filing specifically states that the delay will be until 2nd half of Sun's fiscal 2000 year. However, Sun's fiscal 2000 year is 1st July 1999 to 30th June 2000. In other words, this means the final product will be out and shipping in volume by the 1st half of calender 2000. The beta will be coming out by the end of this year.
Still, it does mean StarPortal will be 3-6 months later than previously stated...
on a happier note, Sun have had over 1,000,000 StarOffice 5.1 downloads in the last 2 months. See Press release. They have a download counter on their homepage, or go here for a direct link to the image. They also have a download counter for Java 2 SDK, and Solaris - though in the latter case, this is the number of "Free Solaris" orders... not downloads...