From Avi Rubin
<[email protected]>

I found it interesting that Dan Geer's wonderful article on privacy was followed by an article on how to archive all employees' email messages.

From Max Southall
<[email protected]>

Hi Rik,

Congrats on taking over co-editor duties on ;login: !!

Interesting that your October musings on StarOffice have been somewhat fulfilled and beyond, now that it's being given away by Sun and the subsequent proliferation of the Windows-based port. I think at this point it must be over a million downloads, as well as shipping-charges-only CDs.

From experience with most of the office systems that have pretensions of being upwardly mobile (UNIX, Windows, Mac), I have to draw that painfully obvious (to us sysadmins, anyhow) conclusion that the proliferation of Windows has brought with it uncontrollable administration costs. . . .

You know something's got to give when it takes more time to resuscitate a user's scrambled PC than it does to restore a well-managed Sun server that serves dozens or hundreds of such users. . . .

UNIX finally matured as the OS platform best suited to the thoroughly networked environment we all find ourselves in, but at the same time, ironically, with none of those PC-styled "killer apps" left that are needed to woo away the disenchanted PC shops.

Except, maybe, StarOffice. A UNIX clone of the lumbering toad MS Office, transformed into a charming thin-client prince? Hey, that's the ticket!

So I think that Scott McNealy's thin-client application services vision for StarOffice is a mite convenient and maybe disingenuous. Not yet. As you noted, this is pretty compatible to MSOffice, right down to being a fair imitation of bloatware installation heft. Also, StarOffice wasn't even Sun's idea, although as my friend Gerry [Singleton] points out, the synergy with ex-SUNner Andy Bechtolsheim can't hurt. Trying it out last year, my opinion was, after finding it just didn't quite cut it, that Sun Microsystems ought to buy it and make sure all the rough spots were shined, so that there would be user-level office software available that wouldn't end up telling everyone in the enterprise where Microsoft wanted them to go today. That and a cup of Java could eventually get us all off the MS dime.

The lesson, from the emergence of Linux, is that the only strategy with any chance of competing with Microsoft, regardless of merit, is one that gives software away to gain significant market share. Because Microsoft with its enormous accumulated wealth can afford to dump its products until its competitors go out of business, we have seen over and over companies who have pioneered successfully in the Microsoft arena be absorbed or disappear soon after Microsoft decided to enter their markets. . . .

McNealy's free distribution of StarOffice punishes Microsoft in the only way it understands—becoming subjected to the same strategy it aimed at everyone else, namely, amputation of cash flow from key product sales.

OK. So that's the fun strategy for the folks in Mountain View. What about the strategy for MIS?

We need to have manageable systems that encompass the desktop. We can't have systems becoming ever more unmanageable under an unworkable PC paradigm, or in the case of what Microsoft has disingenuously offered as enterprise management solutions, with all the important decisions outsourced to Redmond and made with full attention to Microsoft's cashflow needs rather than MIS. Truly, the Microsoft way is now vendor-driven, not customer-driven.

We're installing StarOffice on all those Windows desktops. Just as Microsoft temporarily made its products like NT and IE available on other platforms, not truly to support those platforms, but to migrate the users to their own paradigm when they eventually dropped support for those alternative platforms, we're looking at a transition period for the legacy Windows platform. It's driven not by an urge to have a monopoly, but to return management to those best suited to carry it out, because they understand their own enterprise needs, local MIS.

We're currently running all three platforms supported by StarOffice. Because of its stability as a company of sufficient size, and also its focus on its core products, we are deploying Sun servers. . . . .

There is a window of opportunity right now for vendors like Sun. People are dissatisfied with the Microsoft enterprise path for very serious manageability reasons, and are willing to entertain a shift to a more viable approach at this moment. I think that the acquisition of StarOffice and its release in this way is bearing out the signs that this is the way to go. Personally, I hope that they will build it better, and the customers will come. I just can't stand the thought of system administration being reduced to carrying a CD fanny pack from user machine to machine, forever. And that's what's happened to some of my formerly UNIX colleagues.