RSSSun Inks StarOffice Deal with India
By David Worthington | Published March 11, 2004, 7:15 PM
Sun Microsystems is claiming another victory in its ongoing campaign to oust Microsoft Office from its position as market leader. The Indian State of Haryana has standardized Sun's StarOffice open source software as its primary productivity solution throughout all state government offices.
With this decision, India joins Brazil, England, Germany, and Israel in their collective shunning of Microsoft in favor of thriftier open source alternatives.
The StarOffice suite features word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation, and drawing functionality in a value-priced open source package that supports Microsoft's file formats and XML. The state of Haryana is seeking to capitalize on lower cost software to bankroll the distribution of low-cost PCs to its 21.1 million citizens. The decision to adopt StarOffice comes as a result of this strategy.
India is not alone in subsidizing the liberalized ownership of technology. Microsoft has managed to participate in a similar program in Thailand by offering a specialized "light" version of Windows XP and rebated Thai edition of Office XP.
A Microsoft spokesperson billed its involvement in Thailand's ICT program as the "only trial of its kind" that the software giant is currently participating in. In the case of ICT, the initial batch of PCs shipped out under the program came with OpenOffice preinstalled before Microsoft stepped in as a vendor.
OpenOffice is a free-of-cost open source suite built upon the same foundation as StarOffice. The project recently hit the 1.1 milestone on its roadmap to offer a viable alternative to the Microsoft Office System. Both StarOffice and OpenOffice include broad language support to entice emerging markets.
In the enterprise, India's United India Insurance Company recently inked a 10,000 seat deal with Sun for the licensing of StarOffice. Despite the progress, a recent Yankee Group survey indicates that Microsoft rests comfortably with a near 90 percent share of the market.
Corel recently stepped back into the ring to duke it out for the remaining market share. WordPerfect 12 is a value-priced closed source alternative to Microsoft Office, which offers improved compatibility, a similar interface to MS Office and mobile office capabilities.
As the competition heats up, Microsoft is busy readying a service pack for Office 2003 that includes new functionality for InfoPath alongside usual bug fixes and enhancements.
For who need StarOffice 7 Trial can download from
http://wwws.sun.com/soft...aroffice/get/index.html
For who need to try Openoffice.org can try it here
http://download.openoffice.org/index.html
Don't forget to submit an Issue when you found it.
http://qa.openoffice.org...ing/project_issues.html
or discuss in the openoffice.org mailing list
http://www.openoffice.org/mail_list.html
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|When you can go to Swap Meet and get copies of MS Office 2003 for few bucks.......... which is a good value.
Why use StarOffice? It's a crap anyways.
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|People shold use what they need, and, for most of the poeple, Sun has exactly what you need. OO is not that bad as you think, is only that with OO you don't have the colorful MS-O2003 interface...
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|you are right, sun office is total crap. I installed it on linux, because I didn't feel like restarting the pc and booting to windows each time I want to write a letter. But it's totally unusable. it's uncomfortable, it looks like s***, and it doesn't open MS documents properly, although sun claims it does. But you should rather believe what I say than what Sun says, cause they are obviously interested in selling their product, so they will promise you everything.
Actually Sun knows that its product is crap, that's why it gives it away for free. the commercial version just features some support for exotic languages/encoding, like some african languages, but the core is free to download.
Everybody uses MS office and this is not gonna change. I didn't like Office XP that much, it used to crash more often than Office 97 on win98, but Office 2003 works flawlessly on my system.
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|"Office 2003 works flawlessly on my system."
clap clap clap clap, good for you glad you like it. clap clap clap clap. You really convey they type of power user that NEEEEEDS Microsoft Office. I'll uninstall OOo right away, you have convinced me that it doesn't open any of the MSO documents I have been collaborating with co-workers for YEARS using. All this time, I must have been full of it to ever think that there was life outside of the box.
HAHAHAHAHA
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|This is great. Free markets. Open source vs. private property. It's all about cutting costs to increase efficiency. Competition will keep Microsoft on its toes for awhile. Star Office may not be as powerful as Microsoft's Office for industry, use especially with the Exchange Server but you should only have to pay for what you want, not what someone tells you what you need.
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|I thought you could buy the individual componets in the office suite?
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|I just checked www.amazon.com and they do sell Word, Excel, etc. seperately. Amazon.com currently sells Word for $200 (the FULL version of Office 2003 is $429). Amazon currently sells the full version Sun Staroffice 7 (the ENTIRE suite) for $64.95 (list price is $79)!! Look at the HUGE price differential. I have used StarOffice and love it. Unless you are a power-user and need some of the advanced features of MS Office, then StarOffice or OpenOffice is the way to go. I would guess that over 90% of us are not power users and the free OpenOffice (or StarOffice) would serve us just fine.
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