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."

Re:No way man!

[Anonymous Coward]

And for some reason in all these articles we're seeing about Massechusets, the cost of migrating everyone to the incompatible-with-old-versions Microsoft Office XML is negligable.

So why will MSXML be the deciding factor? The only possible benefit I could see would be to combine it with an XML enabled database but that would require not using all the nasty DRM stuff, and users actually structuring documents rather than hitting "Bold, Italic, Big" whenever they want a title. It also probably won't give much benefit anyway, and is also possible with Open Office XML.

I expect the deciding factor, if Microsoft can get away with it, is increased vendor lockin thanks to DRM and tighter integration between Office and their various server products.

Office just needs to hold on for long enough that they can get all that in place, so obviously big moves to OpenDoc format must be stopped and and it seems to me that Microsoft are willing to sink to the depths to do it.

After all, who cares if you get your wrist slapped for antitrust after the event? By then it will be too late, and Microsoft's goal of perfect vendor lockin is worth any amount of wrist slapping to them.

Business Opportunity

[Threni]

Isn't there space in the market for a company or app which converts from MS to StarOffice? And/or what are the licensing implications for a large, multi-site company to purchase one single copy of MS office and have their IT department use it to convert incoming MS files into StarOffice format?

Re:Is that hell freezing over?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I think that more appropriate killing would be of those who think that the Soviet Russia and old Koreans jokes are still funny even after their 2 billionth iteration, which Slashdot probably reached several years ago. Add the moderators who continually mod them as "Funny" to that list. (Not advocating violence here. Just dreaming about it.)

Re:SO8 OpenDocument support and Massachusetts

[Delphiki]

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".

God forbid someone would want their documents to be usable by other groups they work with or that someone would want citizens to be able to download government documents and read them in a program they already have. Sure, OpenOffice is free, as long as you have heard of it, and have broadband, or a couple of days to spend downloading. Haha, nobody likes dial-up users anyway. Screw them.

Oh man, the fact that moving to an open format will prevent 98% of the population from being able to read government documents without downloading or buying a new program they've never heard of and don't want is great. I'm surprised people in the government didn't think of this sooner as a way around the freedom of information act. Just give everyone copies of documents in formats they can't use.

Re:Yep..

[AKAImBatman]

I wish open source developers would stop copying the microsoft look-and-feel in the hope that users will find it familiar, since it seems microsoft responds to this by *gasp* making a new interface!

You missed the whole "Integrated Desktop" era of StarOffice, didn't you? It looked like this. [justinsomnia.org] The first job of the OOo team was to break the applications out of that interface. With each consecutive version, OOo/StarOffice has gotten closer to the MS Office interface. In the OOo 2.0 version, they've even gotten rid of the vertical toolbar.

Microsoft may not always be right, but in this case their basic style is the most efficient interface for users.

Format conversions NEVER work

[dpbsmith]

Hmmph. Reminds me of what a wise Editorial Services manager once said. She was told that a certain conversion process was "99% reliable." She said "It is useless to me unless it is 100% reliable, because unless it is 100% reliable we will need to proofread it again, and proofreading accounts for more than two-thirds the work we do in preparing a document."

It doesn't matter if most of the simpler conversions do work, because it takes just as much time to inspect a conversion that works as it takes to inspect one that didn't.

And the better the conversions, the worst the problem--because you'll tend to let your guard down, and the errors that do occur will be infrequent and subtle, but just as serious.

This was a department that prepared NIH grant applications and papers for submission to scientific journals. The NIH grant applications were limited to IIRC twenty pages and had to be submitted on preprinted forms with boxes print on them for the text of the application. It was not rare for scientists to use every square millimeter of available space. If a conversion changed a line break and resulted in a line spilling over to a 21st page, it was a disaster.

And, guess what: equations need to translate.

They found that out the hard way: when they submitted a grant application in which the text had been munged by some "transparent" conversion... that had changed all of the alphas and betas to A's and B's.

Now, you'll say, "but this same problem exists when you transition from one version of Microsoft Word to another." And, yes, you'd be right.

Silly claim

[notaprguy]

Love 'em or hate 'em but Microsoft has better backward compatibility that almost any software company...sometimes to their detriment. They get beat up all the time on /. and elsewhere for not making great leaps forward because of their concerns with backward compatibility. It's not like their complete idiots. If they wanted to they could throw Office and Windows legacy code out and start fresh. But if they did it would piss their customers off. Show me your proof that MSFT intentionally adds incompatibilities to new versions of Excel etc.

StarOffice wont kill it, AJAX will.

[neo]

Office is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet. When I can edit documents online from a web page and it looks and feels like an application then you know no one is going to buy MS Office ever again. The real question is who is going to build the AJAX suite and what pricing model will they use.

We've all known for years that "Applications Are Not Possessions". You can't own "Word". You can have a CD with a copy of Word on it, but you can't own it. You can put that CD in a nice shiney box and fool people into thinking they can own data... but they can't. No one can own data.

For year's MS has fooled people into thinking they were buying products when they were actually buying data. Software building is and will always be a service. Let me repeat that for those who don't get it. You can't own data, making data is a service. There's even a word for making a service look like a possession, it's called "Productizing." MS got rich by taking something that was infinately reproducable and selling it like a commodity. Great marketing.

AJAX will kill that. When people realize they can pay $15 a year for the service of word processing online, Word dies and the people who make $15 a year on a million customers win. Send me the royalty checks.

MS Office isn't a bad value (really)

[klubar]

For home/student use the Office Suite is quite cheap (I've seen Office 2003 for around $100 at Staples for a three-home user license). Microsoft is competing with stealing by pricing Office very low. Even for SMB and Enterprise users, sticking office isn't that much--on the purchase of a new machine Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PPT, Publisher and Outlook) costs about $190; I suspect enterprise customers are paying less than $100. At that price it's not worth looking at alternatives that are "nearly as good".

Other than not supporting Microsoft, what's the benefit to the alternatives.

Personal Users

[iamlucky13]

Don't forget about Joe Sixpack who bought the $400 Dell on sale for school, then realized that it only comes with Works suite, which has Word, Outlook Express, and Works. He gets to school and finds himself needing to make presentations and use real spreadsheets (not Works crap), but he was planning on spending the remaining $300 that tuition left to his name on books, not Office Small Business Edition. I see potential for Star or OpenOffice to appeal to him. Of course, it would have to be able to share with Microsoft programs effectively. If he can't deliver his presentations on whatever computer the professor sets up for the class or share his spreadsheets with his project partners, it won't really work for him. Does anybody know how the interoperability is going the opposite way the article discusses?