By Guy Middleton,
Sun Microsystems said Tuesday it would give away productivity applications following the acquisition of Fremont, Calif.-based desktop software house Star Division.
The acquisition gives Sun an office suite deployable across diverse clients, with the current release running on Windows, OS/2, Solaris, and Linux, in addition to a network computer-oriented Java release and the technology to build a portal-based productivity application service.
"This is a network play -- we're not competing with a fat client Microsoft Office," said Sun president Ed Zander, as he detailed the new StarPortal product in a webcast on Tuesday. He said this would enable ISPs to add word processing and spreadsheet applications to the popular e-mail and calendaring functions already offered by companies such as Yahoo.
"StarOffice and StarPortal will be made available on a 'no per-seat license' basis. We'll charge for support and customization," said Sun marketing manager Jonathan Mills.
StarOffice would be pitched to enterprise and ISP customers and would speed the adoption of productivity Web portals, he added. Mills said Sun had learned from the failure of other office suite vendors' forays into the Web-enabled office application market.
"Corel and Lotus failed because they were charging for it. We'll give StarOffice away -- we think it will increase the demand for mission-critical servers. We can sell you the servers," he said.
Sun's decision to make the office suite available without a per-seat fee is in stark contrast with Microsoft's strict per-user licensing, a model that lends itself to the single-user PC market, rather than the emerging network computer model. As Microsoft increasingly moves into the enterprise server market, Sun has begun to encroach on the desktop market, albeit by giving away software in the hope of seeding server sales.
"It's difficult to see exactly what Sun's strategy is, although they are hoping to kill a major Microsoft revenue stream. This is a serious threat to Microsoft," said Robin Bloor of Bloor Associates, in Milton Keynes, U.K. "It's basically a Microsoft Office clone -- anyone that uses Microsoft Office can use StarOffice easily. StarOffice has around 30 percent of the German market already."
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Sun said it would make StarOffice's source code available under the Sun Community Source License (SCSL) program, an arrangement extended to Java developers.
"You can see it as another attempt by [Sun CEO] Mr. McNealy to outflank Microsoft," said Simon Moores of the Java Forum user group. "You can give stuff away, but it can devalue it. I don't believe corporates will migrate overnight just because they are giving it away, but this is a threat to a major Microsoft revenue stream -- good news for users who are seeing some competition, and it will probably make Sun's servers more attractive."
The Java version of StarOffice could make Sun's own thin-client offerings more viable. Sun's JavaStation network computer, first released in 1996 and revamped in 1998, has not been widely adopted, partly because of the poor availability of applications. With Sun planning to announce a new "information appliance" on Sept. 8, StarOffice could be key to its potential success.
Financial terms of the acquisition of privately held Star Division were not disclosed.
StarOffice 5.1 is available for download from http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/get.html.
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