Gartner: Microsoft licensing could push users to StarOffice

Computerworld - SAN DIEGO -- End-user unrest over Microsoft Corp.'s enterprise licensing plan may prompt some companies to move from Microsoft Office suite to rival Sun Microsystems Inc.'s personal productivity suite, StarOffice, predicts Gartner Group Inc.

Gartner is estimating that StarOffice has a slightly better than 50-50 chance of taking 10% of the office productivity suite market -- at Microsoft's expense -- by the end of 2004.

Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, said some firms are beginning to weigh the cost and licensing terms of Microsoft's Office against StarOffice's improving compatibility with Microsoft file formats and its expected lower pricing.

Sun intends to begin charging for StarOffice when Version 6.0 is released sometime by the end of next month, but it will couple that move with support services (see story). Pricing hasn't been announced, but a Sun official said Gartner's per-user estimate of $25 to $75 per user, depending on volume, is in the ballpark.

"StarOffice has a chance, based on better compatibility, some mind share and Microsoft missteps," said Silver. But migration costs, end-user training and converting documents from Microsoft file formats could deter companies, he said.

Gartner's prediction of a potential 10% market share for StarOffice may seem small, but it may be the boldest prediction to date that there's a product with the potential to dent Microsoft's overwhelming share of a market for an application that's key to its desktop dominance.

But the hurdles for reaching that market share could be high.

David Morris, a senior vice president of e-business solutions at AmeriCredit Corp. in Fort Worth, Texas, is among those who have downloaded StarOffice and tried it out. He called it "a pretty good product" but said he's not about to roll it out to his 6,000 users.

The training and infrastructure costs associated with moving end users to a new personal productivity suite pose too big a barrier, said Morris. "We don't think there are viable alternatives," he said.

But another end user attending Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo here, Mike Thiele, associate director of corporate IT infrastructure at Gilead Sciences Inc., a biopharmaceutical company in Foster City, Calif., said his company has begun looking at alternatives to Office, in part because it doesn't want to have to rely on one vendor.

But switching won't be easy. "We're going to have to define some pretty compelling reasons," he said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia last year upheld a ruling that Microsoft has a monopoly in Windows operating systems, but the court didn't weigh whether Office