Are there viable alternatives to 'Microsoft Office'?
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP) First, here is a very exciting piece of news from Compaq. In a press release that I received last week, the company announced a new 17" LCD monitor for its desktop PC. The new monitor, which takes far less space than a comparable 19" or 20" CRT model, has a resolution of 1280 x 1024, a resolution level that is also known as SXGA.
Each dot is 0.26 mm, just 0.01 mm larger than the best CRT monitor that we have. To save even more desktop space, we can use the optional adjustable swing arm or simply mount the monitor on the wall. Add to all these features the 200 nit brightness level and the 160 degree viewing angle. The latter means that, unlike your old notebook screen, people can view images or read text from points farther to the sides of the monitor.
A USB hub is optional. We can connect the TFT 7010 monitor to the CPU's USB port and then up to four USB devices can be connected to the hub. The monitor can accept both digital and analog signals, making it compatible with our existing VGA card or its DVI replacement in the future.
What made the news really exciting was the price. The press release said that the monitor would be offered at US$1,499.
Wow! The prices of 15" monitors have been going down from the $1,000 mark at a snail's pace, and this aggressive pricing will push them down a little bit faster. Traditionally, the price of a 17" CRT monitor is almost twice of the one just one level below, and similarly the price of a 19" or 20" CRT monitor is twice that of a 17" one. On the LCD side, the price of a 17" is normally more than twice that of a 15".
Compaq Indonesia told me that it would be some time before I would get the chance to review a demo unit, as the product had just been announced in the U.S. However, just to read the release already made me so excited, and I now look forward to testing the real thing.
News from MS
If you've been following the news from Redmond, at least two important developments are worth sharing.
First, Windows 95 is being phased out. Microsoft will no longer make it available directly from them, and support for Windows 95 users will cost them some cash. The upcoming Office suite, i.e., Microsoft Office 10, will not run on Windows 95.
The second is perhaps the more significant development. In its attempt to curb the use of illegal copies of its products, Microsoft has announced that it will apply the so-called "Product Activation Technology" in its future products -- Windows, Office, Visio, etc. The method will enable Microsoft to limit the number of times a copy of software is installed on individual machines.
In addition, Microsoft's "edge-to-edge" hologram method has also been proven to be reliable in fighting software counterfeiting because nobody has been able to duplicate it.
However, Microsoft's problems are not limited to product counterfeiting and copying. A lot of users are not interested in buying the original software products anyway, so the hologram will not concern them. To them, the Product Activation Technology is more likely to be something that they will hate.
Industry analysts and observers believe that Microsoft's move will drive more people faster to Linux and other open-platform initiatives, and alternative software.
Alternatives
With Microsoft Office reportedly being used by at least 80 percent of computer users worldwide, it is difficult to think that we can ever work without it. Each time we share a file with someone, the typical question is "Which version of MS Office do you have?"
However, if you have two or three PCs and a notebook at home, how can you justify the expense of buying original MS Office for each of them? Cyberian Outpost, the highly popular U.S. mail- order company, offers MS Office Standard for $459.95.
What are the alternatives? First and foremost, we can still use the software that we have been using and forget about upgrades and their new features. The only thing is that we have to agree to use the Rich Text Format as the standard for exchanging document files. Some formatting features may be lost, but for most purposes this is a workable solution.
Or, we can use one of the growing number of MS Office- compatible products -- some of which are cheap, others are free. ThinkFree is one of the new applications that can read and write MS Office 2000's files. ThinkFree comprises Write, Calc and Show. The names already indicate what they are for.
Strangely, despite its name ThinkFree is not free. The company (www.thinkfree.com) currently gives you a 30-day trial period. You can subscribe to it as a service based on the Application Service Provider (ASP) model for $49,95 per year. The beauty is that you can use it from any computer anywhere on the planet as long as you have a browser and Internet connection. ThinkFree even gives you a 20 MB storage space on their servers, so you can also access your files from any place in the world.
The first drawback is that ThinkFree's features are very limited. The AutoCorrect, for example, does not fix typos such as SOme and teh. I could not find the way to enlarge the page display to optimally use the screen. If you use Alt-F instead of clicking on the File menu, you will be out of luck, too, as ThinkFree does not support it.
Although ThinkFree's Calc can read a spreadsheet file in Excel 2000 format, it will not open it if it is password-protected. However, the biggest minus point is that you basically have to stay connected to the Internet as long as you work, because even the data for AutoCorrect, Settings, Help, etc., are stored on ThinkFree's Website instead of on your local hard disk. This definitely will not work well here in Indonesia, where most people still use the dial-up connection to the Internet. Even with a cable modem connection, I always suffered a lag of a few seconds before ThinkFree's Help, for example, began to show up.
Last week, I mentioned in this column StarOffice that you can download fro free from Sun Microsystems' Website. StarOffice has so many features that we have come to take for granted in MS Office 2000. CApital, for example, will be automatically corrected to Capital. It also has an on-the-fly spellchecker. We can also send documents out as e-mail like we do in MS Office. You should try StarOffice 5.2 while it is still downloadable for free (by the way, this entire article was written using this software).
However, the best thing that we all can hope for would be Microsoft's willingness to make their products -- which are generally still the best in their respective areas -- much, much more affordable for the rest of us. It is OK if the products are copy-protected, but it should definitely be affordable.
Although in some workplace environments paying for the software as you use it is a feasible solution and is already a common practice, it will not work for our home PCs, especially if we do not have a broadband connection to the Internet. We still need to have the entire software installed on our individual machines. Personally, I would have no problem paying $70 to $100 for the next upgrade of Microsoft Office and get the original CD- ROM. After all, it is part of the tools that I use to earn my living. But, at $459.95? Maybe in the future. (zatni@cbn.net.id)