“As you probably know by now, Sun has bought Star Division and
is not only giving away StarOffice 5.1, but also is planning to
open up the source code for the product…”
“Sun is obviously attempting to poison Microsoft’s cash cow,
Microsoft Office, by giving away a competitive product for
free. StarOffice 5.1 imports most Microsoft Office files
reasonably well, and it looks and works enough like Microsoft
Office to make the transition easy for an end-user…”
“Sun’s product also has a scalability edge. I saw an early
version of StarPortal almost two years ago after Star Division made
a deal with Network Computer Inc. (NCI) to integrate the mostly
Java-based front end to the office suite with the NCI network
computer desktop operating system. It was quite impressive,
considering the underpowered NC and server they used for the
demo.”