Sun would like to think it can succeed where others have failedÃ,—in breaking Microsoft’s stranglehold on the office productivity market—by offering a product that’s almost as good as Microsoft Office at a much lower price. Do the sums add up?
StarOffice version 6 is not a direct competitor to Microsoft Office XP, whether it is the Standard or Professional edition. However, StarOffice is a suite of office tools for the user who does not need all the additional bells and whistles of Microsoft’s Office suite.
It could be argued that most users do not need or will never use many of the features in either product, and this makes a compelling case for the considerably less expensive StarOffice. However, Office is the most widely used suite and as a consequence most documents, spreadsheets, and presentations are in Office’s proprietary format. While StarOffice imports most simple files without any problems, as the files become more complex, problems start to creep in.
So in essence, for SOHO use where file importing is not a huge issue StarOffice is a very strong contender. For power users, or indeed organisations with MS Office well and truly entrenched, there are strong reasons not to move to StarOffice.
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Office politics
Introduction 1. Microsoft Office XP 2. Sun StarOffice v6.0 About RMIT |
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