Are there viable alternatives to 'Microsoft Office'?

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)