Sun advertising knocks microsoft licences

[Calum]

just noticed this new marketing drive from Sun:
www.sun.com/whynot

for example, click the first link there and you see:
 

quote:Attention IT Managers:
 If you haven't bought a software maintenance plan for Microsoft Office you'll have to re-buy the software the next time you want a new version

[Refalm]

From what I can tell, StarOffice is a kind of OpenOffice.org with more features...

I hope more people will use this package, including my school    they pay lot's of money to Microsoft just to run Office XP legally...

[KernelPanic]

quote:Originally posted by Refalm:
From what I can tell, StarOffice is a kind of OpenOffice.org with more features...

I hope more people will use this package, including my school     they pay lot's of money to Microsoft just to run Office XP legally...

I never found any major differences but I am not a office suite power user. What I did find was that StarOffice 6.0 crashed like a bitch when OpenOffice didnt crash ever.

[Calum]

yeah but if you buy a licence, you feel really safe if you're a clueless idiot. i think sun rightly assume that many systems admins are clueless idiots *** and would therefore prefer to pay the licence fee than get a free office suite.

also, one crucial difference between the openoffice licence and the staroffice licence is that the openoffice licence offers no warranty of suitability for any purpose, while the staroffice licence guarantess a certain level of vendor support. big difference if a) you are a clueless idiot and/or b) your office software keeps crashing!    

*** i am not talking about professionals here, i am talking about people who have unwillingly landed the task of keeping their systems in order in a small to medium business setup.

[ December 04, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[foobar]

quote:Originally posted by Calum:

i noticed this in Sun's shop window today, they had a big poster about how you should now roll out staroffice as your company's office suite and only pay for microsoft office for people who do a lot of advanced spreadsheets and things.

But ... doesn't StarOffice provide you a spreadsheet? Is Excel like - better than the StarOffice spread because of some reason?

[xyle_one]

my co-workers wife uses microsft office on a regular basis, i introduced her to starOffice and after she played with it for a while, she convinced her boss to buy it for her. i have heard from a few people that starOffice is a better product. im not an office suite power user, so i cant give a good assesment of the two products, but i can say i prefer starOffice over microsoft office. i made a time card for work in microsoft office, and the file was 46kb, i made the same file in starOffice, with the same functionality, and the file was 9kb.
anyways, im glad that sun is pushing their office suite harder, and taking swings at microsoft. hopefully more people decide to switch.

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by -=f00bar=-:
But ... doesn't StarOffice provide you a spreadsheet? Is Excel like - better than the StarOffice spread because of some reason?

It does include a spreadsheet. The only thing I can figure is they mean for people who already have a lot of MS Office spread sheets where they used a lot of embedded VBA macros. StarOffice obviously does not support VBA macros but they do have StarBasic Macros and you can define how you want VBA macros handled when importing an Excel spreadsheet. At least that's the way it is in OpenOffice.org which is the code base for StarOffice.