[Am-info] Apple and StarOffice

[Mitch Stone]

On Saturday, July 27, 2002, at 11:04 PM, Sujal Shah wrote:

> On Sat, 2002-07-27 at 21:40, Mitch Stone wrote:
> [SNIP]
>> If anyone can tell me what StarOffice would offer to Mac owners that they
>> can't already get from several other sources, then I'd like to know what
>> it is.
>>
>
> The same thing you implied as the primary value proposition for
> office:mac: compatibility with the other staroffice and openoffice users
> out there, as well as one of the better office alternatives.

None of my clients uses either one of these alternatives. In fact I know 
of only one that still uses WordPerfect. I'd certainly like to see 
StarOffice make an impact, but I'm afraid, realistically, the Mac may not 
be the place for this occur. If Sun would push StarOffice harder in the 
Windows market, it would make more sense for Apple to port it, and for Mac 
users to adopt it. It looks to me like Sun is asking Apple to devote 
substantial resources to porting StarOffice to the Mac, something Sun has 
never been willing to do themselves. Am I the only person who thinks Sun 
has allowed StarOffice to languish in obscurity?

> If you're looking for extra features or the reason why people will buy
> this over any of the alternatives for OS X, the answer is pretty simple:
> features/price.
>
> I've used AppleWorks (came with my iBook), ThinkFree, Mariner Write 3.0,
> and a couple of others (is there one called Nisus?  I think I tried
> that).  All of those are inferior to Word in what I'd consider business
> user features.  OpenOffice is the closest to Word as far as features are
> concerned.  And, of all of the options I've tried, has the best Word
> compatibility.  The only issue I have is with fonts/character sets
> getting confused between Windows/Word and my Linux/OO box.

I'll take your word for it on the features front; I've never used 
StarOffice and don't know what it offers that a fairly simple product like 
AppleWorks does not. AppleWorks manages to be our every-day word processor 
and I've never felt starved for features.

As I've said before, the file translation issue is key. The ability to 
"open" or "work with" MS Office files is simply not sufficient. AppleWorks 
and other products already do this. What they don't do is open complex 
documents with sufficient accuracy to allow collaboration.

Mitch