Slashdot Mirror
Sun May Buy StarDivision
ChrisRijk writes "The Register is
reporting that according to the German mag c't, next month Sun will buy
StarDivision, whose major product is StarOffice. With Sun's financial and development resources behind it, StarOffice could rapidly become a worthy competitor to MS Office, especially in multiple-platform environments. The idea of having a major office productivity suite that looks and feels the same no matter which OS is beneath it is simply too good to be denied. But this is just a rumor report (albeit a well-sourced one), so don't get too excited yet.
Well, I think one of two major things is going to happen here if it is true.
1) Sun will not release a new version of SO for quite some time while they fix the bugs and make it faster. Then release a kick butt product, a Solaris of the Office software world.
or
2) It will die a horrible flaming death like HotJava and the JavaStation.
One of my feeling due to this news is that Sun is trying to become completely self contained, or as close as they can. The close alliance with Netscape provides a browser, and the acquisition of SO would provide an office product. This way they don't have to worry about buying licenses from Corel for WordPerfect. Hardware, OS, programing apps, productivity apps, and internet connectivity all in one bundle.
Due to the fact that I don't see any alliance with Corel coming anytime soon I think that Sun is going to put some effert into this product. One of the reasons HotJava died, other than being a crappy product, was that Sun had to support Netscape in the browser market, and couldn't do that if they were devolping and releasing their own product.
As someone else pointed out, they want something very big that is programed in Pure Java that they can showcase. Also, someone else mentioned that they thought that SO was already programed in Java, but I have heard several people mention that it is buggy and slow. If Sun does want to show off Java, and wants to use SO to do this they aren't going to be satisfied until it isn't buggy and slow. Also, in order for them to infiltrate a market dominated by Corel and MS they are going to NEED to make this product free. Especially due to the fact that Corel gives WordPerfect 8 out to Linux users for free right now.
If this is true we may have a very interesting Sun Star Office out there in a year or two. Or it may dissapear all together.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
I have been toying with it and so far, my impressions are very mixed. It manages to convert the most complex Word and Excel documents with nary a sputter. For someone trying to migrate away from MS, this is a Very Good Thing. OTOH, its S L O W on every machine I test it on. VERY SLOW. These are PII's with lots of RAM and both 2.0.36 and 2.2.10 kernels, good video. Its got enough features to make me happy. OTOH, I can't resolve printing issues (it seems to be trying to use lpstat for something) to my network printers. It installs quicker and easier than MS Office, once you get the quirks of the installer worked out (permissions strangeness in my case). It uses Java - hence Sun's interest, but I am not sure that I am completely thrilled with that. Internet integration is tight - not too sure about that, either. Call me crazy but I like Netscape, I don't want my office suite surfing.
At any rate, I see a great product, if StarDivision will take an effort to fix some of the strangeness and really make it a top-notch competitor to Office. I hope Sun will buy them and work to make a great product.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
A lot of you are missing the point here. Sun needs Staroffice.
Here's why: The PC card for Sun servers never worked well, and Sun wants to sell their Ultra5 and 10 workstations into the Windows NT developer workstation market. In order to compete here, they need to read/write MSOffice doc formats.
Software emulation of Windows really sucks. Sorry, but soft-PC isn't a good solution.
Bundling a PC-on-card sucks, too because
1) Windows sucks
2) Who wants to flip back and forth between unix and a windows box
3) user still needs to buy Windows and MS Office
4) hardware compatibility issues
so, the only obvious solution is for them to bundle an Office suite with their servers (sure would be nice to get StarOffice with Solaris...)
Staroffice isn't perfect. IMNSHO, it tries too hard to be Windows95, and it was obviously ported from win32 with a porting kit, but it's high on usability and ability to convert document formats to standard html
It's grown on me, and I now find that a staroffice desktop can keep me from having to vnc to a windows machine.
I'd say it's a good move for Sun, and Microsoft should be scared of the spectre of SUN OFFICE!
slashdotters should be worried about future cross-platform support of Staroffice, licensing terms, and a staroffice re-written in Java.
Even though I'm a Sun bigot (and came by it honestly), this could well be the death knell for StarOffice, and if StarOffice falls, Linux chances become much slimmer.
Doesn't anyone remember that Sun already bought a world-class OO office suite about two years ago, and then proceeded to completely bury it? (They bought Lighthouse Design, which had some very nice office apps for NeXT.) In principle, it should not have been that difficult to port the Objective C code to Java, producing the first real Java office suite, but for whatever reasons, the opportunity was bobbled and all Sun has to show for the LD purchase is an OO modeling tool.
Lighthouse Design's excellent code is now but a footnote in history, and there's little reason to hope the same fate won't befall StarOffice if they can't find a way to remain independent.
I like Sun, but I do NOT trust them to follow through on this, or devote anywhere near the level of resources required to make StarOffice a real competitor. Never forget that Sun has lots of really bright people, but they are a poor software development house - their business model insists that business units be instantly profitable, leading to bone-headed business decisions in an attempt to generate unreasonable amounts of cash. Java is an abberation. Look at the fate of Sun's other software products (SunNet Manager, the NFS client, etc.) to see how software really fares at Sun. The company starved those products, and the same is likely to happen to StarOffice, which will require even more money to support.
On annother note, StarOffice is not written in Java, but there is a Java version (port) of it, which can be run from JavStations or other network computers. (Sun is finally realizing that a local disk is a really good thing, even if only for cache - networks will never be fast/good enough to make no local storage a good architectural choice, especially with the increasing importance of mobility.)
If I were at Microsoft, I would throw a party if Sun completes this purchase...
I sure wish they would chase that common file format initiative mentioned in another post, though - that's the way to really make a difference!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Yes. It's slow.
1. I know that many of the JavaSoft division used StarOffice on the evaluation license because of Scott McNealy's directives to avoid MicroSoft Office. The file import and export routines worked well, and this allowed Sun employees to exchange Word files with the rest of the universe. It worked adequately on Solaris and various Windows platforms. The speed issues kept getting killed by Moore's law as we upgraded machines. It was unusable on the old Mr.Coffee Javastations, but so was everything.
2. One idea floating around Sun that never picked up steam was to help the industry formalize file formats. Remember that this was at the time that JavaSoft was the only group being able to pound out a working standard with reference code and conformance tests in under a year. The goal would be to work to disrupt the MicroSoft cash flow by creating a consortium of Lotus, Novell, Corel, StarOffice, Adobe, Oracle, and others to make a standardized, testable, and brandable file format that would allow new add on products and to cut of the monopoly profits from Office. There were a lot of fish frying, and this one never picked up steam.
3. Notice that the lack of standardized formats does kill innovation. Oracle has had some cool doucment summarizing technology for a long time. Other companies really understand how to manage change logs. None of these companies can afford changing file import formats everytime Microsoft has a whim.
4. The MicroSoft Office monopoloy grinds out long feature creep lists, and it works on the incredibly complex file formats. There are a couple companies doing reasonable business who spend their life reverse engineering the MicroSoft Office file format. I actually read an early draft of a paper describing the likely proprietary moves that Microsoft could make with XML and patent protection as part of the file structure. It's fairly nasty.
5. If Sun finally does buy these people out, Scott will probably make it free for individual users. The basic rule doesn't change; Sun wants you to use a Unix workstation instead of a PC.
I've used StarOffice for about 6 months on my Linux workstation at work, opening and saving mostly other users Office97 documents. My system is a PII-233 with 192 meg of memory, and sometimes StarOffice is very slow. Sometimes it consumes 40% of the cpu for no reason until I shut it down.
However, it's still my program of choice for word processing. I have had very good success reading/writing MSOffice files, and the tools that it comes with work well alone and with each other.
I tried WordPerfect for awhile, but it was way too quirky to use day-to-day. My biggest complaint about StarOffice is it's size and lack of speed, but it does what I need it to do, and that's what I look for in an office suite.
I'm thinking of purchasing a license to put it on all 12 of my Linux systems in my computer lab here at the office (I teach some networking classes and soon some Linux classes) to teach people basic word processing/office type skills.
StarDivision also has a very nice package for schools called "Software in Schools". For something like $200, you can get a site license of StarOffice (any platform, I think) plus licenses for the teachers to install it on their systems at home. A school lab with Linux and StarOffice can make a very cost effective solution for a school where the budget is already stretched very thin.
I hope Sun uses it's market share to push StarOffice and continue to improve the product.