SONY backing Staroffice

[Robert Harris]

Sony dumps MS Office for StarOffice
08:24 Friday 6th December 2002
David Becker

By the end of the year, Sony will include version 6.0 of StarOffice on most consumer desktop PCs sold in Europe, marking another dent in Microsoft's dominance of office suites

Sun Microsystems announced a deal on Wednesday to install Sun's StarOffice software on some European Sony PCs, marking another defection from dominant Microsoft products.

By the end of the year, Sony will include version 6.0 of StarOffice on most consumer desktop PCs sold in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, according to Sun. Microsoft's Works package is currently used on most of those PCs.

More at:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2127117,00.html

[Techie2000]

And here in the US, we still use Microsoft Office...:-/

[Robert Harris]

Not everybody. Some of us prefer superior products. :)

There is a little chipping away here, too, though. A couple of manufacturers (HP and someone else) will be including a Corel suite on some of their models rather than MS Works.

[ethics]

And it still will not beat Microsoft, in at least ten years.

Staroffice was free when I tried it, and while it was great it had bugs that I just kep discovering. Some of the bugs were fatal to my document--which took hours to compile.

[Techie2000]

ethics: http://www.openoffice.org/ is the Open Source codebase on which StarOffice is based on. I've personally lost more Documents to Word than to OpenOffice...