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Sun offers up free StarOffice office apps suite

Competitor to Microsoft Office now available for free download; Sun to open source code

By Dan Briody and Nancy Weil, InfoWorld, 09/03/99

August 31, 1999 -- Choosing not to issue any direct challenges to Microsoft, Sun Microsystems announced the upcoming release of StarPortal, a free Web-based software suite targeted as a competitor to Microsoft's Office and based on technology acquired when Sun bought Star Division.

The StarOffice software suite, which contains word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation applications, is immediately available for free download from Sun's Web site. The 65MB version for "fat" clients, will be followed early next year by StarPortal, the Web-based version that will be accessible from any device with a browser, Sun said.

"Today, we dot-com the office," said Ed Zander, chief operating officer at Sun, at a press conference in New York City on Tuesday, August 31. "We understand that there is a prevailing way of doing [office productivity] and that is with a fat client. But we are not interested in competing with Microsoft on a fat-client basis. This is a network play."

Sun is offering the current StarOffice desktop software for free download at http://www.sun.com/staroffice. StarOffice 5.1 runs on the Linux, Windows, Solaris, and OS/2 operating systems. Users will be able to import various software file formats, including those from PowerPoint, Excel, and Microsoft Word, officials said.

Users of Microsoft Office and other similar software will not need much, if any, training to use StarOffice, according to Sun, and will have immediate access to Office files, which they will be able to modify and export.

In support of that claim, Zander displayed a quote from the testimony of Microsoft senior vice president Paul Maritz from the software giant's antitrust trial against the Department of Justice that read, "it is relatively easy for customers used to [Microsoft] Office to switch to StarOffice."

Upon showing the quote, Zander quipped, "and it was under oath, so you know it must be true."

Zander then introduced Star Division wunderkind, Marco Boerries, the new vice president and general manager of Webtops and desktops at Sun. Having started the company at the tender age of 16 in Germany, Boerries assumed the stage as if he had won the lottery, high-fiving Zander.

During the demonstration of the software, there was a noticeable difference in the run times between a locally run version of StarOffice, and the demo of StarPortal running over the Internet. In response to the delays, Boerries said only, "Probably there is some congestion."

Sun then paraded various partners on stage, one of which had made an appearance endorsing Sun competitor Compaq's eight-way servers only two weeks prior in the same hotel. A lot can change in two weeks, apparently, when Bobby Patrick, vice president of strategy and development at Digex claimed that, "Digex has chosen all Sun for our servers." Compaq could not be reached for comment.

Sun CEO Scott McNealy took the stage at the end of the presentation and again deflected the attention away from a head-to-head battle with Microsoft over control of the desktop.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.