[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Unusually for an open source project, OpenOffice.org had its
roots in a reasonably successful proprietary office ‘productivity’
suite, StarOffice, which was marketed by a German company,
StarDivision. StarDivision was purchased by Sun Microsystems in
August 1999.“An office suite was not an obvious fit for Sun’s business. Sun
was a hardware company. Its primary business was back room servers,
and two or three years earlier had even banished the use of
PowerPoint from its offices. ‘We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint
slides on our network,’ Scott McNealy told the San Jose Mercury in
August, 1997. ‘And I thought, ‘What a huge waste of corporate
productivity’. So we banned it. And we’ve had three unbelievable
record-breaking fiscal quarters since.'”