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Sun claims 250,000 StarOffice downloads in first week

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CIOL Bureau
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A whopping 250,000 people downloaded the 65 MB

StarOffice office

business software suite during the first week that Sun Microsystems

made the office application suite available for free download from its Web

site.

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Sun chief Scott McNealy said the heavy demand for the free software

shows Sun could succeed in its effort to break Microsoft’s stranglehold

on the business applications suite market. "This is the way you

change the computing model," McNealy said at a conference this week.

The StarOffice suite contains many of the same applications available in

Microsoft’s $400 Microsoft Office suite. But the StarOffice suite is

available for Windows, Linux, OS/2 and Sun Solaris platforms. That would

enable companies using a variety of computer platforms to distribute a

single office software suite.

Microsoft still holds 90 percent of the office suite market, and there

are no indications at this point to show that the company is losing sales

because of the StarOffice availability. Analysts said that a majority of

the StarOffice downloads are likely from individuals and students rather

than corporate workers and managers who buy the bulk of the Microsoft

Office suites on a corporate site license basis.

Few are expected to force their employees to switch from the MS Office

suite to the Sun freeware. McNealy said Sun will give a "portal

version" of Star Office to Internet service providers, phone

companies or other online companies that use Sun computers. These

companies will then create Web sites where computer users could go to use

StarOffice applications via the Internet - without downloading the 65

megabytes of files required for the programs. "You can have access to

all of your office productivity suite from a web site," he said.

Meanwhile, the portal version would help Sun sell servers that control

networks and e-commerce web sites.

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