Introduction

This paper will discuss the feasibility study that I conducted on the better office suite for a small business, StarOffice 5.2 or Microsoft Office 2000 Professional. An office suite is a collection of programs that perform common office functions such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, e-mail, and web browsing. The choice of an office suite for a small business is a very critical one these days because the business relies on this software in order to complete the tasks that the business needs to do. The software must be reliable, capable of performing the functions required, and be affordable.

Until recently, there was not really any other choice in the office suite market. There were individual applications, but they generally were not interoperable and performed only one function, such as word processing. With the advent of Microsoft Office, businesses were provided with a complete set of programs from one source that could perform all of the vital functions. At the start of the office suite era, Microsoft was alone in the market; there were other suites, such as Corel's WordPerfect suite, but it did not provide all of the capabilities that Microsoft Office did. Microsoft is no longer alone; Sun Microsystems has purchased and further developed the first real competitor to Microsoft Office, StarOffice 5.2. This suite is one of the first of offer the same range of applications that Microsoft did, and be capable of the same tasks as the Microsoft suite.

This report will discuss initial software cost, supported operating systems, hardware requirements, network installation options, performance on test machines, training costs, licensing, capabilities, reliability and stability, future upgrade costs, vendor support, software source code, and interoperability in the Factual Discussion section which directly follows. The report will then go on and give an overview of the data that I obtained from my research. The next section of the report will focus on each conclusion from each area of the study. Finally, the report will detail the recommendation that, despite a valiant effort by StarOffice, Microsoft Office is the choice for a small business.

 

Factual Discussion

This section will discuss each main point of this study in great detail. StarOffice 5.2 Deluxe and Microsoft Office 2000 Professional were compared in numerous areas and the results of each comparison are noted in each section. Please note that Microsoft sells several different versions of its Office software. They include a range of different types of applications, but Professional was the version that had the most typically used applications and also happened to match up the closest to StarOffice.

Initial Software Cost

The initial software cost is one of the most important factors for a small business to consider when it purchases software, and office suites are no different. The costs of the two suites were compared in all of the possible ways that they may be acquired (except for pre-installation on a computer system since most computer manufactures do not pre-install StarOffice on their computer and those that do, the specifications of the computers do not match those with MS Office pre-installed; also since there are several different versions of MS Office, it would be difficult to compare them in regards to price bundled with computer systems).  For the full versions, MS Office is $599 with a CD and installation manual (Microsoft Website) while StarOffice is $39.95 for the CD and installation manual; StarOffice also includes a 400-page user manual. StarOffice (the full version) can be downloaded directly from Sun for free. For the upgrade, StarOffice is exactly the same as the full version (Sun Microsystems, StarOffice Website), while MS Office is $349 (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Website). Table I, next page, summarizes the costs of the two suites and what is included.

 

 

Supported Operating Systems

The operating systems that an application supports is very important to small-business since not all software will run on all operating systems; office suites are no different. The small-business must consider the operating system when they purchase a computer system against the software that they want to run on it; they also must consider the operating system that they already have on their current systems when they purchase software to run on those systems.

MS Office 2000 Professional will run on only Microsoft operating systems including Windows 9x and later and Windows NT 4.x and later. The Macintosh operating system is supported but the version that runs on the Mac is not the same that runs on Windows; the Mac version is usually a slight preview of what will be in the next version of MS Office for Windows. Currently, the Mac version is Office 2001; the next Windows version of MS Office will be Office XP which is due to be released along side the next version of Windows, Windows XP (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Website). See Table II below for more information on the supported operating systems.

StarOffice supports not only the same Windows operating as MS Office does, but also Linux (Kernel 2.0 +) and Solaris 2.5 +. This would give the small business more flexibility should they decide to run a non-Microsoft operating system. Sun Microsystems has announced that it will have support for the Macintosh operating system with the next release of StarOffice, StarOffice 6.0. StarOffice used to support the OS/2 Warp 3.0 operating system, but support for it was removed with the latest version of StarOffice. (Sun Microsystems: StarOffice Website)
Please see Table: II, next page, for an overview on the supported operating systems.

 

 

Hardware Requirements

The hardware requirements that software requires is incredibly important to anyone that is purchasing software for the computers; if their computer does not meet the minimum requirements, the software may run very slowly or not at all. Office suites tend to require more substantial hardware than other software because of their massive number of capabilities.

Both StarOffice and MS Office require almost the same in hardware. Both require a Pentium class processor (which includes AMD processors) or higher and they require exactly the same in CDROMs and displays. The only real difference in hardware requirements they have is that StarOffice requires a “minimum” of 32MB of RAM and a “recommended” amount of 64MB of RAM (Sun Microsystems, StarOffice Website) while MS Office requires 16MB, plus 4MB for each component of the suite that is running at once (say if the word processor is running at the same time as the spreadsheet, then 24MB would be needed) (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Web Site). Hard disk space is also slightly different; StarOffice requires 170MB of disk space (Sun Microsystems, StarOffice Website) while MS Office requires 217MB for the full installation (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Website). Please see Table: III for a summary of the hardware requirements.

 

 

Network Installation Options

Network installation is the installation of core code on a server and having only a small amount of code installed on the client's side as opposed to having the entire code installed on the client. In a network install, the client only has such code as for customizations and personalization of the application while the core code of the application is stored on the server; when the application is run, the client will access the application's core code directly from the server over the network (network must have sufficient bandwidth to support the running of applications) as opposed to accessing it from the client's hard disk. The advantages of this are that it allows clients with small hard disks to run the full application even though they may not have the disk space for the full installation. Also, with the application's core code stored on the server, the application can be updated on the server only once as opposed to having to update each and every copy of the application if it were fully installed on the client's machine. The downside to network installation is that the applications run much slower over the network connection than if they were installed locally on the client's machine.

Why is network installation important? The small business may want ease of upgrading and distributing patches by having the core code on the server and not having to update each machine separately. Yet, the small business may not have sufficient server hardware to handle users accessing the application's core code over the network. Also, with today's computers with large hard disks, the advantage of central storage for core code is negligible. Therefore, even though both StarOffice and Microsoft Office support network installations, it really is no longer an issue (Sun Microsystems, StarOffice Website), (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Website).

Performance On Test Machines

The performance of the software on a user's machine is one of the most vital aspects of software usage; "How fast will the program work?" In order to test the performance of the two suites, I gained access to three completely different computer systems. These systems ranged from low-end machines (the small-business may buy used machines to save money), to high-end machines (the small-business may want the best hardware for longer, useful life span of the equipment), to a custom built machine (if the small-business wanted to have total control of their hardware.) Machines #1 and #2 were Kent State University- Trumbull Campus machines that are used in their computer labs, while Machine #3 is my home machine. All of the machines had vastly different hardware combinations; it would not be possible to test the suites on all of the different combinations of hardware since there are literally thousands of different combinations.

The machines had a variety of CPUs ranging from a Pentium 233 to Pentium 666 Xeon. All of the machines were running various versions of Microsoft Windows (95b, 98se, and 2000 sp1); testing on other non-Microsoft operating systems (i.e. Linux, Solaris, or Macintosh) were not possible since MS Office 2000 only supports Microsoft operating systems. Please see Table IV for a complete run-down of the test machines' specifications.

 

 

In order to conduct the tests, sample documents for each of the components (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and database) and were tested with open time, the time it takes for the software to open the document and release control to the user to edit it. Two test documents were used for each component of the suites and the same documents were used on all machines (except for the e-mail due to time and additional incoming e-mail to my POP server which I could not control; in these cases, the same messages were used for each test on each machine.)

I calculated the times with an electronic organizer that keeps time to the second. I first opened the programmed and used the program's file management features to navigate the file system to the location where my test files were stored. I highlighted the test document and, as soon as I hit 'Enter' on the keyboard, I counted the amount of time the suite took to open a document and release control to me.

For the text documents the results on all of the test machines revealed that MS Office opened all of the documents faster than StarOffice did on the larger documents; on the smaller ones, there was no difference. On the spreadsheets, the results were similar; on the more complex spreadsheets, MS Office took the lead; while on the less complicated spreadsheets, the two suites were in a dead heat. In the presentations, MS Office took the lead in all of the tests on all of the machines; StarOffice was not able to match MS Office on any of the presentations.

For the tests with the Internet sites, I picked two of my favorite sites: Yahoo.com and Stargatesg-1.com. Yahoo is designed for speed and efficiency while the Stargatesg-1.com site is a gaming site that is meant for recreation and not for actual work. The sites differ in that Yahoo uses standard HTML and some JavaScript while Stargatesg-1.com is heavy with the Flash animations and graphics. To test, I typed in the site's address into the browser and counted the number of seconds it took from when I hit 'Enter' until the browser indicated that the page was fully loaded.

In the Yahoo.com test, both suites displayed the sites fully, but in all cases on the test machines (and both connection types, LAN and dial-up) MS Office was faster by a wide margin.

The Stargatesg-1.com tests were quite interesting. On the low-end machine, StarOffice failed to display the Flash animation and when I reloaded the page in an attempt to display the animation, StarOffice crashed- the first and only crash during my tests. Yet, on the high-end machine, StarOffice displayed the Flash animation perfectly. I knew that the Flash plug-in had to be installed perfectly since MS Office had displayed it perfectly; StarOffice is able to detect and use most standard plug-ins. Why didn't the animation work on the low-end machine? That remains a mystery.

On my home machine, when I tried to connect to Stargatesg-1.com for that test, I was unable to connect at all even, with both browsers. I ran PING (a program that tests to see if a site is responding) and I got no response. I tried to conduct the tests numerous other times (thinking that the server may have been down for maintenance), and still the same result. I contacted my ISP and they had me change with my network settings, but nothing was able to allow me to connect to the site. This has been the case now for over two months.

The e-mail test consisted of seven e-mails, some formatted as plain text and some were few were HTML messages; I also included an attached file in one of the messages. I sent all of these messages from a web-based e-mail account to my POP mail account and waited a sufficient amount of time for the messages to travel to the POP account. I then configured the e-mail applications of the suites to leave the messages on the server (they downloaded a copy locally) so that the other suite could then get the same messages. Once I felt I had waited long enough, I retrieved the e-mail. In all cases, StarOffice retrieved the same messages as MS Office did in a much smaller length of time. In the most extreme case, StarOffice was nearly four times faster at retrieval than MS Office was.

Please see Table V, next page, for the actual performance numbers. Please note "sec" represents "seconds."

 

 

Training Costs

Training costs are important if the intended users of the office suite have never used that software before. Training can range from an on-site person that is already with the company to self-study classes (with videos, CDROMs, and Web-bases classes) to seminars. Since in-house training would be difficult to judge (perhaps because the person who would be teaching could range from the secretary to an executive, the cost could vary greatly), I consider self-study training and seminars. Books are also considered.

According to Sun Microsystems’s StarOffice Website, they hold training seminars and web-based classes. The web-based classes range from free for an introduction to StarOffice to $600 for a web-based class in advanced StarOffice usage. There were 14 books that ranged from $16 to $32 at FatBrain.com; I could find no CDs or videos for StarOffice training.

There is a huge amount of training information available on Microsoft’s Website for MS Office including web-based classes, distance-learning, regular academic classes, videos, books, and CDs. Microsoft does not give pricing information on the training, but the books (over 200 of them) ranged from $8 to over $70. Most of the training classes start at $100 and go up from there.

 

Licensing

Licensing is how a purchaser can use the software product; such as if it can be installed on multiple machines with just one copy of the software or if additional copies of the software can be made (for backups, spare CD, etc.).

According to StarOffice’s Binary Code License Agreement, the license allows for one copy of the software to be purchased and that copy can be installed on as many machines as the organization (company, non-profit, educational institution, or personal) wishes, so long as it is installed only “internally.” This means that, for example, KSU could buy (or download for free) one single copy of StarOffice and copy it as many times as it likes; KSU could then install it on all of their computers and give it to its students and faculty all for the cost of that initial CD or download.

MS Office requires that if an organization needs multiple copies of the software, that the organization buy the corresponding number of licenses for as many copies as the organization wants. Also, with each individual license, the organization can make only one backup copy of the software that must remain with the original licensee. If the software is sold or given away, the original owner must give any and all copies of the software to the new owner and he must sever all ties to that particular software. In addition, if the software came pre-installed on a computer system, the owner of that system cannot under any circumstances sell or give away MS Office; the software must be returned to either the manufacturer of the system or be returned to Microsoft (Microsoft Corporation, EULA).

If the organization wants multiple copies of MS Office, the licenses they must have do give them a volume discount of approximately 22% off the regular price. The organization must require at least 5 copies before they can acquire the license and the discount. (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Website).

Capabilities

The capabilities of the programs would be the most important factor in determining if the software should be purchased, since no one wants to buy something that cannot do what the user wants to accomplish. Both StarOffice and MS Office have an enormous amount of features, and I will consider each component separately.

StarOffice’s word processor is very similar to MS Office’s. Yet, StarOffice lacks such features as grammar checking, multiple views of a document (i.e. Normal, Print, Outline, Online), and some more advanced formatting such as breaks in a document. Can StarOffice hold it’s own against MS Office in this area? Yes. In both my usage and other’s opinions (C|Net Download.com), StarOffice is more than capable in this area.

In the spreadsheet realm, the only features that are missing in StarOffice are Pivot Charts and some advanced chart formatting options. Both have the basic and advanced functions that anyone may need in a spreadsheet application.

The databases are a rather interesting comparison. Both programs support queries, reports, and forms but they way they are implemented are vastly different in how they are worked with. Can StarOffice compare to MS Office in databases? Yes, but in my experience, learning the database requires a very steep learning curve.

Presentation software is rather equally matched. Both support slide transitions and animations, and the other basic functions that presentations require.

Web browsers are where StarOffice and MS Office separate. StarOffice does not support 128bit encryption that is so required for secure online transactions. StarOffice does not support any kind of ratings system to keep objectionable content from being viewed, nor does it provide the same level of security in regards to JavaScript, cookies, and ActiveX controls as MS Office does. StarOffice does not provide the same feature that allows for offline viewing of web pages, nor an easy way of saving an entire web page for archival purposes.

In regards to e-mail, the only difference in the two suites is that StarOffice does not support “in message deletion or moving,” which is simply being able to work with that particular message with out having to close the message window and work with it from the main e-mail window. Both handle numerous accounts with ease.

Reliability and Stability

Reliability and stability is important especially for the user who may have to put up with the application’s bugs. Having an unreliable program is just like having a car that won’t start half of the time, or one that stalls going down the road. It is not only frustrating, but can lead to trouble if an important document was needed to be finished and the program crashed, taking the document down with it.

In my testing and long-time use of both StarOffice and MS Office, neither proved to be crash or bug-proof, but MS Office was much more stable than StarOffice. On my home machine, StarOffice tends to send error messages whenever I try to open a document while I am online. StarOffice also has the habit with other users (I have never experienced this) of what is called “crapping out”: crashing at a critical moment when a document has not been saved (C|Net Download.com). During my tests, the browser in StarOffice crashed once; that was the only crashed I received during all of my testing.

On my home machine, MS Office’s browser tends to crash nearly constantly. I will be browsing a page, and when I click on a link, the browser refuses to respond and will lock up the system; this has never happened with StarOffice while browsing the Internet. During my uses of MS’s browser at KSU, it crashes often, but not nearly as often as it does on my home machine.

The e-mail applications have proven to be stable as well as the databases, presentation applications, and spreadsheet applications.

 

Future Upgrade Costs

Future upgrade costs can be very important to a small business since they may want to keep their software current so that they will have all of the latest features. Unfortunately, determining the future upgrade costs could not be calculated. On the StarOffice front, Sun has held the cost of StarOffice 5.1 and 5.2 the same, but Sun is currently working on "Applications over the Internet," where an application would actually be run from a web browser instead of run from the users hard disk. Sun has plans on releasing StarOffice 6.0 as a regular application, but pricing has yet to be released to the public (Sun Microsystems, StarOffice Website). Also, if Sun succeeds in the applications from the Internet, the cost could change to a subscription plan (for example, $5 to use it) as Microsoft is planning. Therefore the upgrade cost for future StarOffice versions cannot be determined.

The upgrade cost for Microsoft Office also cannot be determined in much the same way as StarOffice. Microsoft is also planning a subscription plan for Office and they already have Office available through a browser (third parties are actually providing the service). Also another problem is that Office XP (the next version already in the late Beta stage) may not have the same grouping of applications as Office 2000 Professional does. Therefore, the future upgrade cost cannot be determined.

 

Vendor Support

Vendor (the manufacturer of the software) support is important in the event that the user or anyone else locally cannot fix a bug or requires help with the program. Microsoft offers online resources including an extensive online database of questions and answers that their own technical support people have answered. They also provide a huge number of patches for all of their applications as well as user forums for user-to-user help. Microsoft provides professional one-on-one, real-time support for $195; and they provide telephone support for $24.95 per call. E-mail support did not appear to be available according to Microsoft’s Technical Support page (Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Website).

Sun Microsystems provides the same support as Microsoft, but they have a much smaller number of patches and a smaller database of answered questions. They do provide a FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) page as well as telephone support at $25 per call. E-mail support is provided by a third-party, ExpertCity, for $20 per incident (Sun Microsystems, StarOffice Website).

 

Software Source Code

Software Source Code is the computer programming code that the Suite is created from; i.e. The Suite is a book and all of the text on the pages is the source code. Why is the source code important and why do I even consider it? The source code is important because it goes directly into if the owner can actually modify the program, say to fix a bug that could pop up while it is being used.

If a program is closed source, it means that the program's creators do not want anyone else but the original authors to edit the program's code and fix any bug or expand the program's capabilities beyond what it was originally designed to do. An open source program in one that allows the user to view and edit the source code in any manner he/she chooses; usually, the only stipulation is that if the user makes any changes to the code, the user must then submit those changes to the program's authors. The author will then determine if the changes should be kept and used or discarded.

So what is the point of open or closed source code? Typically, an open source program will have a much larger number of developers than those of closed source programs. This can both be a hindrance and a help to the software. It can be a hindrance in that with no necessarily unified front (except for the original programmers) and that with little collaboration, there may be no advance in the progress of the program. On the other hand, open source can lead to more features and faster bug fixes.

Why would a small business care about the source code of a program? The small business (depending on the knowledge of the business's computer personnel) may want to have a program that they can fix the bugs in should they find any. So what is the source code for Microsoft Office and StarOffice? According to the license agreement during the installation of MS Office, the user may not "reverse engineer or decompile the program;" although the program does not actually come right and say if it is open or closed source, the phrase "reverse engineer or decompile" means that the user can not modify the program's code, therefore it is closed source (Microsoft Corporation, EULA).

Sun Microsystems has released the source code for StarOffice at a specific website, OpenOffice.org. According to the website, a user may download the source code and modify it in anyway, just so long as the user submits it back to Sun Microsystems. The company will then decide as to whether to include the modifications in the next release of StarOffice, 6.0. StarOffice is therefore open source.

 

Interoperability

Interoperability is the ability of two or more applications being able to edit a document and have it opened in another application and have it be formatted the same way as in the first applications. This is very important since if one source has one application and the destination has another, will the destination be able to open the document and get what the source intended?

Since Microsoft Office supports, generally speaking, only a Microsoft format for its documents, that is what they had to be saved as. Fortunately, StarOffice supports Microsoft's file formats making opening, editing, and saving documents between the two suites very easy. For the record: MS Office does not support any of the native StarOffice formats.

In the word processing documents that I used in testing, there was absolutely no difference in either document when they were open in both suites. During the two years that I have used StarOffice and Microsoft Office, I have experienced only very minor changes in documents between the suites. This is echoed by some of the comments on C|Net and other articles that I have read (Spanbauer).

Spreadsheets have also faired well between the two suites. The only problems that I encountered during my testing were some cell widths changed when they were switched from suite to suite. These were mostly minor formatting changes that were remedied very quickly.

The presentations were where things fell apart greatly. One presentation that was fairly simple, both suites displayed it fine, but a very complex one was another story. The complex presentation consisted of different slide transitions for each slide, imbedded animations, numerous graphics per slide that had to come in a specific order, and other complex items. StarOffice was not able to display most of the animations in the proper order that I had originally programmed them, in MS Office. On the other hand, the other presentation that I used, which was created with StarOffice, displayed perfectly in MS Office.

In the database realm, I attempted to test the suite abilities to open the but could not complete the tests since the way that StarOffice works with databases is too different than MS Office's; therefore I could not time the opening of database files. I attempted to open a MS database file in StarOffice that contained tables, queries, and reports; when I was finally able to get StarOffice to open the database, it converted everything to a table. The queries and the reports were still there, but they could not be edited so as to change the search criteria. I tried in vain to create a MS database with StarOffice. StarOffice natively supports it's own database format which is not supported by MS Office. Yet, StarOffice does have the option of creating a MS database, but each and every time I tried, I would get nothing.

In e-mail, StarOffice supports importing MS Office e-mail directly while MS Office does not support importing StarOffice mail; there is no full-featured e-mail format that both programs support. They both support one file type, but nearly all formatting is lost in this format, making it essentially useless.

Both StarOffice and MS Office can edit HTML documents and in my experience with them, they do an excellent job working with each other. There is one slight difference in how they work with HTML; MS Office creates main styles at the beginning of a HTML document and then refers back to these definitions later on in the document instead of specifying the style each time the style changes. StarOffice specifies the style each time it changes. Therefore, if you open a HTML document in MS Office, it converts each change in style to the reference at the beginning of the document and then refers to it. If that same document is then opened in StarOffice, and changes are made, StarOffice does not use the reference material at the beginning of the document, but specifies the style each time it changes. This essentially creates excess code. Although the programs do not loose any of the formatting, this can lead to slightly increased download time for the document.

 

Factual Summary

Overall, both suites put up an excellent battle. I will now summarize my results.

1)                                          In the initial software costs (page 3), StarOffice proved to be the cheapest with a free download or $39.95 for the CD and manual; the cost did not vary with upgrade or full version.

2)                                          With supported operating systems (page 4), StarOffice took this category by supporting the most operating systems; not only all of the Windows 9x/NT+ family, but also with Linux and Solaris for a total of 9 supported operating systems to MS Office’s 7.

3)                                          In the hardware requirements category (page 6), both MS Office and StarOffice were nearly equally matched, but StarOffice pulled ahead with slightly less disk space required, 170MB to 217MB. StarOffice does “recommend” 64MB of RAM while, MS requires 16MB plus 4MB for each additional open application.

4)                                          Both MS Office and StarOffice were equal in the network installation options: both support it (page 7).

5)                                          The performance on test machines (page 8) category proved to be StarOffice’s downfall; MS Office was faster in all types of documents by a wide margin, typically twice as fast as StarOffice. The only category that StarOffice was close in was the e-mail; StarOffice beat MS Office hands down in this category with significantly less retrieval time for the e-mail, in one case nearly 3 times faster

6)                                          Training costs (page 13) were hard to judge since the user may not need any training, but overall StarOffice won by having free training for an introduction to StarOffice.

7)                                          Licensing (page 14) was a boost to StarOffice with it’s maximum licensing cost of $39.95 for unlimited users; while MS Office would be over $467 for the full version and $272 for the upgrade with at least 5 copies.

8)                                          MS Office won in the capabilities category (page 15) with a richer feature set in all of the programs, except for the database and presentation applications.

9)                                          StarOffice was much more unstable and unreliable (page 17) in my tests and other’s usage. I experienced one crash with StarOffice, while I didn’t have any during my formal testing. Although MS Office’s browser was unstable on all of the systems that I have worked on, the rest of MS Office is relatively stable.

10)                                      The future upgrade costs (page 18) could not be accurately determined.

11)                                      Microsoft won in the vendor support category (page 19) with a much larger database of problems and many more patches for the applications.

12)                                      StarOffice wins the source code (page 20) category with open source code as opposed to MS Office’s closed source.

13)                                      In the interoperability category (page 22), Microsoft opened StarOffice’s documents much more reliability than StarOffice opened Microsoft’s documents.

 

Conclusions

In conclusion, despite the effort by Sun Microsystems to have an office suite that could beat Microsoft’s Office 2000 Professional, MS Office is still the better choice. StarOffice does have a cheaper initial cost, supports more operating systems, has less hardware requirements, has cheaper licensing, cheaper training costs, and open source code it just cannot keep up with MS Office. MS Office is has much better performance, is stable, and is supported more heavily by Microsoft. Please see Table VI for an overview.

 

 

Recommendation

Despite an overwhelming effort by StarOffice, I have to recommend Microsoft Office 2000 Professional for the small business. With its increased stability, better technical support, richer feature set, and better performance on computers, it is the best choice.

 

StarOffice provides an enormous amount for such a small price, but given Microsoft Office’s better stability and features, it is the clear-cut winner. StarOffice is a more than capable program, but I cannot recommend it for a small business requiring an office suite.

Works Cited

 

Binary Code License Agreement. 16 April 2001 <http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/get.html>.

 

C|Net Download.com: StarOffice Personal Edition. 16 April 2001 <http://www.cnet.com>.

 

English, David. Sun’s Shining New Star: StarOffice 5.1 20 December 1999 <http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2404023,00.html>.

 

FatBrain.com. 16 April 2001. <http://www.fatbrain.com>

 

Haney, Clare. Let StarOffice be Free: Sun Executive Why StarOffice Can, and Does, Compete Successfully with Microsoft. 16 April 2001 <http://www.pcworld.com.>

 

Microsoft Website. 16 April 2001 <http://www.microsoft.com>.

 

Microsoft Corporation. “Microsoft Office 2000 Professional License Agreement (EULA: End Users’ License Agreement.)” Microsoft Office 2000 Professional. 2000 (Version 9). 16 April 2001. 

 

OpenOffice.org Wesbite. 16 April 2001 <http://www.openoffice.org>.

 

Perens, Bruce. Sun’s StarOffice Release: Is It Really What You Think? 16 April 2001 <http://www.zdnet.com.>

 

Rapoza, Jim. StarOffice is a Worthy Alternative. 16 April 2001 <http://www.zdnet.com/products>.

 

Spanbauer, Scott. StarOffice 5.1 Nudges Microsoft: Alternative is Nice, but not quite compatible with Office. 16 April 2001 <http://www.pcworld.com.>

 

StarOffice Website. 16 April 2001 <http://www.sun.com/staroffice/>.

 

Sun Microsystems. StarOffice 5.2 Deluxe. Palo Alto, California: Sun Microsystems, 2000.