Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 72.83.80.174]
on August 22, 2007 01:09 PM
Lets face it, OpenOffice and Star Office aren't doing as well as sun had hoped. Sun released the plugin hoping that it would help people who wanted to avoid Vista and Office 2007 migrations move to OpenOffice, not allow people with Vista and Office 2007 to continue to use it. Thats why it was released "obselete", Vista and Office 2007 were not part of their strategic plan.
From a software engineering standpoint, I think it's a little unrealistic to hope that the plugin will work for unreleased platforms. Even if a beta was available to test under, it wasn't the final product. I do think they should have held back on announcing Office 2007 and Vista compatibility until the product was thoroughly tested, but you can't put this all on Sun; at least they are providing an alternative and showing a clear commitment to this product.
I also find it a little odd that you also don't mention any Microsoft liability in this story. Why doesn't the plugin work in Windows Vista / Office 2007? Was Sun truly afforded the ability to thoroughly test it's software against these platforms? Do most other legacy apps still work? The article seems to imply that is the case, since it seems to expect that the Sun plugin should work for the more recent versions of these Microsoft applications. Is there something anticompetitive happening? I'm not saying that there is, because I don't know, but given Microsoft's history of attacking competitor software written for it's own platform, I would have at least looked into it.
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Why point the finger at Sun?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 72.83.80.174] on August 22, 2007 01:09 PMFrom a software engineering standpoint, I think it's a little unrealistic to hope that the plugin will work for unreleased platforms. Even if a beta was available to test under, it wasn't the final product. I do think they should have held back on announcing Office 2007 and Vista compatibility until the product was thoroughly tested, but you can't put this all on Sun; at least they are providing an alternative and showing a clear commitment to this product.
I also find it a little odd that you also don't mention any Microsoft liability in this story. Why doesn't the plugin work in Windows Vista / Office 2007? Was Sun truly afforded the ability to thoroughly test it's software against these platforms? Do most other legacy apps still work? The article seems to imply that is the case, since it seems to expect that the Sun plugin should work for the more recent versions of these Microsoft applications. Is there something anticompetitive happening? I'm not saying that there is, because I don't know, but given Microsoft's history of attacking competitor software written for it's own platform, I would have at least looked into it.
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