Why it's real hard not to try StarOffice

Considering that 80 percent of the people that use office suites use them for 20 percent of their features, StarOffice is the functional equivalent of Microsoft Office (as well as "http:="" techupdate.cnet.com="" enterprise="" 0-6119769-720-3686782.html"="" target="_blank">WordPerfect Office and LotusSmartSuite) for most of us. "You get what you pay for," Microsoft often said when StarOffice was free. But, that's also the problem, according to a lot of ZDNet readers. No one wants to pay extra for bloat. So, the burning question of the day is: At $76, is StarOffice really worth considering?

It's hard not to. At last count, over 70 percent of the 3,500 respondents to our online survey agreed that an alternative suite was worth considering. Could StarOffice end up being the same thorn in MS-Office's side that AMD has been in Intel's?

A better question is, why pay $76 when you can download the free open-source equivalent from openoffice.org? According to Sun's general manager for Desktop and Office Productivity Mike Rogers, the code base for OpenOffice and StarOffice are synchronized daily. "The main differences between the two," says Rogers, "is that OpenOffice must be distributed with open-source substitutes for technology that we had to license for inclusion with StarOffice." Examples of this are the database software, some fonts, the dictionary and grammar software, and the filters for opening WordPerfect files.

More importantly, and relevant to business users, is that dial-up support is not available for OpenOffice. Anyone who decides to go with the free option has no choice but to go online at openoffice.org to get support--an option that may not sit well with businesses. If the code bases truly are in-synch, another option might be to buy one copy of StarOffice (that gets your foot in the door with Sun's support organization), and set the rest of your company up with OpenOffice. Sorry, Scott.

Beyond a compelling entry cost, businesses typically look at the total cost of ownership (TCO). This includes support, training, on-going upgrade costs, and, in the case of a potential rip and replace like this (swapping StarOffice for MS-Office), the price of converting.

According to Rogers, StarOffice ships with one "free" support incident that expires in 60 days. If you're having a problem with StarOffice, you have 60 days from the date of purchase to call Sun's 800 number, thereby avoiding Sun's $25 per incident fee. The retail version of Microsoft Office ships with two free incidents and unlimited support for getting the product installed. Beyond that, it's $35 per incident. If it's a non-retail version (if you're an IT professional with a site license, for example), the cost of getting telephone support from Microsoft climbs dramatically to $245 per incident. There are options to reduce the cost, such as buying a "six-pack" of non-telephone online support in advance or getting support from a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for as little as $25 per incident. Between human and online support, there are myriad options from both companies for different types of buyers.

The best advice I can offer you is to study support options closely when comparing the TCO of these products. Sun seems to have a slight, perhaps negligible edge from a cost perspective. However, Microsoft has been at the productivity software support game for so long that the quality and maturity of its support offerings are probably top notch.

Ongoing upgrade costs are harder to compare because Sun hasn't released any information on what it will take for users to upgrade from StarOffice 6.0 to its successor. On the other hand, the cost for a new copy of StarOffice ($76) is still remarkably less than the $239 cost of upgrading MS-Office from one version to the next.

In terms of conversion costs, Gartner estimates those costs to run approximately $1,200 per user. That includes the cost of retraining Office users. Sun disputes this cost, saying that the same retraining exists whether you are upgrading from Office 2000 to Office XP, or Office 2000 to StarOffice. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. My colleague and ZDNet editor-in-chief Dan Farber, for example, is using OpenOffice and hasn't shelled out a dime for anything yet. The user interface was intuitive enough for him to figure out and, even better, he's had no trouble exchanging documents with people like me that are still using Microsoft Office. Not only does StarOffice support MS-Office's file formats, but it also supports some of Office's collaborative features such as integration with Microsoft Outlook and the redlining of documents.

Redlining is a feature that workgroups use when multiple users are collaborating on a document. It allows each of the collaborators to see the comments of colleagues. We rely heavily on this feature here at ZDNet when editing articles. (For example, if I sent this column for review to Dan Farber, he could comment on it and send it back to me and I would probably not be able to tell whether he used MS-Word or StarOffice.) Beyond these one or two special collaborative features, we don't have a need for any of MS-Office's other bells and whistles-for which we're theoretically paying a premium.

In order to achieve this level of file format compatibility, Sun had to reverse-engineer all of MS-Office's formats. The implication is that if Microsoft changes those formats in any way, Sun will have to go through the reverse-engineering process all over again and there could be a period of time where StarOffice and OpenOffice are incompatible with the newest version of MS-Office. This could be an obstacle to sharing documents in situations where one or more collaborators are using that newest version.

One area of incompatibility that Gartner identified and that no amount of reverse engineering can overcome is programmability. MS-Office is actually a full-blown development environment that allows for everything from the recording of simple macros to the development of complex applications. Those applications are totally incompatible with StarOffice; and Sun's Rogers highly doubts if Sun will ever offer tools that ease migration from one suite to the other. One noteworthy point is that, according to Sun, macros and applications that run on StarOffice will run unchanged on all versions of StarOffice. That includes the Windows, Linux, and Solaris editions as well as the recently added Mac OS X edition.

Bottom line? If you're considering the switch, your mileage will vary. It depends on who you are, what you do, and the type of organization(s) you work in. The good news is that if you're an MS-Office shop, the cost of evaluating either StarOffice or OpenOffice is dirt-cheap. That's probably why, of the 3,500 people who participated in our survey, almost 60 percent said they were considering a switch to a non-Microsoft Office suite, and 11 percent already have. Clearly, Dan Farber had nothing to lose by checking it out. Why should you?

Is your company considering or currently using StarOffice 6.0? Share your experiences in our TalkBack forum.

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