StarOffice 6.0 419
Lawrence Teo writes "News.com,
Infoworld.com,
and
eWeek
are all reporting that Sun's StarOffice 6.0, which will be released on May 21, will cost a measly $75.95. That's less than a quarter the cost of Microsoft Office. Details are also available at Sun's own StarOffice 6.0 website." Sun's press release mentions the new features, although if you're familiar with openoffice.org, you've got a pretty good idea of what StarOffice has to offer. An anonymous reader also points out that Sun has effectively one-upped Microsoft's various schemes to get its software into schools by making an unlimited donation of StarOffice to China's Ministry of Education.
$75.95 (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand the difference, either. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand the difference, either.
From the Star Office web site, "A single-user license lets you load the StarOffice office suite onto as many as five individual workstations or PCs..."
Nice licensing, but it doesn't compare with Open Office's unlimited multiple-user licenses for free.
Also, from the Star Office web site, "Through the OpenOffice.org Project, Sun has made full use of feedback from highly talented open source programmers. The StarOffice 6.0 suite shares a codebase with the OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite, future enhancement to the base source code are planned to be available, providing the best of both worlds to users."
Sun has certainly done everyone in the world community a great service by open sourcing Star Office, but it has not explained the difference between its version and Open Office.
I just hate glib marketing writing like this. Certainly the web site writer knew what we wanted to know. Why not just tell us?
Re:I don't understand the difference, either. (Score:2, Informative)
A database program, for one. More licensed clip art and fonts, for another.
I don't find that on the web site. (Score:2)
Re:I don't find that on the web site. (Score:5, Informative)
From the General FAQ [sun.com]:
Q. What are the differences between StarOffice 6.0 software and the OpenOffice.org 1.0?
A. StarOffice 6.0 softwre is a commercial product aimed at organizations and consumers while OpenOffice.org 1.0 is aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community. StarOffice includes licensed-in, third-party technology such as:
In addition to product differences, StarOffice offers:
As for me, I've installed OpenOffice 1.0 (I'm a TeX sort of chap), buy I can see this being great for businesses.
Support, Support, Support (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Support
2) Support
3) Support
If you buy staroffice, you have support. If you download openoffice for your business, you have to contract in support, which is probably as much per seat as staroffice.
If no money exchanges hands, especially when it comes to the almighty GPL, there is absolutely NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER that the software works. Sun stakes its very life and reputation on the fact that StarOffice will work perfectly. True, the open source community produces good code, but there's no GUARANTEE of good code. Sun spent 8 months in semi-public beta of this baby (I've been using it since September).
Sun found that more companies would use StarOffice if they charged a bit for it than if it were free, for precisely this reason. Remember, the market for office suites is corporate, not personal, especially for Sun.
assistance (Score:4, Funny)
Re:$75.95 (Score:4, Interesting)
I wasn't paying much attention to the updates so I was a bit surprised that all of the integrated mail and scheduling tools were gone.
The products that remain seem to be excellent with improvments in graphics and ease of use. I haven't used them enough to really be an expert, but they seem to be clean.
I'm highly dissapointed with the lack of scheduling and email. The integration with the Palm OS was a huge advantage for me and I was planning to push this suite to clients in large part on the merits of the clean Palm integration. Nevertheless, it seems to be a win.
Now, I need to find someone who will write a clean integration tool for the Palm on Linux functionality. KPilot is a mess and J-Pilot doesn't intigrate with any other desktop apps. Sigh....
RedStarOffice (Score:5, Funny)
Crescent Office! (Score:4, Funny)
"In the quest for learning and understanding, there is really no greater tool than technology," said Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research, Sun Microsystems. "With this contribution of software, Sun and the Ministry of Jihad will work closely with students, educators and suicide bombers to enhance their ability to compete in a global economy, while opening the door to greater productivity and achievements throughout the Islamic world. Sun Microsystems will provide al Qaeda with the office productivity tools they need to destroy all Zionists and Crusaders. Allahu Akbar!"
Re:Crescent Office! (Score:5, Insightful)
Avoid mixing "islamic world" with "Al-Quaeda" and avoid mixing Jihad with war/fight.
Al-Quaeda is a minuscule minority of the islamic world and does not represent it.
Jihad is an extremely broad term which sometimes means war, and most of the time doesn't.
Almost all americans and many europeans have a problem understanding these two things, and through this ignorance make wrong judgements of the muslim world and muslims, it would be good if you could avoid strengthening that by mixing these things together.
Actually it's free to all Educational Institutions (Score:2, Informative)
pre-order here (Score:5, Informative)
Re:pre-order here (Score:3, Funny)
"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-based (Score:5, Informative)
XML-based. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's become popular not becuase the technology itself is particularly revolutionary-- the technology is simple. It's become popular, rather, becuase of a number of very versatile, useful, well-done parser libraries that (for example) let you save and retrieve your structured data to and from XML without much fuss or work at all. As opposed to mucking about with file pointers and binary data and such yourself, and probably misusing a free() call somewhere and segfaulting. (There is also the associated neat ease-of-parsing technologies, like schema and XSL, but i won't get into that.) One such parser library was written by microsoft, and is part of ".NET". This is why microsoft is pushing XML right now; it's a development best practice. Or something of the sort. Not because they are moving toward XML as an "open standard".
(The fact it has a sexy acronym, and the fact that nebulous connections exist in people's minds between anything XML (no matter how useless) and the very useful technologies like SOAP and XSL that have sprung from XML, doesn't hurt.)
XML does not support interoperability in any way unless everyone agrees on common XML grammars for a specific task.
Unless Microsoft releases the XML schema for their new-office XML format, then the new MSWord format will be every bit as much unusable gibberish as the old MSWord format (except the new gibberish will contain a lot of > and < symbols, and begin with a standard tag identifying it as an XML document). Microsoft seems every bit as xenophobic as they'd ever been, and have given no indication they will release such a schema for any reason unless they are forced to as part of a court judgement terminating the current antitrust case with the states. And probably not even then, unless the court order is carried out by armed national guard members storming the Redmond compound.
Re:XML-based. (Score:3, Insightful)
However, while XML documents are easier to reverse-engineer for the reason you give, it can still be plenty difficult or maybe even impossible to decipher.
If you were using HTML, which doens't take much to become valid XML, you can use any of the following to achieve the same purpose (my apologies if i haven't remembered the exact css attributes off the top of my head):
- <img align=right width=100 height=100 alt="local image" src="localimg.gif"
/>
or- <table align=right><img width=100 height=100 alt="local image" src="localimg.gif"
/></table>
or- <img style="align:right; width:100; height:100" alt="local image" src="localimg.gif"
/>
or-
<style>img {align:right; width:100; height:100}</style>
<img alt="local image" src="localimg.gif"
/>
And there is absolutely no reason, that if you were designing your own XML formatting system, that you couldn't make this valid:Look at all these different ways to do a single thing! And yes, we have a pretty clear distinction of what's a tag and what's data. But look at all those different ways of *conveying* data. Formatting (content) can be conveyed as parameters, as entities, as data within tags, as tags within tags, as header information elsewhere in the document, as parameters that serve as enumerated options just by showing up in a tag. If all those options above were gibberish acronyms instead of being in english, and if the "local image" and "localimg.gif" bits were being stored as huffman codes or something other than straightforward text (which *could* happen) i guarantee you'd have a really hard time determining in each example what was structural/logical division data, what was document-inherent/header data, what was style information, and what was content.
In an actual reverse-engineering environment this is much easier because you could make a bunch of MSXML documents and see what shows up frequently and what's different in every document-- thus telling you what's enumerated formatting and what's data-- and you could disassemble the Word executable itself and try to find the place where the XML-parsing program logic is. But it's still possible a couple of rare but crucial implications of certain innocuous-looking parameters or tags that your tests just didn't happen to touch on could slip through the cracks..
MS XML! Argh (Score:3, Funny)
Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base (Score:5, Funny)
<ms-word format="screw-you">
</ms-word>Not quite, (Score:5, Funny)
WARNING! IT'S A TRAP! (Score:2)
Excuse me while I get the door. Someone out there is knocking my door real hard.....DOH!
Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base (Score:4, Informative)
> Hot on the heels of Sun's press release, it looks like Microsoft is also
> planning their so called next-gen Office
Actually, that was Microsoft being caught with nothing to offer when a new competitor had a new version. They can't let a competitor be in the news without blabing about themselves, so they mumbled some things about their next Office version (due in another six months to a year at the earliest). Of course they are still trying to get people to upgrade to Office XP, when many are still running Office 97, and I've even heard of one person who was still on Office 95.
> it has some comments from Gartner about both Office.NET (ugh! I'm
> getting
Here's a nice story that might make you feel better. Once upon a time, Microsoft spent much time and money researching a brilliant new idea. They brought it to market, and named it Bob. Poor Bob fell flat on his face and immediately died (I believe the cause was terminal stupidity, but I could be wrong). (Un)fortunately, the cute cudly assistants from Bobland were rescued and went to live in Office, where they lived happily ever after (until Microsoft recently made them disabled by default).
History, thankfully, repeats itself (because Microsoft never seems to learn). In the late 90's, Microsoft spent much more time and money researching the Millenium Project (yep, Millenium also starred as the alien that Godzilla nuked in "Godzilla 2000 Millenium"). Millenium used Java (and a JVM named "Borg") instead of C#, but it was basically the same thing that Microsoft is bringing to market under the name of ".Net". Hailstorm was to be
Sooner or later, every product of Microsoft's that people hate will be bundled with either their OS or their office suite. With any luck, both Windows and Office will become so universally hated that people will switch to all the better alternatives that are out there (and more will come the more people want them).
What happens when you embrace and extend Godzilla? Nuclear heartburn!
See "Godzilla 2000" (released in Japan as "Godzilla 2000 Millenium") for details.
Re:For the lazy ones, here's the FUD briefing (Score:3, Informative)
"Companies considering a switch to StarOffice or a competing product won't find the move cheap. Gartner estimates that the average cost per user would be about $1,200, which works out to about $800 for labor and $400 for productivity. In contrast, companies upgrading to Office every two years would spend about $550 per user, or $700 every four years. That means many businesses would take eight years to recover their initial investment.
" (note: Was Gartner the company that made some pro MS statements in a report, and forgot to clean the MS-signed footnotes? Can't recall but i think it was them)
FUD Part 2:
"Whenever you put StarOffice on the desktop, you're taking a risk," Smith said. "You're moving to something that's not tried and supported...There's no guarantee that file compatibility won't be a problem."
Are we happy now?
Re:"Next-gen" office from Microsoft, also XML-base (Score:5, Insightful)
No way in hell that MS would make the office formats XML
Sure they would. They'd just do what they do now; embed the WMF data (perhaps as Base64) into <mstag> and <mstag/> tags.
XML doesn't mean shit, only that the data is organized in some kind of fashion. It does not guarantee that the data is open and accessible
XML is an uglier version of s-expressions! (Score:3)
Re:XML is an uglier version of s-expressions! (Score:5, Funny)
Are CRITICIZING XML????
Are You MAD?
(wouldn't shirts that say "XML Sux" be cool?) ; )
Cheers,
-b
hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone does know that the only reason Sun bought StarOffice was to have something to annoy Microsoft with, right?
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised if it does. When it comes to buying applications, most purchasers believe in the addage "You get what you pay for." While StarOffice may not be above and beyond what OpenOffice can do, the price tag demonstrates to most buyers that it's a "real" program and also suggests that there is guaranteed support behind it as well.
After all, look how well RedHat is doing compared to competitors. Or how much Mandrake is taking off as they establish a similar model.
But still no mac support.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Last i checked, the idea any flavor of staroffice would be supported on classic mac os was a joke.
So, your choices are: Go with MSOffice, and have no support for UNIX; or go with staroffice, and have no support for Macintosh. Lovely choices here.
I realize this isn't a problem, really, since you could just put openoffice on the unix/windows machines and msoffice on the macs, and use compatible file formats always, but that's still obnoxious, and i don't think that msoffice/mac can support openoffice's XML format at all, no? Is there a plugin that would let it?
Dammit, when's this XML DocBook standard or whatever going ot be something that all the major word processors can save in?
One problem (Score:3, Insightful)
If in they're advertising, say it works the same as MS Office, and supports all their documents etc etc, then they might see a little change. The problem is, MS has had such a monopoly, its hard to breakthrough to a non-technical users level.
Re:One problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:One problem (Score:2)
after doing the mandrake install, i would recommend then installing RH 7.3 on the partitions that mandrake created. just a personal opinion, but i dind't really get mandrake at all.
on the open office/star office front, i used so 5.2 on rh and it works great! getting oo installed was challenging, but maybe the 1.0 binaries are a little easier. rh (and others) are working on rpms, but have a few changes to make due to the graphical install currently needed by open/star office.
$75 bucks for the software (Score:2, Funny)
Why pay $75.95? (Score:2, Informative)
If you use databases, I am sure you can find some open source version DB software somewhere. Same with spreadsheets and presentations. As for scheduling, let's just say, pen and back of hand work fine.
$75.95 != Free (Score:2, Insightful)
If it's not free, the only way it will be able to compete with Office is if it is 10 times as good.
Re:$75.95 != Free (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason that Gartner expects StarOffice 6.0 to take away 10% of M$ market share in the productivity suite arena is because it's a paid product offered by a reputable, known viable vendor.
There are a whole lot of people looking to get out from under Microsoft's licensing/upgrading set to take effect this summer. Sun's offering may entice them to jump off the fence.
While open source is ready for the enterprise, the enterprise is not necessarily reader for open source.
What does that mean? It means that most enterprise class shops won't go for something that a) isn't supported by someone on the other end of phone and b) they aren't certain will be available in 5 years because of vendor viability.
Sun doesn't really give a damn about all of us - they are targetting a larger market that will provide a longer-lived revenue stream.
And take a bite of out Microsoft's chunky a$$ at the same time.
I don't like OpenOffice. Font support sucks and some of the compatability with MS Office products is less than acceptable. Given that I absolutely have to be able to read/edit MS documents, that is an imperative.
Will I pay for StarOffice? Hell yeah. I'd rather give it to Sun than MS any day.
StarOffice came first - open office is the release of the code into the open source community. StarOffice isn't originally Sun's, but was offered as early as 1996. Sun picked it up (to the dismay of many, myself included ) in 1999.
You can read about the acquisition here [com.com]
OpenOffice did not come first, StarOffice did. Sun released an earlier code base to the open source community and continued with its own development.
Re:$75.95 != Free (Score:4, Informative)
As others have said, Open Office is missing components (db, fonts, templates), though.
Enterprise? No Outlook (Score:2)
A company like mine, for example, which has approx 500 employees, would probably jump at the chance to get something equivalent at a cheaper price, but only if it can replace the whole thing.
Re:$75.95 != Free (Score:2)
i really think the licensing is pittance compared to the trainning investment in the M$ "productivity suite". not only the current trainning investment, but trainning required to migrate to a new package. as well as conversion to new file formats.
and finally, there's always the new guy in marketing that goes out and gets office XP and starts sending documents out in that format such that within a few months every other employee NEEDS the upgraded version (however real the NEED may be is hightly debatable, but that's probably another thread).
so to conclude (there's gotta be a point here, eh?), i think it's more than Free == No Value. I think the underlying hesitation is that Change == Huge initial investment and the actual payback due to the change is negligable in terms of licensing dollars, and intangible in terms of being the odd ball without M$ Office.
Well if you really want to spend $80.00 (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides OpenOffice has been perfect for me thus far.
Missing PIM Functionality (Score:4, Insightful)
Why China? (Score:3, Informative)
One can only hope that the rollout will be done in a more responsible way that the Korean K12 Internet Access initiative. If you're the unlucky recipient of spam, chances are that a lot of it is sent to you courtesy of the Korean school system. All 16,000 schools got a preconfigured PC with some Windows toolkit on it that will connect anyone on the Internet to anyone else for any purpose. Kewl. Of course, none of the educators were educated into being good Internet citizens, and with English skills at a minimum the non-Korean speaking world now has a problem.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
Re:Why China? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or why not make it available for free to all US Schools? I imagine because having the entire K-12 system in china run on star office is considered more of a 'coup' than just having it available for free to various US groups (which it really is, in the form of Open Office). It is just great propaganda to use.
Customer: So.. umm who uses this?
SUN: Well nobody really. Except 12 million chinese schoolkids, who will eventually grow up and live in what is become the world's largest economy.
Customer: Righto. Sign me up.
You instantly gain a few million users and spite microsoft in one fell swoop. I imagine MS is now plotting to get back at Star Office someway - most likely by changing MSoffice formats to make them harder to read.
Re:Why China? (Score:3, Informative)
I think that 12 million is a bit of an underestimate. Try 100 million and you would be a bit closer to the mark. If it were only 12 million children, it wouldn't become the world's largest economy. Of course, India could still take that badge.
Michael
Re:Why China? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why China? (Score:2)
Re:Why China? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why China? (Score:2, Interesting)
They've gotta be trying to position themselves with a product they can call number one in certain market niches, preferably pretty large ones. Trying to create a de facto standard in China seems like a great way to do it. They might not make any money at first, but the beauty of software is that it doesn't really have any marginal cost until they develop upgrades or offer full support.
If they successfully penetrate the Asian markets, they can leverage this sort of credibility in their marketing to paying customers around the world.
Also, if it works but MS makes MSOffice formats harder to read, MS could end up stabbing themselves in the foot - Don't use MS, you can't talk to 3 Billion potential customers/suppliers/partners with it. Pretty good FUD if you ask me. Maybe US businesses would start using both MS (for the West) and Star/OpenOffice (for the East) together for Global compatibility until enough people do that that they can eventually drop the more expensive solution (MSOffice).
Lots of maybes, but if StarOffice has a chance to break the MSOffice gridlock, this is exactly the kind of bold ambition they need to shot for and exactly the kind of motivation that is probably behind this strategy.
Re:Why China? (Score:2)
I can think of 1billion + reasons, and ALOT of them are kids.
fact 1: shovel your software on the youngsters, they chose it when they go into the real world. look at what colleges have done over the past 20 years with *nix.
fact 2: there are alot of people in china.
fact 3:if, say, 1/4 of the population is children(low estimate, I know), and they're being exposed to this software, well, that's 1,000,000,000/4= 250,000,000 kids growing up on something that will basically cost sun little more than opening up an FTP server for them...
and we all know how asia in general has a knack for making copied CD's:)
wildfire, my friend...that's what it'll be.
Font Issue?? (Score:2)
According to the OpenOffice web site, one of the main differences between OpenOffice and StarOffice6 is fonts, in particular, Asian fonts. Perhaps the reasoning is that OpenOffice is not as usable by Asian students because of the lack of Asian fonts. Western students, however, can use OpenOffice, which is already free.
Re:Why China? (Score:2)
Are you out of your mind? You're talking about the same people who poop themselves and don't know what to do when they leave a floppy in the drive and it says "Non system disk error - remove and strike any key when ready" and have trouble saving Word documents to their H:\ home share!!!
I'd like to see what would happen when they are faced with [~]$.
Discounts for multi-seat purchases? (Score:3, Interesting)
I see that there is a Star Office Now program (here [sun.com]), but that looks to be for vendors.
If Sun makes it so that large companies can get an even further discount, it would seem to me that they'd get even *more* people switching, which could only be a Good Thing (tm).
Re:Discounts for multi-seat purchases? (Score:3, Informative)
Sun has a discount level associated with every product. The level is identified with a letter: A, D, and H for most hardware, B and P for most software, some other codes.
They negotiate discount levels with just about anybody - the bigger the institution, the steeper the discount. For example, a certain institution that I know of (I don't know if this is technically NDA so I won't mention names) has a 38% category A discount (with which we buy Sun Fire 3800s and up), a 20% category H discount (for netras and the like), and a 38% category B discount (for software like staroffice). So when we buy Solaris media with documentation, instead of $100 we pay $62.
Of course we have a site license for Solaris and StarOffice, so in reality we don't pay per seat. But when my boss got confused, we paid $62 for staroffice...
This is a standard discount with which we buy online. I know that another institution had a category A of only about 30% and a category H of about 15%... each group negotiates separately.
Active Office Desktop? (Score:2, Funny)
Why? (Score:2)
As soon as I heard about Sun charging for Star Office, I switched over to OpenOffice. I haven't noticed any loss of functionality.
What I have noticed is that on a modern(500Mhz+) machine, Open Office is fast, relatively bug-free, and can open and save MSOffice documents easily. I rather like it.
I could see paying to support the project, but I don't see people paying $75 en masse for something they could get for free with OpenOffice.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
These items were proprietary code that Sun could not open source because they were not part of the Star Office purchase.
Open Office doesn't have these items, but most people won't need them. That along with commercial support are the only real differences. If you don't need a GUI database and you don't need commercial support, get Open Office.
Sun is not counting on Star Office to be a cash cow ($76Million isn't chump change, but it won't change the world either). The cost associated with Star Office is to help pay for support infrastructure, which in turn makes companies who feel that only supported software is worth using (a logical concept for an Enterprise level company) feel comfortable buying Star Office.
I've been using Open Office for months and, especially because of the last 2 releases, have gone ahead and removed Office 2000 and Star Office 5.2.
Re: (Score:2)
Compatibility Issues (Score:4, Interesting)
Currently, bare Word
Anyway, that's my experience with the matter. I won't be leaving Microsoft Office any time soon. Your mileage may vary.
not quite the same as openoffice (Score:2, Interesting)
Users should decide whether or not that package of features is worth 75 bucks.
Of course, where OpenOffice is licensed under the GPL, those fonts and functions *could* be developed and distributed for free by another group. Hmm.. I smell another sourceforge project here.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here we go again... (Score:2)
If you don't care about those fundamental freedoms, then by all means buy StarOffice from Sun.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Here we go again... (Score:2)
Well, I started working on adding the ability to rotate EPS figures to OpenOffice. You can't do it in MS Office (at least in Office 97, which is the last one I've used). You can't do it in StarOffice 5.2. It would have been very useful for me on several occasions; I ended up having to convert my figures to bitmaps to rotate them, and they didn't look very good. However, by the next build, someone else with the same itch had already contributed this feature, so I can't claim credit for it. Nevertheless, that's why I personally have wanted to modify an office suite.
And if you don't care about Microsoft having any competition in office suite software, then by all means download OpenOffice in lieu of buying StarOffice.
OpenOffice is guaranteed to be available in ten years. StarOffice will disappear as soon as Sun loses interest.
Re:Here we go again... (Score:4, Insightful)
You bring up a very valid point. Is it easy to build into an image that can be deployed cookie-cutter style without an administrative headache?
My guess is they (Sun) are not going to be jerks about it, and probably not enforcing it with s/n's being entered, etc. Maintaining all the license paperwork for the BSA audits are also painful and expensive. That is what makes MS Office and Windows and many other apps so difficult, it is a royal pain to manage and deploy it all in an enterprise setting. If they take a laissez-fair attitude, take corp folks reasonable efforts to maintain legality as "good enough" and only go after companies that blatantly disregard the licensing, they will have achieved their goals and made a lot of friends. There are not likely to be too many companies in the blatant disregard category as they could just use OpenOffice if they want to be cheap.
Bottom line, it appears Sun is not in this office game to make a killing, but primarily to stick their fork in Microsoft's side and break their lock on the market a bit and trying to break even while doing it. I just can't see them making a fuss over licensing like MS does. As far as sharing with your friends, share OpenOffice, do you really need the extras? Corps do, you and your friends probably don't. I think this is going to work just fine.
Does anyone know what kind of licensing enforcement mechanisms are being put in SO? Are they "mass deployment friendly"?
Re:Here we go again... (Score:2)
Sun's market for StarOffice 6, OTOH, is likely for IT managers and other corporate types, who prefer to pay for stuff just to get that warm fuzzy feeling that their investment is being protected. Plus, it's easier to convince upper management to migrate to alternative products, if they're stated as being "less expensive" as opposed to "free". Upper management always says, "how can good products be free?" So I think Sun's strategy of making StarOffice at a quarter price of MS Office, instead of being "free", as a really good move. Plus they offer OpenOffice.org for the hobbyists too. So I don't see why anyone should complain.
Re: (Score:2)
Less than a quarter, alright... (Score:3, Insightful)
Note: I submitted something along the lines of this article and the cool bit about the NZ law firm switching to Linux, but do you think it wasn't rejected? Ha! Not everything Anti MS/Pro Linux makes it here.
Reality check... (Score:2, Informative)
1. Microsoft, just a few days ago announced that they sold 60 million licences of Office Xp.
IN ONE YEAR!
2. That's more than double the amount of licences they sold for Office 2000.
3. They also sold over 12 million licences in Asia Pacific region.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/may0 2/05-13OXPMomentum2002PR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/May0 2/05-14officexpasia.asp
That's just over 72 million licenced users of MS Office XP created in a year.And what's more Office.net is just about ready to roll out the door.Just so everyone knows full well what were all up against.
Re:Reality check... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they should just give up then (Score:2)
Nobody ever pretends competing with MS in an area where they're so dominant would be easy, but you have to give Sun some credit for fighting a good fight. It's a decent product, and they have a relatively intelligent marketing strategy (though they should give it away to all schools, not just in China).
It will take time, even MS Office didn't become completely dominant overnight, it took many years. Our (admittedly small) company now uses mainly StarOffice because it makes business sense for us. What matters in the end is that there is a market with some reasonable competition, not that Sun completely stomps out everyone else.
Screenshots (Score:2)
Differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org (Score:5, Informative)
$ == legitimacy in business (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:$ == legitimacy in business (Score:3, Insightful)
-- Thomas Paine
Year in and year out, the new cars that are rated the highest are the ones that cost the most money. Generally speaking, this is not because expensive cars are so much better than others, but primarily because those who pay are obliged, in their own minds, to evaluate what they received more highly, or call themseles fools for having made the bargain.
but how? (Score:2)
How does free software 'work' in a communist government on a large scale. Could a private enterprise (sun) give them stuff? Does it then get classified as 'enterprise' if it's free?
Free software often conveys ideas of free speech. This is frowned upon by the chinese (remember what happened in 1989?).
it's not that they couldn't use software such as this; it certainly is for a good cause. it is also certainly a welcome change to see private enterprise to begin to appear in china, just like this software, which brings up another humungous topic:
In a hard-core communist country, would the government create all software, which is required to be proprietary to the country, and keep it inside the country? What would their opinions be on free software?
and of course, after reading this post, I see why communism hasn't been successful yet.
Talking paperclips and such... (Score:3, Funny)
"Single" user license. (Score:3, Informative)
OpenOffice didn't cut it for us -Would StarOffice? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, you see the problem. So I am wondering if StarOffice 6.0 has the possibility of editing WordPerfect docs?
Re:OpenOffice didn't cut it for us -Would StarOffi (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, StarOffice 6.0 includes a filter for WordPerfect 8 documents according to the technical FAQ [sun.com]. According to the general FAQ [sun.com] (and somewhere else that I can't find right now), the WordPerfect filter is licensed from another company, so it won't appear in OpenOffice. I won't be holding my breath waiting for a WordPerfect filter in OpenOffice, because I gather that it is quite difficult to convert WordPerfect files to other formats.
Let's see M$ get around this one! (Score:2, Interesting)
I like it.
How much better? (Score:2)
In any event, hoo rah to Sun for marketing this. Few would use OpenOffice because it's free. $75 is an excellent price - enough to make people consider it serious software but inexpensive enough to make the switch.
That's less than a quarter the cost... (Score:2)
So is it one fourth as good?
Just when I'm beginning to rely on 5.2, too... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm about ready to spend the $35 for the boxed product just to make sure I have access to the software when Sun stops supporting it. Then and only then can I even consider moving on to 6.0, and I will probably end up having the two installations sitting side-by-side.
The features that died with StarOffice 5.2 were fairly useless for the personal user (their own browser and e-mail) as well as large enterprise networks (their own database structures), but damn it if they weren't useful for us middle-of-the-road types. Unless I grab one of the last copies of 5.2, I might as well invest in a copy of Office 2000 for Access 2000, Outlook and the VBA to use between them. That or learn how to script/program for real...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Seems a bit pricey... (Score:2)
I installed it today on Win98Se (Score:2, Interesting)
If it meets only 90% of my needs then MS Office is dead in My Office!
So far looking good opening my old Word docs. But I use Word mostly for creating documentation so actually I expect OO to do just fine. I'll be putting a note in my doc's that if anyone has problems reading them that I will provide a PDF
ouch! I hear a Squeal! Is thata pig?
Fix for OOo 1.0 font problem in Linux (Score:3, Informative)
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Find user/psprint/pspfontcache from whatever directory your soffice binary is in
either delete this file or rename it
make a new, empty "pspfontcache" file and make it READ-ONLY ("touch pspfontcache && chmod 444 pspfontcache")
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The issue has something to do w/ font caching; I got this fix from OOo's IssueZilla.
There, OOo is now that much more useful for Linux users.
For the record, I'd look into SO 6.0 if it had a *usable* database component (I hate to admit it, but, like M$ Access).
Linux kernel 2.2.13 or higher.. Sparc64!!! (Score:2)
I bet thats only x86 linux. How about my linux-sparc64?
If they truly supported linux, they would support linux on their on damn hardware AND software.
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If you cannot convince them, confuse them. - Harry S Truman (1884 - 1972)
When are we going to see something big from Corel? (Score:2)
I think that Sun really had the right idea by starting their projects opensource. That way they got people interested, they got free code from people, and they gave something back to all the people they helped out by allowing the open-office branch.
Now the thing I don't understand is... If it started as open-source, how can they turn it back into closed source? Can the creator of any work do that?
Re:When are we going to see something big from Cor (Score:2, Informative)
OS X Version?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, I'd buy 2 or 3 licenses for this if I could run them on my machines.
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Re:Why not Open Office? (Score:2)
Re:Why not Open Office? (Score:3, Interesting)
BTW if you're interested, the diffs between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are available here [openoffice.org]. That may contain other reasons why people would prefer StarOffice instead of OOo.
Re:Why not Open Office? (Score:2)
Re:Why not Open Office? (Score:2)
Re:Open Office (Score:4, Interesting)
A little bit of research on your part would go a long way; OO does not have a database component (i.e. like Microsoft Office's Access), nor does it have some file filters, fonts or the clipart that StarOffice has.
For me, the database component is required, but I would plunk down my $80 for SO to "help the cause" -- I use OO right now on both Linux and Windows and under Windows, it rocks. It rocks incredibly hard. Linux OO has some issues like fonts and startup time but being able to open (and save) Microsoft documents without issue is great.
I'd love to see a KDE wrapper for SO/OO; having access to all the office functionality through DCOP and have the damn thing look right would be nice. I've tried out OpenOffice, KOffice and HancomOffice. At this point I would say OO is in the lead, with KOffice gaining ground fast. Hancom was nice but just too ... odd.
Re:Open Office (Score:2)
I hate replying to myself...
SO also has support for reading WordPerfect 8 files, which is very very important to a lot of people.
I know you're trolling, but. . . (Score:2)
It'll answer your question.
KFG
Re:Price war (Score:2)