NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, December 2002
President's Column
by Dale Oliver, President
d_oliver@swbell.net
(click to email author)


Don't forget! We will not have a club meeting in December. Maybe you can use the extra time to finish digesting that Thanksgiving turkey dinner, or to race around town for those last-minute Christmas gift purchases!

Ken Hreha presented another excellent program this past month. We all know that Open Office works nicely with Linux, but Ken showed us that it also runs quite transparently under Microsoft Windows. Many members weren't sure exactly when Ken was running Open Office under Windows or when he switched to Linux.

I was slightly amused when different club members asked the same basic question, only phrased slightly differently. Something like, "What happens if I receive a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Word document and need to open it?" Or, "What if I need to save a document in a certain version of Microsoft Word or Excel?" It seems as if some of us have forgotten that a software product is capable of reading and writing file formats defined by another company. Microsoft has done an amazingly long-lasting and effective marketing campaign to push their office software suite. Somehow, many consumers have been led to believe that no other software vendor is capable of creating an effective office suite or reading and writing Microsoft Office documents. What impressed me is not that Star Office can read and write Microsoft Office's proprietary file formats, but that it is capable of producing XML documents, the cross-platform file format of the future that will make all of this silly proprietary file formatting go the way of the dinosaurs.

While Microsoft is working so hard to making software products more proprietary and less compatible, it's gratifying to see that Star Office is going in the opposite direction. Their product runs on many different operating systems, and creates files that can be shared across many software vendor's products and operating systems. Pretty cool.

Admittedly, Microsoft did an excellent job of designing and creating the first integrated suite of office software. At the time their Office suite was introduced, the market was fragmented with various software vendors specializing in their small piece of the office software puzzle, such as WordPerfect, Borland, and Lotus. At the time, none of these disparate software products interacted with each other very well.

Be that as it may, an integrated office suite is old news today. Each subsequent release of Microsoft Windows and Office comes with more bells and whistles that gobble up alarming amounts of disk space, RAM and processor cycles, when virtually none of us need or want all these additional "features." The additional software complexity creates an ever-increasing number of bugs and security problems, and this endless cycle has made it increasingly more difficult to convince consumers to purchase yet another version of Windows or Microsoft Office. Add to this the ill-fated attempt by Microsoft to force consumers to pay an annual fee or their software will be disabled, and you have the classic ingredients for a significant change in consumer behavior. When the pain of continuing with the status quo exceeds the pain of making a change, interesting things start to happen in the marketplace. I believe we are seeing this change in consumer behavior, just like the one we witnessed when Microsoft became the vendor of choice over the other software vendors of choice at the time.

Out of curiosity, I went to the Computer Discount Warehouse site (www.cdw.com) to compare the price of current versions of Microsoft Office Professional and Star Office, the commercial version of Open Office offered by Sun Microsystems. Both software suites include a word processor, spreadsheet program, presentation graphics program, and database program. Both read and write Microsoft Office document formats. Microsoft Office XP Professional, which runs under Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000 and XP sells for $539.89. Star Office 6.0, which interestingly runs under more versions of Windows that Microsoft's office suite (it also runs under Windows 95) and runs under Linux and Solaris to boot, sells for $66.67. One-eighth the price.

Personally, I like change. I believe that we are seeing a viable choice in the software marketplace once again. I am looking forward to seeing how this change will benefit businesses and everyday software consumers just like you and me.

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