Office2000 gets its bum smacked!! (Microsoft Office 2000 Developer in general)

Member Name: tagheur

Product:	Microsoft Office 2000 Developer in general
Date:	06/07/02 (87 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: costs bugger all

Disadvantages: can be a bit wobbly

According to our friends at Amazon, a copy of Microsoft Office costs a cool 416 quid while the professional version costs over 500! That is a lot of money to write letters and run the odd spreadsheet. Until very recently the only competitor to Office was IBM's Lotus Smartsuite product. Having used both, I do not think that Smartsuite is as good a product as Office, however the latest IBM version still retails at around 400 pounds! Both companies do a 'cut down' version, mainly for OEM computer resellers. However, these versions tend to be delivered net of manuals or any other assists.

Enter SUN Microsystems allegorically dressed in shimmering silver armor astride a milk-white charger... Please don't misunderstand my apparent hero worship here, while I consider what SUN has done to be a 'good thing', I do not in any way consider SUN itself in any better a light than I do Microsoft. It's just that when a couple of Dinosaurs fight one-another the little mammals scurrying around underneath them (aka you and I) occasionally benefit.

About eighteen months ago, SUN decided to open up their own productivity suite (called StarOffice) in it's entirety under a GNU Lesser General Public License. What this means is that Sun effectively gave away the rights to their software and placed it into the public domain, much the same as Linux is a public domain product. To you and me it means that we can have a copy of the software, at least in principle, for bugger all. Unfortunately, a lot of the intrinsic value lies in the knowledge that it is going to be maintained out into the future. If I am going to invest my time and effort into learning and using a particular piece of software then I want to know that it is still going to be around in four or five years' time. The big questionmark with 'open' sofware is, 'who's going to look after it and maintain it?' In the case of StarOffice the answer i
s not totally straightforward. SUN have taken the decision to close StarOffice up again and to take it forward primarily for their Solaris user base. Solaris is SUN's UNIX V.4 variant operating system. The word on the street is that, the new release, StarOffice 6.0, will sell for about 100 bucks a pop. The 'free' variant, officially known as OpenOffice 1.0 will be maintained by OpenOffice.org, a non-profit making organisation. You can download OpenOffice 1.0 from www.openoffice.org, it is completely free of charge and they claim to already have in excess of 50,000 users.

At this moment in time, StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice 1.0 are allegedly identical, apart from the logos, however having both installed on my Linux Box, it is quite clear that they are different. In any event StarOffice 6.0, is definitely different in many respects to OpenOffice most notably in the fact that it has support for many more different filetypes.

My Openoffice 1.0, which I loaded from a CD that came with Linux Magazine, is pretty damn buggy. My copy of StarOffice 5.2, on the other hand, is as solid as a rock (at least so far). Now, I am prepared to concede that this just may be as a result of a rushed code release in time for the CD, however I will reserve judgement until I have downloaded an 'official' copy from the website. For now, I will stick with StarOffice 5.2.

Bearing all of this in mind, is it worth changing? Well for my money, yes it is. The proof of the pudding, at least as far as I'm concerned, lies in the fact that I have written this op using a mixture of StarOffice 5.2, OpenOffice 1.0. and Microsoft Office2000.

Here are my reasons for recommending Star/Open;
First of all, I actually like the software. It is difficult to say whether it is as 'good' as Office or not. Some bits clearly aren't while others, like the 'word finisher' are, in my opinion, better. In general
I think that Star/Open comes from a slightly different philosophical viewpoint. Office2000 is quite clearly a 'mouse based' system, whereas, Star/Open is much more of a 'mouse assisted' system. Which you prefer is really just a question of personal taste.

Secondly, the interoperability with Office is really very good. To illustrate, I began writing this article on a Linux Box running with OpenOffice 1.0. I then moved to a Windows/ME machine and opened the document in Word and carried on working. Finally, I saved the Word document and then opened it from a copy of StarOffice 5.2 running on the same ME machine. Pretty impressive in my opinion. The biggest problem with embracing any new software is how you manage all of the investment that you have in the old software. Star/Open, through their interoperability with Office can preserve that investment for you.

Thirdly, in America, Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance have begun to aggressively ferret out improperly licensed copies of Office in businesses and educational organizations. Now, let's be honest, many of us are running bootleg copies at home because we don't want to have to shell out almost 500 dabs for the full version. StarOffice and OpenOffice give us a real alternative that stops us from having to go to prison if we get caught.

Finally, it's high time that Microsoft had some real competition. We all know that competition improves that breed. The Linux/OpenOffice/GNU software thing seems to have caught the imagination of some very influential people. All of a sudden it's fashionable to be a Geek. Linux is the darling of the industry and everyone is having a ball with this new-found opportunity to cock a snook at Gates and his kiddies up in Seattle.

The cynic in me says that the idea of 'voluntarily' maintained software being provided 'freely' by non-profit making organisations will be a short li
ved one. Already, some of the GNU supporters are breaking ranks and 'closing' up their software. Smoothwall, a provider of previously free, sophisticated firewall technology has announced its intention to close its code. SUN have closed, or are about to close, StarOffice and this trend will continue. It only takes one group to get greedy and break ranks for the whole thing to fall apart. This isn't as bad as it sounds and we do have a precedent in the computer industry. In the early '70's, AT&T Bell Labs donated UNIX Release 6.0 to the American Universities free and for gratis. It has resulted in three main UNIX variants (four if you count Linux); BSD, SCO and V.4. However, what it has also done is to encourage competition between the various protagonists resulting in a UNIX which is a much better and fitter animal than the one which left Bell Labs. I am absolutely sure that whatever happens to Star/Open, the product will only improve and in doing so force Bill Gates and his kiddies to get up off their fat self-satisfied arses and improve their own product which, in the end, can only be of benefit to us all.

In conclusion, I have decided to go with StarOffice for now, with the intention of moving to OpenOffice as it stabilises. However, while I am buggered if I will shell out for another Office upgrade, neither have I removed the current version from my computer. At least not just yet.....

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