Friday June 04, 2004
Word on the Street
Recently, I met up with a friend at the Blue Chalk Cafe in Palo Alto. He has his own consulting business setting up accounting systems for small companies.
Eventually the topic of Microsoft Office came up. He quickly started complaining about the price of the Office suite. I asked him why he didn't look into
StarOffice 7.
He immediately started to laugh.
"What?", I asked.
"Everyone knows that's not a serious product.", was his reply.
"Why not?" I asked, intrigued.
"Because it's buggy, slow and doesn't have all the features of Office. It's more like traning software for those who can't get the real thing.
I asked him if he had ever used StarOffice and he admitted he had not. I asked him for specific bugs, specific instances where performance was lacking and a list of missing features that he had heard about. He could not produce anything.
So I asked him how he got the impression that StarOffice was so inferior to Microsoft Office.
"It's just what I hear from people", was all he managed to grumble between sips of beer.
He had struck a nerve with me and, not knowing proper social limits, I pushed again. Where had he heard about how poorly StarOffice was? What customers, magazines, web pages did he read to form this opinion.
Again, he couldn't point out one source. It was just this common knowledge, word on the street that he accepted for fact.
I will be the first one to admit I am not a very sophisticated StarOffice user. But for me it does everything I need. I've noticed no performance problems and no bugs have come up and bit me.
So how do you battle this? Doing a quick search for StarOffice 7 reviews I came up with:
So there are people spreading the word on the virtues of StarOffice 7 but yet "common knowledge" still doesn't take it seriously.
How can you fight this? My friend deals with many small businesses and I am sure that his opinion was formed by talking with these companies. Why don't these companies take StarOffice 7 seriously? What would it take to get them to notice that there is a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office out there?
I wish I had the answer. All I can do is point my friend to this blog and try and change his mind. And maybe that is the way to counter this "common knowledge", this "word on the street", one person at a time...
(2004-06-04 10:30:15.0)
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