Computerworld - By announcing last week it would begin providing indirect technical support for OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems Inc. took another quiet step towards admitting that the 'freemium' business model it has employed for the past five years has been -- at least in regards to sibling StarOffice -- a failure. Now the rise of Symphony, which pairs free software with the option of paid enterprise support plus the massive Notes userbase, bids fair to stick a fork in the project.
In August, Google Inc. began distributing StarOffice 8 free as part of its Google Pack download.
Sun's director of marketing for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Mark Herring, declined to say how many copies of StarOffice had been downloaded via Google Pack.
Nevertheless, it was just one more blow, albeit self-imposed, to Sun's efforts to sell the $70 StarOffice as a low-cost competitor to Microsoft Office.
The free OpenOffice.org has long been a favorite of the open-source community and anti-Microsoft sympathizers. But it has also recently been gaining some among governments and some enterprises looking for an alternative to Office.
Sun maintains de facto control of both OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. But it had been pushing StarOffice, with features such as enterprise support and indemnification against potential open-source lawsuits, at large customers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft Office continues to dominate the niche.
And in September, IBM said it was preparing an office suite called Symphony -- based around the same OpenOffice.org source code as StarOffice, but with more collaboration features.
None of this "seems to bode well for StarOffice," said Rob Koplowitz, an analyst with Forrester Research.
Origins of a Star
Sun acquired the German-based StarOffice in 1999 for $73.5 million. The price was so low that Sun's head of open-source, Simon Phipps, once quipped that buying StarOffice and deploying it to its then-42,000 employees was cheaper than paying for Microsoft Office licenses.
After establishing the semi-independent OpenOffice.org body and turning over the StarOffice source code to it, Sun announced plans to position StarOffice as a premium (albeit-low-cost) office suite targeting enterprises paying hefty fees to use Microsoft Office.
The move seemed to have plenty of promise. Single user licenses for StarOffice cost at most $75 -- volume licenses were cheaper -- and included limited support. That compared to the typical $300-plus list price for Microsoft Office. Sun similarly undercut Microsoft for formal technical support.
Gartner Inc. analyst Michael Silver predicted that there was a 50% chance that StarOffice would take one-tenth of the office software market away from Microsoft Office within 2 years.
Sun declined to say how many users it has for StarOffice today. "We just don't break that out," Herring said.
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