Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Erwin's StarOffice Tango
Erwin Tenhumberg's Insights into Open Source and Dancing
... or why Open Competition matters

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Dienstag August 23, 2005

PC Magazine: 4 "Stars" for OpenOffice.org
"Unlike the slow, clunky original version, version 2.0 of this free productivity suite is surprisingly slick and highly compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. It even offers features not found in its expensive Microsoft counterpart."
The full review can be found here.
( Aug 23 2005, 06:59:27 PM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]

Survey Results
Here are the results for last week's survey (38 people participated):

( Aug 23 2005, 09:25:54 AM CEST ) Permalink

OpenOffice.org in Australia
"Microsoft knows if they tried to sell Office at full price nowadays in most Australian market segments, the uptake will be dismal. Demand is bad enough already. I understand that only 20% of users are on Office 2003, two years after that version of the application was released. By now, even Windows users know just how much functionality they can get with OpenOffice.org, for zero cost. Dropping a few hundred bucks just to run a legit copy of Microsoft Office no longer carries real appeal for families or also small business."
The full article can be found here.
( Aug 23 2005, 08:21:25 AM CEST ) Permalink

Open standards enable open competition
TextMaker 2005 now also starts supporting the open standard OASIS OpenDocument XML file format:

"TextMaker 2005 also offers compatibility with the open source office suite OpenOffice.org and the industry standard OpenDocument (née OASIS) file format."

Although I obviously prefer to see most people choose OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, I think this is great. The more vendors support the OASIS OpenDocument format, the more people will realize what the benefits of open competition based on open source and open standards are. In contrast to Microsoft's file formats, OASIS OpenDocument offers choice.
( Aug 23 2005, 08:09:22 AM CEST ) Permalink