StarOffice 8: Taking the Office Suite Showdown to a Heightened Level Version 8 to Debut in July Adam Stone
In much the same way that Netscape and Mozilla have been fighting the good fight against Microsoft Internet Explorer, Sun has challenged the House of Gates in the arena of the big "office" suite.
Sun's product, StarOffice, has not yet stolen away significant market share from Microsoft Office, which continues to dominate. But with its latest beta release, Sun has announced its intention to continue its push into the market.
The new version, StarOffice 8 Beta, has been designed with a focus on integrating better with Microsoft Office. It offers easier import and export functions, new toolbars that are more user friendly, and a new mail merge wizard, among other tools. Now, let's be realistic: Even the best of tweaks won't shake Microsoft from its dominant position, which analysts estimate accounts for some 90 percent of the market for office suites.
But all these improvements, taken together, should at least give StarOffice a boost against its Goliath-like competitor.
Already the leading office productivity suite on Linux and the Solaris operating system, as well as the leading alternative office suite to Windows, StarOffice delivers a range of tools based on the open source OpenOffice.org office suite first introduced to the open source community by Sun in 2000. Versions of StarOffice since v6.0 have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation, and continue to build upon the open source office suite's foundation.
StarOffice includes word processing and spreadsheet tools, presentation functions, drawing tools, and database capabilities. It can additionally export to PDF and to the Macromedia Flash format. It also includes a software development kit, a macro recorder, and support for complex text layouts.
Price continues to be a major factor in favor of StarOffice, which costs about $80 for the small office edition, as compared to the Microsoft product, which retails for about $500. The Sun product also offers a far greater range of cross-platform support. Whereas Office 2003 will run only on Windows 2000 and XP, StarOffice supports Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, and XP, as well as Linux and Solaris.
These factors have helped to put StarOffice on the map and to keep it there since its release in June 2000. With so many pundits these days predicting the imminent arrival of Linux, open source, and/or Solaris as significant market drivers, many are looking to the 8 Beta release of StarOffice as a potential major turning point.
