Microsoft Office still owns the desktop, future of StarOffice unclear

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Makes you wonder

StarOffice/OpenOffice is so far behind MS Office that it isn't even funny. They are lagging in performance, usability, innovation, features, programmability. It looks like Office 97. featurewise and quite literally.

It is the cheapo free/cheap alternative you only accept because it is, well, free. Or for some ideologically infused, because it is anything but Microsoft.

But it will take a miracle to bring the bloated codebase up to a standard where it can actually compete with MS Office.

If StarOffice is spun off into a mozilla like foundation, lets hope that they are born with a healthy and sizeable capital. Enough to not only sustain the current level of development but also to help about the extra effort it will take to actually start closing the gap.

Otherwise the whole openoffice chain may start to crumble. That would be really bad for the open source movement. If the posterchild of open source lets down the users how good does that look?

Sun always saw Star/OpenOffice as a way to undermine (or at least keep in check) Microsofts Office cash cow. As such it has been at least partly successful. I have no doubt that the competition has been healthy and has helped keep Office license costs down.

And without OpenOffice, Sun and IBM we wouldn't have had the standards war and Microsoft would not have opened up their formats.

But the big question is if the model is sustainable?

Posted by: honeymonster   Posted on: 05/26/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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