Free release of Star for Windows - no way.
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Headline: Sun Micro to buy Microsoft Office competitor Star
By Therese Poletti
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) said it will announce on Tuesday that it is buying Star Division Corp., developer of an office application suite that competes with Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT), as Sun seeks to move office applications beyond the personal computer.
Terms of the deal to buy Star, a privately held company headquartered in Fremont, Calif., were not disclosed.
Sun, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based developer of computer workstations, network servers and software, has been beefing up its software business over the past few years, as part of its vision of so-called thin-client computing, where data and applications reside on a powerful server, accessed by devices other than PCs. The company's mantra for years has been, "The network is the computer."
"When I am on the road, I access my corporate desktop from a Web browser," said Sun chairman and chief executive Scott McNealy, in a phone interview. "I don't like to carry my laptop around ... I want everything I have residing somewhere on the network on a server, as opposed to something bundled in a personal mainframe under my arm."
With the acquisition of Star Division, Sun will offer computer users Star's office productivity tools over the Internet, for free, or for sale on a low-cost compact disk, continuing Star's current distribution model.
Currently, road warriors and Internet surfers at home use applications such as e-mail, calendaring and Web browsing over the Internet, but not Microsoft Office, which is the dominant office productivity tool with word processing, spreadsheet and presentation packages, which reside on a personal computer.
"Today...I can do everything from my Java browser," McNealy said. "The one thing we can't do is the office productivity suite."
Star was founded by a 16-year-old computer programmer, Marco Boerries, 13 years ago in Germany but is now based in Fremont with offices in Hamburg.
The company develops an office suite which is similar in look and feel to Microsoft Office, with a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation package and other programs.
Unlike Microsoft Office, StarOffice runs on non-Microsoft as well as Microsoft operating systems, and it is the number one productivity suite for users of the free Linux operating system.
Sun says it is not buying Star Division to compete directly with Microsoft in the office application suite space, which Microsoft dominates with a market share over 90 percent. Rather, the acquisition is about making personal productivity tools as easily accessible to traveling workers and Web surfers as e-mail, eventually on devices other than PCs.
"To use 1970's-80's technology to compete with Microsoft is not what we want to do. We want to take this technology and move it to the Web," said John Loiacono, vice president of brand marketing at Sun. "We are going to take the office productivity suite and we are going to redesign it and offer it to Internet service providers."
Internet service providers, such as Bell South Corp. (NYSE:BLS) and US West Inc. (NYSE:USW) will be able to bundle a Web-based version of StarOffice, to be called StarPortal, with their Internet service. Eventually, Sun said these applications will be available over the Internet for Web devices, such as a Web phone or a 3Com Corp. (NASDAQ:COMS) PalmPilot.
Sun said that it also plans to make the source code of StarOffice available over the Internet for free, making StarOffice a part of the open source community, where software and its code is given away over the Internet and programmers can update and improve the code.
Besides Windows and Linux, StarOffice also runs on Sun's Solaris operating system and on International Business Machines Corp.'s (NYSE:IBM) OS/2.
Both Sun's Solaris and Linux are variants of the UNIX operating system, but Linux is open source software. Updates to Linux are managed by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish programmer who created the core kernel of the operating system, which is becoming a competitor to Microsoft's Windows NT in some applications.
Sun said it plans to make money with StarOffice and StarPortal through the sale of more servers and by offering service and support to users.
Joyce Becknell, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group in Boston, said Internet service providers and other Web portals which offer the Star products will be able to make money by offering services associated with the use of office productivity software.
"I would charge to save the documents, I would charge for hard disk space," Becknell said. "It will let you add a lot of value and charge for it."
Sun said StarOffice and StarPortal will run on any hardware the company produces in the future. But company executives declined to comment on a recent report on CNET's news.com, which said Sun will soon announce an updated version of its unsuccessful JavaStation, code-named Corona, a thin-client device to access corporate networks.
Copyright 1999, Reuters News Service |
