[TriLUG] StarOffice at Best Buy

[Robert Floyd]

Yesterday, I went by Best Buy and picked up the shrink-wrapped
StarOffice. It was on sale for $69.95, with a $20 rebate by mail. Not
too bad for a 5-license office suite I'm running on my home Windows 98
box, my personal Linux laptop and, soon, my daughter's Windows 95
machine (that will be the test: it's a P100; and it's in my house, so
it's still my machine).

You may be asking, "Why would anyone take off a perfectly good free
office suite (OpenOffice) to install an office suite that costs money
and does the same thing?" There are several reasons, some of which, I
hope, may motivate some of the readers of this mailing list to head down
to Best But/CompUSA/other retailer and pick up a copy:

1. The additional goodies: the templates and clip art are nice, as is
Adabas, but the additional filters are particularly important to me. In
addition, the manual is not too shabby.

2. The best way to encourage competition in the software field and,
especially, to encourage stores to start carrying Linux software, is to
buy it. If the bean counters see StarOffice leaving the shelves (I
picked up the last one on the shelf at the Durham Best Buy), they'll
start to realize there is an economically viable (for them) alternative
to the Microsoft juggernaut.

3. By purchasing the software, I'm encouraging Sun to continue funding
the OpenOffice effort and, by extension, helping out all you folks who
use OpenOffice. Consider it part of the social contract.

4. Come on: $50 for a 5-machine license. What better bargain is there
for all you home networkers out there.

5. I plan an experiment in subverting the dominant paradigm at work.
When I install StarOffice on my Windows 2000 machine, I'll start using
it as my default word processor/spreadsheet/presentation package and
exchange documents freely with my Office 2000 colleagues. If I can do
this transparently (i.e., no complaints about problems reading my
documents), it will demonstrate the folly of buying into the Microsoft
licensing scheme.

The only complaint I have about the shrink wrap is that there is
absolutely no documentation about Adabas. It installs it, but, from
there, folks are on their own. A Google search got me to the Software AG
site with their Adabas documentation, but Sun should have provided it in
soft copy on the CD, or, at a minimum, pointed folks to the
documentation in the README file.



Robert Floyd
Durham, NC