Sun公司在推广StarOffice时遇到困难

Sun faces challenge getting companies to switch to StarOffice 8

Sun Microsystems Inc. has worked to improve the compatibility of its StarOffice application suite with Microsoft Corp.'s Office, but it still faces an uphill climb as it tries to entice corporate users to consider the new version released on Tuesday

"Microsoft is the dominant platform, and it would be very hard to have a catalyst for a major switch," said Dan Agronow, vice president of technology at The Weather Channel Interactive Inc. in Atlanta. "If you already have the investment, you're not going to throw it away."

Agronow noted that switching Web browsers is relatively painless, since any choices made by end users won't affect an entire company. But because Office users share documents and content, the potential for file incompatibility remains an issue despite Sun's efforts to address the problem in its StarOffice 8 release.

Mike Prince, CIO at Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corp., has used a beta copy of StarOffice 8 since February and has been receiving 25 to 30 Microsoft Office documents per day. Prince said the only interoperability problem involved fonts in about six documents out of the more than 2,500 that he has opened. "With earlier versions, the compatibility wasn't as flawless as what I've observed with [StarOffice] 8," he said.

AMTeam.org消息：Sun公司正在努力提高它的StarOffice应用程序套件和微软公司Office软件的兼容性，但是在它努力推广它的StarOffice应用程序套件的时候，仍然遇到了很大的困难。

一个主要的公司客户说，window操作系统仍然是主流的平台，这样的话，应用程序的转换将是一件很麻烦的事情，当你已经在这个方面进行了投资，你就很难再把它抛弃掉。

他同时指出，从浏览器方面来讲，进行相应的转换并不是一件很难的事情，但是对于文档处理工具来说，需要和一些历史的留存文档格式进行兼容，这是一项非常大的工程。

一些已经使用StarOffice应用程序套件的公司也提出了这个问题，说他们在使用的过程中经常会碰到新的文档处理工具和原有的文档格式不兼容的问题。