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 September 8, 1999 Sun's StarOffice Gambit
Sun made international news last week when it started giving away the StarOffice Suite. StarOffice is the crown jewel of a company Sun recently acquired, Softwareentwicklungs GmbH, now renamed StarDivision Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun. Giving away the office suite is a gutsy move that--despite Sun CEO Scott McNealy's protests to the contrary--may do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Netscape.
Let me explain: When Microsoft was behind (far behind) Netscape in the browser wars, it acquired a company called Spyglass (Spyglass and Netscape both trace their roots to the original Mosaic and Mozilla browser projects). Microsoft then renamed the Spyglass browser "Internet Explorer," and gave it away for free. Netscape allowed people to test-drive beta and evaluation versions of the browsers for free, but charged $50 for a license. Individual users often simply migrated from beta to beta and never paid a dime to Netscape, but enterprises wanting to be legitimate paid the license fees and kept Netscape's coffers full.
At the time, the Netscape browser was much better than Internet Explorer. But IE was free. Many users didn't think the extra value and extra features in Netscape's offering were worth $50, and so they switched. Microsoft rapidly improved IE and promoted its use with hyper-aggressive marketing tactics.
Today, Netscape's browser business is in rubble. The current versions of its browser are a developer's nightmare to work with or to use as a platform. In fact, the core code is so bad that the new open-source Mozilla Project essentially threw out the old code and started over from scratch. That project is running some nine months past its original deadline. Eventually, a new, state-of-the-art Mozilla 5 will emerge, but in the meantime IE has steadily improved and is today the best-available shipping browser for most uses. It's become dominant in many enterprises and on individual desktops, too. (Microsoft's excessive marketing tactics have clouded IE's success; but make no mistake: technically, IE is superior to the currently shipping versions of Communicator and Navigator.)
OK, let's change channels: Today, Microsoft earns something like 40% of its revenue from Microsoft Office. The cheapest and most limited incarnations of Office cost around $180 a pop; the most elaborate and expensive cost almost $1,000. Sun, by releasing a free, fully functional and highly capable office suite into this profit-rich venue, has potentially devalued Microsoft Office in much the same way that IE once devalued Netscape's browser.
It gets more interesting: The early versions of Internet Explorer were pretty bad compared to Navigator, but Sun's StarOffice is much more than a pale imitation of Microsoft's suite: It's a well-developed, smooth-running, good-looking and nicely integrated package comprising a word processor and Web-page editor, spreadsheet, database, calendar and scheduler, presentation maker, drawing and graphics tools, an E-mail client, newsgroup reader, and a browser. And again, it's all for free. (Download the 62MB file from http://www.sun.com/products/staroffice/get.html; or you can use the same link to order a CD for $16 to $35, depending on how you want it shipped.)
I've been using StarOffice for several days now, and I have to say I like it. Because I just recently paid for Microsoft Office 2000, I'm not sure I'm ready to make the switch to Sun's suite. But if I were just now approaching an upgrade cycle, or if I had to equip a large number of PCs with an office suite, I'd give StarOffice serious consideration.
That might be enough to attract many users, but there's more. StarOffice also includes StarDesktop: a shell that replaces your Windows desktop. (See screen capture.) When StarOffice is running, you don't see any of Microsoft's offerings on your screen. Even the start button and task bar look different. In fact, the only visual clue you have that you're still in Windows is the system tray, which Star Office doesn't interfere with.
In fact, StarOffice doesn't remove or interfere with any part of Windows--it just disguises it. You still can navigate to your applications normally and run whatever you want. When you shut down StarOffice, your normal Windows desktop returns. But while StarOffice is running, your entire GUI belongs to Sun. It's an interesting echo of the tactic Microsoft used to promote its early versions of IE and MSN, when it placed its own browser and online service on the Windows desktop, and kept competitors available, but out of sight.
So, StarOffice is an interesting and real competitor to Microsoft Office in its own right; but given the fact that it's free and that its operation weans its users away from Microsoft's visual dominance of the desktop ... well, if I were Bill Gates, I'd be worried.
Scott McNealy says it's not his goal to unseat Microsoft. (Yeah, right.) Rather, he says, he wants ISPs and corporations to use a version of the office suite called StarPortal. That version runs on Sun servers, of course, either as a centrally served application, or with the server as a central repository for the documents. McNealy says his goal is to sell servers.
Maybe. I can imagine StarPortal appealing to the thin-client crowd and in private networking environments. But, especially in light of the HotMail security fiasco last week, I have to wonder about the wisdom of creating and storing sensitive documents on the public Web or on local ISP servers. Is McNealy really serious?
Maybe not. Heck, StarPortal isn't even available. The free version of StarOffice now shipping is a classic fat client that's perfectly happy to be set up as a standard, stand-alone suite, running locally and using a local hard drive for storage. It works well with the Web, but does not require it.
So I think McNealy isn't being fully candid. He may indeed hope that StarPortal will sell more Sun Servers-- but I'll bet his main goal is to choke off a major revenue stream for Microsoft, or put more bluntly, to put Microsoft in Netscape's position, and Sun in Microsoft's.
What's your take? Have you tried StarOffice, or do you plan to? How do you rate its features? What do you think of Sun's gambit in giving it away, for free? Is McNealy only interested in selling servers, or is he trying to significantly weaken Microsoft? And, most importantly, will it work? Join in the discussion!
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