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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.
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.