Google Pack Adds StarOffice 156
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.'"
Ask That Question Again (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Isn't this how Linux got Ubuntu? People don't like massive changes all at once.
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That was exactly my point.
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In my experience OO.org will migrate MS Office files just fine, even files that MS Office itself can't or won't open. Of course not all features are supported on all platforms, but that goes for MS Office as well, not to mention that MS Office does not exist on *nix, which means that
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* spellchecker (hunspell backend) and thesaurus
* email mailmerge feature (pymailmerge)
For Metrically equivalent fonts just...
* grab the Liberation fonts
For "Macro Migration"...
* grab the ooo-build vba implementation, which is a superior approach over the StarOffice mess, ships with most distro OOo variants.
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Re:Ask That Question Again (Score:5, Interesting)
Google Docs Backend for StarOffice (Score:2)
Mod Parent Up!
If Google integrated on-line and off-line storage for documents in an easy to use package, that might just be the feature that gets people off of Microsoft Office. Combined off-line and on-line storage might be enough of a feature to force a paradigm shift.
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(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 o
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I use Windows once or twice a month, mainly through Parallels. OS X is the best system for me.
Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason? Who cares! (Score:1, Insightful)
Purist may puke by just thinking about this, but sane persons would just forget funny ideals and get the work done by chosing the tool that fits better for this case.
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Smart business people don't set themselves up to be dependent on third parties who can take advantage of that dependency, because they lose everything if they're stupid enough to make that mistake.
Software costs become marginal if you're free, they eventually become an unsustainable liability if you're not.
Google would have been stillborn in the garage if they had been dependent on Microsoft for their OS.
Now they're one of the worlds g
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The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 Statement of fact
The United States was wrong to invade Iraq in 2003 Statement of Opinion
See the difference?
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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
$69.95 U.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
So how does google do it then?
Martin
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Re:$69.95 U.S. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Star Office at Amazon.com (Score:2, Informative)
Star Office 8 at Amazon.com:
#1 in Linux sales.
#28 in Windows Office Suites.
Where it is sandwiched between Upgrade MS Office Pro at $270 and Word Perfect 11 at $30.
I'll wager you didn't know there were 28 runners in the Windows Office Suite-stakes.
#1 in Windows Office Suites and #1 in Amazon software sales is MS Office Home and Student 2007 at $110 with a three-seat license. Retail
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I doubt to be honest that getting licences for StarOffice is the direct commercial motivation for Sun, it was cheaper to buy the StarOffice company than buy MS office software for all their workers, if it allows other people to use Solaris then all the better.
Re:$69.95 U.S. (Score:5, Funny)
- 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.
- They pirated it using BitTorrent and are now illegally redistributing it.
I'll let you decide which one is more likely.Re: (Score:1, Funny)
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I wonder about Sun's stance towards StarOffice/OpenOffice. Are there really many people who buy StarOffice? For what reasons?
I assume that Sun runs OpenOffice in order to provide people with a means to move off of Windows, as well as earning good will in the open source community and marketing benefits (brand recognition and whatnot). So I guess it seems weird to me that they simultaneously split themselves between the OpenOffice brand and StarOffice brand, which is likely to confuse some people. The o
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I preferred ApplixWare at the time, and wish the Applix Office suite was still available.
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Now my linux-as-a-hobby days are pretty much over, and since all of my work is for windows shops, thats what I use at home as well, along with MS Office, since other interests take up my hobby time, and quite frankly, I don't want to put the effor
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Because my needs are pretty basic, I'm going to be taking a look at iwork 08.
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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
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3. Maybe they are scared that with an open source license like the LGPL, it could be manipulated into something they couldn't agree to and have to either change their product "midstream" or accept terms that they aren't comfortable with. OR possibly worse and get into a position where they unwittingly gave away property they didn't want to because of the associations to new licenses.
At least with a proprietary license, they have a contract and can control to some extent what they are going to be subjected
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Can i have some of what you are smoking please?
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Besides, the non-free StarOffice does have modules that are relevant to Google's customers. How would a typical customer create flyers for a yard sale if there is no clip art included? This is a better deal than OpenOffice just because of that.
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I personally think it was a good idea to include StarOffice. I just think the whole "zOMG the GPL duck and cover!!!" reason that the original poster came up with is BS, that's all. Google and Sun both promote open sou
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Why would someone want to start an offering off with something that just went though a reworking faze complete with claims of it punishing companies and tricking MS. IT doesn't matter w
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Google blog says: OK on work PC's (Score:2)
According to what appears to be someone under Google's control: http://groups.google.com/group/pack-howto/browse_ f rm/thread/ae14a8881ea3505 [google.com]
I take this to be accurate, since the bona fides for this post are:
Compare with Picasa (Score:2)
People don't want choices (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Which would sound probable considing Google's products.
Re:People don't want choices (Score:5, Funny)
duh! every Joe Schmoe knows websites ends in
Staroffice without Linux... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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?
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My advice: make a PDF of your presentation. xpdf, Preview, and acroread all support full-screen mode.
Re:Staroffice without Linux... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
mixed Linux, MS, OOffice in small medical practice (Score:1)
[1] unlike the police department in Kiev - I think their Clipper ap was rather smaller.
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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
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It makes a huge difference... (Score:4, Informative)
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MS Office Home provides one-stop shopping for MS Office tutorials, templates, click art, etc.
It's a handsome site, easy to use, light-years removed from OpenOffice.org. And, yes it matters. Most of us don't have the time to re-invent the wheel. To spend endless hours searching for free, professionally designed, co-ordinated, themed and cataloged clip art.
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http://www.openclipart.org/ [openclipart.org]
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
It's been 10 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
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OH NOES! (Score:1)
Well I, for one, have just pissed myself in fear.
StarOffice is blog aware (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
StarOffice == ODF == Good (Score:2)
Both OpenOffice and StarOffice are equally bloated thanks to Sun anyways...
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But still can only install to C: drive... (Score:2)
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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.
Argh! (Score:1)
Depends on usage, entirely (Score:1)
Or, try powerpoint. OO's presenter or whatever isn't bad, but PowerPoint ... well, easily looks far more professional.
And frankly, I think a lot of businesses would rather pay for Office because it allows them to have professional looking documents much quicker (i.e., templates and such).
Whet
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But when someone sends me a Word 2007 document, what do I do?
Ask them to send the document in a different format. Also, politely remind them that what they sent was stored in a proprietary format (yes, OOXML is proprietary), much like sending someone a document written in Latin and expecting them to be able to read it.
I make it a point to respond to every word document attachment with a request for information in a non-proprietary format, even if I don't care about reading it anyway (I get a few every week). However, you will find that 90%+ of people will compl
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Therefore Word is not feature complete unless a PDF printer is added. Open Office/Star Office is.
For corporate use you should really have in-house templates.
OOImpress is completely compatible with Powerpoint, the output looks identical with the same document, so one cannot possibly look more professional than the other
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In my experience non computer literate people think of MS Office as the new car and other like OO.o etc as the weird, cheap car that came from some nutty eastern european nation
Also in my experince, people that think ppt look impressive and/or impressive are people that should be avoided. I suspect ppt has cost the business world untold billions in wasted time in lame meeting
Um, an *interesting* question? (Score:1)
It Will Be Interesting? (Score:2)
Slow news day?
I hate the google pack (Score:1, Interesting)
Along the same vein is the Google Toolbar, which I really like for people running MSIE, but I really HATE haveing the "GoogleUpdateNotifier" processing running ALL THE TIME whether MSIE
awesome (Score:1)
DAMN YOU! (Score:1)
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Jolyon
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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For home users? All they'd really need is "Save in Word format", and OpenOffice has that.
I do agree that the proprietary components probably tipped the scale towards StarOffice, just not the one you pointed out.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 ...?
What google did wasn't evil - they're supporting StarOffice, and this will help continue to develop the product. Competition is good, mkay? :-)
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http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/enterp rise_tools.jsp#Setup [sun.com]
The big one from that list is the macro migration wizard. There's also an analysis wizard that examines your documents and calculates migration costs and risks. For a business with thousands, o
Certification? (Score:2)
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Uh, no. Google pack [google.com] 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.
C'mon man! (Score:1, Funny)
*Anonymous_Coward slaps Anonymous_Coward around a bit with a large trout
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Re:why Google didn't choose to include OpenOffice. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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b) This is pure speculation, but some sort of GoogDocs and StarOffice fusion that keeps your GD documents synced locally for use with StarOffice, and giving StarOffice some of Google's collaboration features to compete with MS's SharePoint and Groove