Why it's hard NOT to like StarOffice, May 20, 2002

"You get what you pay for," Microsoft often said when StarOffice was free. But that's also the problem, according to a lot of ZDNet readers. No one wants to pay extra for bloat. So, the burning question of the day is: At $76, is StarOffice really worth considering?

IT'S HARD not to. At last count, over 70 percent of the 3,500 respondents to our online survey agreed that an alternative suite was worth considering. Could StarOffice end up being the same thorn in MS Office's side that AMD has been in Intel's?

As operating-system installs go, this one went by pretty quickly. About 36 minutes after I threw the CD-ROM in the laptop, I had rebooted and was gazing at its new interface, with just a few simple desktop icons and a background picture of a sky full of puffy clouds floating above a lush green hill.

Armonk, New York-based IBM said it used a carbon nanotube -- a tiny cylindrical structure made up of carbon atoms that is about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair -- to make a transistor similar to today's silicon-based electronic switches, or transistors.

This set of interview responses from Linux hacker Alan Cox is overtly political, in line with the questions we asked him on May 6th.

Microsoft certainly are a threat. If they are given a slapped wrist then their behaviour after the lawsuit is going to make their behaviour before it look quite saintly. It won't be politicially acceptable for the US to drag them straight back into court. They know that from their last slapped wrist. The fact they have been able to avoid paying shareholders dividends has given them huge amounts of cash and power.

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