My review of StarOffice 8 has just reached LinuxPlanet.

The article comes just after Microsoft announce that they think OpenOffice.org (which shares code with StarOffice) is 10 years behind Microsoft's own Office suite.

One of the comments I make at the end article relates to the look and feel:

If I have one criticism of StarOffice it is that the application is so like Microsoft Office that many will fail to see the difference. While file compatibility is one thing, virtually duplicating the look and feel of an application is another. I am not entirely sure it is the right approach, but I appreciate that to compete with Office we should have an application that is as simple and easy to use as the suite we are replacing.

This basically follows on from a personal belief that duplicating functionality doesn't necessarily mean duplicating style and interface. That goes across a range of topics and products, and I think a good example is Flickr, which provides an alternative to the photo interfaces that had been available before, while still supporting, and indeed improving on the funcitonality offered by other photo sharing sites.