“Sun Microsystems Inc. hasn’t merely acquired Star Division
Corp, best known for its niche (but popular) Star Office suite. Sun
is taking a radical, open source, free, thin-client approach to
office productivity software. The initiative attacks Office’s
market domination from an entirely new direction and offers a
pricing model (free, free, free) that Microsoft can’t afford to
match.”
“Today,” said to Ed Zander Sun’s president, “we dot.com the
office.” Zander sees thin clients over the network as being the
wave of the office-suite future.”
“Star Office appears to be a natural extension of Sun’s mantra,
“the network is the computer.” Of course, applications aren’t
operating systems or networks. Sun, with its partners, plans to
provide powerful back-end servers with network applications that
can be used in place of today’s fat clients.”