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.
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.