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."

Yep..

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

That's Nice And All

[Roofus]

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.

Wishing them the best

[Lumpy]

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.

Outlook replacement?

[NineNine]

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?

Re:Yep..

[exoromeo]

Agreed. Same thing with the IPod, Itunes, Windows, and so on. It may make a dent in their sales (a small one that MS may not even really notice), but as for killing it, I don't think it'll happen. MS Office has too big of a head start and too large of a market share. So, unless MS itself does something colossally stupid, Star Office killing MS Office won't happen.

Re:Yep..

[The_Spud]

In addition the 'killer' product not only has to be as good as what it is replacing it has to be way better to justify relearning how to do basic tasks. While moving between star, open or microsoft office is trivial for technical people, the average user has major problems with the gui being slighting different and commands being in different menus.

The other big problem is that many companies have invested a huge amount of money in VB Script automation. The cost of the license for something like MS office is trivial compared to the amount spent on custom development . Unless the open source offerings can provide some sort of compatibility layer for macros and such like corporate migration is really unlikely.

So while having good open source alternatives to MS office is a good thing there is slim to no chance of them ever replacing Microsoft word as the defacto word processor.

What about ?

[lord_rob the only on]

Companies will keep their installed versions of Office and won't even care of upgrading to Office 12 ?

Re:Yep..

[tdemark]

While moving between star, open or microsoft office is trivial for technical people, the average user has major problems with the gui being slighting different and commands being in different menus.

Ummm... you've seen these [neowin.net], right?

MS Office will go on...

[OctoberSky]

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.

Killer? When it finally starts...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?!?)

Re:Outlook replacement?

[cavemanf16]

Spreadsheet? Wrong! OK, I love OpenOffice 2.0 beta, but Calc is a hopelessly worthless piece of junk for anyone doing any serious analysis or report creation using spreadsheets. And yes, people, a SQL report looks like utter shit compared to a chart with bright colors for the executives your reports go out to in the end. "DataPilot" is not something some college kid can just sit down and code in a couple of evenings, and it shows from how useless and difficult to use it is in OpenOffice compared to Excel's PivotTables and PivotCharts.

If only I had time to help make some massive improvements to DataPilot I would, but I simply don't right now. And I would feel like helping because DataPilot sucks, and they need some business analysts with programming abilities to show them what kind of power really needs to be there for people like me to fully switch to OOo2 or SO8.

Re:SO8 OpenDocument support and Massachusetts

[BVis]

Star Office 8 will make a wonderful contender that will be in Massachusetts govt list of consideration.

Massachusetts hasn't switched over to OOo or StarOffice yet. There's still plenty of time for the effort to get mired in the bureaucracy or killed by some pinhead politician who thinks he's doing his constituents (and by that I mean the big companies that own him) a favor by "maintaining Massachusetts' position as a leader in industry cooperation and integration", i.e. using Microsoft products "because that's what everyone else uses".

MS days are numbered

See my sig. It's a very large number.

Re:Yep..

[jocknerd]

Then you better switch to OpenOffice.org now. Because Microsoft Office 12 will have massive GUI changes to it. So based on your argument, your users will be better off with OpenOffice since it will be closer to the current versions of Microsoft Office in gui style and location of buttons and icons.

Good diets, clean cars & responsible fiscal po

[O2dude]

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.

This time we mean it!

[therealking]

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

StarOffice? no. OpenOffice 2? If done right

[elfguygmail.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.

About the scripting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it been designed with security in mind? One of the types of files you can't trust as an email attachment is a word processing document such as Word Perfect or Microsoft Word. You might as well open an executable as a word processing document. If I get a Word document or a spreadsheet, I write back and tell the sender to use plain text, I can add formatting myself if I want it.

Has the ability to run executable files, delete files, be sent to didgy websites and other stupid actions been copied from Microsoft?

If not, this would be a great selling point: "Star Office documents are safe to open as email attachments!"

What is an MS Killer?

[sethadam1]

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.

Re:Wishing them the best

[BradleyUffner]

Please offer some proof to backup this claim. All versions of office can open documents saved by a previous version as far as I know. I'm willing to change my mind if you can give some good solid proff though. An example of proof would be a document saved under word 97 that can't be opened correctly under a newer version of Word.

Re:StarOffice? no. OpenOffice 2? If done right

[aristotle-dude]

Explain to us how a free version with less features and interoperability will be a killer for Office while Star Office will not? The 70 dollar price tag? Uh pal, MSFT came into the position they are in now because of penetration into the corporate sector. Once it was entrenched there, people wanted to be compatible with the office so they bought it for the home. Star Office offers brand recognition and is backed directly by Sun Microsystems. From the perspective of an IT purchaser, they will look at Star Office before they would look at Open Office. These guys don't want to mess around with downloading an installer for beta/alpha versions of Open Office but rather want a stable release with extra features like spell checking, dictionaries, clip art libraries and pre-configured database interfaces.

A price tag of 70 bucks is nothing. How much time does it cost you to setup Open Office properly and how much time is spent updating beta releases? Price that out at a typical IT workers pay rate and figure out which one is cheaper. *Hint* ?It's the Star Office version.

Re:Yep..

[Bob3141592]

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.

Yup. The dominance of MS Office isn't because of its technical superiority -- not by a long shot. Therefore a technically superior product won't replace it. It's dominance is because it's economically expedient, especially with its economies of scale. People looking for all sorts of jobs put MS Office on their resume. Who's going to put Star Office on their resume, and why? Heck, usually MS Office is just referred to as "Office," as it is assumed to be the default standard.

That's the challenge that a competitor to Office has to deal with. Not a technical one, but a psychological one on a massive scale. And unfortunately, that's nearly impossible.

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[account_deleted]

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Needs Mac OS X support

[mrjatsun]

Certainly not going to kill MS Office. But hopefully it will chip away a little. If it keeps the MS Office market from growing, and even makes it shrink a little, I think that's a big success in itself. MS is having a hard time finding places to grow their company (why there's going to be so many versions of Vista :-) ). Hell, If it keeps some folks from upgrading to the next version of office, that's a big plus in my book.

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 :-) ) is what is really needed to be successful in the long run. PDF would have never had made it if it didn't do that...

SharePoint

[WED Fan]

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.

Bah. Still No Reason To Abandon MSOffice

[reallocate]

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.

I agree but would add...

[SnappingTurtle]

... that a major reason MS Office is so entrenched is that the Word document format is still proprietary and doesn't port well.

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.

Re:Yep..

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree, WordPerfect was superior to Word when it first came out. Why do you think MS included copies of Word in most distributions of Windows? This is a prime example of using your Monopoly with one product to squash the competition for another product.

No, it's not.

[Ryan Amos]

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.

Re:They'll never even hit 10%

[richlv]

i mostly agree with you, but besides obvious (lack of resources) there is one other reason that seriously slows down progress. and ms knows that.

the fact that msoffice file formats change and are closed, thus making a moving target isn't the worst part.

much worse is the fact that aiming at compatibility with msoffice in regards to file formats in some cases that leads to mirroring of features, even downgrading in some cases.

for example, oo.org =-and-less-than-1.1.x has a very powerful fontwork functionality (it allows creation of differently shaped text).

on the road to 2.0 in the name of compatibility with mso it was removed from menus, a feature mirroring wordart was introduced (because it was basically impossible to reliably export objects created in oo.org with fontwork to mso - it was unable to represent objects complex enough). fortunately, fontwork has returned to menu (at least in writer), but that means we now have two features and there were developers who had to implement this second feature only for mso compatibility. nasty.

so, an open document format that is not controlled by one interested entity would be a blessing. the problem is, microsoft understands that, too.

Re:Yep..

[sootman]

An excerpt from my journal [slashdot.org] that I wrote in January, because I was tired of re-creating that post every time this came up...

Remeber in the old days the saying was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Now it's the same with MS. We all know business reality is ugly and non-idea but the sooner you accept that business reality is reality, as far as businesses are concerned, the better off you'll be. Imagine these two conversations:

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because he has a different version of Word than you have."
Boss: "Oh. Stupid Microsoft. Can you fix it?"

or

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because Joe has MS Office and you have an alternative office suite which is free as in free and 99% compatible but not quite perfect because M$ changes formats all the time but it's more stable and less bloated and launches faster but uses an open document format by default so you need to export as .DOC or .RTF or export to .PDF or HTML or Joe can download it (112 MB) for free or..."
Boss: "This aggrivation is not worth $400. Shut up about vendor lock-in and all your free-as-in-speech hippy friends. Run out to Staples and get me MS Office" if you're lucky or "Shut up. You're fired" if you're not.

Yes, Mac OS X can make PDFs from any application that can print. Yes, you can make PDFs for free in Windows with a Samba server and ps2pdf [newbox.org]. Yes, OOo has built-in one-click PDF support. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that all OOo docs are just gzipped XML and your data can never, ever be lost or unreadable. Doesn't matter that IBM likes it. Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default, it has no chance to take over the world. Office won't be unseated anytime soon.

And I know we're talking about SO here today and not OOo, but the argument still stands. SO has even less of a chance to kill MSO than OOo does--at least OOo is free. SO still exists because Sun is driven by an irrational hatred of MS. Want to kill MS, Sun? Make the Sun Ray [wikipedia.org] really, really, really compelling. Start by using Crossover or something to get MS Office running great on it. Get a theme that looks like XP and make sure Solitaire and Minesweeper run. Make the server as cheap as you can stand to. (At first, heh.) Then push, push, push this product to IT and management. Put together a package of a server and 5 or 10 clients and loan them to anyone who asks for 60 days. The centralized management and smart-card based identity are really cool features. Make it good, market it like mad.

Or, forget killing MS and just concentrate on server stuff.

Re:MS Office will go on...

[Citizen of Earth]

I like competition, in fact I like it alot (go Yankess!). Anyway, no single program is going to kill [Word Perfect 5.1]. Or any...product as widely used as [Word Perfect]. Maybe a second version, maybe a third but it is going to take time.

There are just too many people using it ([Word Perfect]) right now, and as we all know people can't handle change. This might be the start of the downfall of [WP Suite] 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.

Re:Yep..

[walt-sjc]

That colossally stupid thing *may* be their refusal to support OpenDoc. It is very possible that government agencies start mandating open standards (like Mass. announced recently.)

Once more and more government requires opendoc, business will need to support it, and if business needs to use SO / OO, then more migration will happen, snowballing.

Only time will tell, but if MS's sales really start to suffer, then they will have no choice but to support OpenDoc.

Re:Yep..

[DarkAvZ]

...unless MS itself does something colossally stupid...

such as neglecting support for OASIS open document format for office applications [wikipedia.org]?

They will fail... again.

[UtSupra]

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.

Re:They'll never even hit 10%

[cortana]

But as soon as people start designing replacements that aren't 100% emulations of MS products, other people turn around and say, "Open source will never replace Microsoft because people don't want to spend three minutes learning how to do things in a new and better way"...

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[account_deleted]

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Wrong -- Look at the history

[jgc7]

... Microsoft Office 12 will have massive GUI changes to it.

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.

IMHO, the MS Office killer is the developing world

[WoTG]

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.