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October 06, 2004
Fear of StarOffice?
The Register has Steve Ballmer acknowledging that StarOffice, and by extension OpenOffice as well, exists in competition with Microsoft's big cash cow. There must be some big customers complaining they cannot see why they should pay through the nose for office productivity (sic) software.
Ballmer's quoted as disparaging StarOffice because, "It’s not compatible with Microsoft Office and it’s missing key applications like Outlook." There probably are some things that aren't compatible. That's perhaps because StarOffice and OpenOffice use a public standard XML format to store documents, whereas other folks rely on proprietary formats to get your arm and leg.
It's not entirely clear why Outlook would be considered a key application, except by people who write email viruses. You definitely don't need it to send mail, manage your contacts, keep your calendar up to date, or any of that sort of thing. Perhaps it's key to keeping users captive and to propping the stock price up.
Maybe Ballmer's finally learning from Andy Grove. Someone once suggested that Intel went out of its way to prevent potential competitors from dying off completely, because Grove realized Intel's monopoly would be unambiguously identified as such had they no viable competition at all.
Someday we'll learn about the hush funding wired from Redmond to a student bank account in Finland back in the early 90s.
Posted by Mark at October 6, 2004 09:28 PM