It will take a lot more than a strong competitive product to lure people away from Office and take "gambles" on alternatives.
I was curious enough that I just downloaded Star Office and mucked around in it for a moment. I have to agree with you and others who see it only as a minor irritation and not (or at least not yet) as a threat to Microsoft Office.
It might, as some comments here and some articles have said, "chip away" at Office -- especially when the "portal version" is available, but only small chips. If anything, it will probably be most appealing to those who "borrow" their copy of Office from the office.
Star Office has a weird interface that looks like something Office might want to do but has mercifully been prevented from doing. It puts its own new desktop up and expects the user to do everything from there. Perhaps there's some way to get around that, but it isn't obvious. That's irritating because I prefer to have the desktop I've already arranged behind all my windows. It even covers up the Windows taskbar.
It has a very poor implementation of file dialogs that lack most of the power of even the simplest standard Windows dialogs. Each of the major programs is similar to the Microsoft counterpart, but just different enough to be irritating when one is accustomed to the other program.
Concerning the download: It's a 65 meg zipped file that is downloads and uncrunches into a setup program. It took me 15 minutes to download with a 640 kbps connection. Setup, including the unzipping, took 10 minutes and a reboot (which, since this is NT adds another 10 minutes <g>, but that's not Sun's fault.)
The setup program itself is similar to the Acme setup engine used on every version of Office until the current O-2k, and includes similar options.
After running through several parts of the Star suite, I exited and was greeting with a Dr. Watson meditation. In other words, the thing crashed.
Bottom line: I'll delete it soon after playing around just a bit more. |
