[Click Here for MD+F Text Effects 3D!]
[Previous]
OS/21st- by Sam Henwrich
[Next]
OS/2 e-Zine!

Go to a Printer Friendly version of this page


Sam Henwrich is a long-time OS/2 user in Endicott, NY

Related Articles
Perfect OS?
Plug n Play
Network Computing


Lash Back! - Join in the ongoing public discussion with our interactive forum. Be frank, be vicious, you can even be anonymous.

- or -

Blast Back! Send a private message directly to Sam Henwrich with your thoughts:

Contact OS/2 e-Zine!

Summary: How about a Christmas Turnkey? That's not a typo either, see how OS/2 and StarOffice can be bundled, and a memory hogging WPS unbundled on a dirt cheap PC sold to first-time computer owners.

The first thing I did after downloading the free personal edition of Star Office 5 for OS/2 was to make this little change in the config.sys and reboot:

SET RUNWORKPLACE=D:\Apps\Office50\soffice.exe
It was just an experiment, but you know what? It works like a charm. In fact I'm using it this way right now. But why?

If you've tried StarOffice you'll notice that the company that makes it, Star Division of Germany, has bent over backwards to re-create a typical modern object-oriented desktop within the office suite itself. Under normal circumstances it'd be a desktop running on top of a desktop. But why not just let it have its way? That is, let it go all the way and actually become the primary desktop? That's what the above change to the config.sys does. It loads StarOffice instead of the Workplace Shell.

But is it feasible? Let's look at what the Star Office desktop can do:

  • It can launch programs outside of the Star Office suite and create icons for them on the main desktop. I've just used it to launch InJoy and connect to the internet, for example.
  • It includes a file manager capable of everything the Workplace Shell can do.
  • It can't keep track of tasks outside the Star Office suite, but the standard "Control Escape" window list isn't disabled either.

The idea is not for all of us existing Warp users to suddenly say "Duh, okay!" and switch to something that is still far inferior to the Workplace Shell, the idea is to build a dirt cheap PC (such as the sub-$600 computers that IBM is now selling), put Star Office 5 on it, and sell it to first-time computer users; the same kind of market that the iMac is targeted to. By unloading the Workplace Shell, you decrease memory requirements (and shave a little more off the bundle's price), increase the performance of the suite, and radically reduce problems of both confusion (imagine a novice trying to figure out which desktop he's supposed to use) and crashes.

For a great number of users, Star Office might be all they really need too. The suite is not just an office suite, it's a Megasuite. It has everything, even a kitchen sink. There are the standard productivity applications like the word processor and spreadsheet. It has a web browser that handles frames, java and javascript. It has an e-mail client. A newsreader, an address book, ToDo list and planner. If there is such an animal as a "typical computer user" then Star Office was tailor made for them. For everyone else, it's still running on top of an operating system that can run thousands of other native applications, Windows 3.1 programs, and maybe sometime in the future a lot of Windows 95 applications too.

Sweet arrangement.

While I'm not an economics or marketing major, this machine should be ideally priced below $1,000 including the monitor. Just how cheap it can get, and how much profit the company who puts these together can earn, would depend on whether these machines would qualify for StarOffice's free personal license or not. It's entirely fair to assume Star Division would consider it a commercial use, and thus require a paid license for each copy of the suite, even though the ultimate customers would use it on a personal or non-commercial basis.

What Could Be Better

Even though the web client in Star Office is very good, it isn't perfect. This could be solved in a heartbeat by including Communicator with the system as well. It could also be solved in the long run if Star Division used the Next Generation Layout engine of the open-source Mozilla project.

But what else is better? If you have some opinions on this idea, talk about it with me and other readers in our interactive forum.

[Previous]
 [Index]
 [Feedback]
 [Next]
Copyright © 1998 - Falcon Networking ISSN 1203-5696
November 16, 1998