Sun And Google Finally Get Around To StarOffice

from the that-took-some-time dept

Tue, Aug 14th 2007 9:06am — Joseph Weisenthal

Back in 2005, there was a lot of hype about a joint partnership between Google and Sun that turned out to be a big load of nothing. While there had been expectations that the companies would partner up to push Sun's StarOffice (an office suite based on OpenOffice), the announcement turned out to be nothing of the sort. As for StarOffice, they did mention that they might do something with it down the road, but that there hadn't been much thought put into it. Well, two years later, we're getting our answer. StarOffice is now available for free as part of Google Pack. Still, it seems unlikely that the move will do much to boost StarOffice. In the two years since the initial announcement, there's been a surge of interest in web-based applications, which will remain Google's priority. If there was ever a time for another offline office suite to steal significant share away from Microsoft, it would seem that time has passed.

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Filed Under: office, software
Companies: google, microsoft, sun

6 Comments

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chris (profile), 14 Aug 2007 @ 9:51am

open office is based on star office
star office has been around for many years. it was developed by a german company in the the early 90's and was bought by sun microsystems in 2000 i think. star office wasn't the first full fledged office suite for linux, but is was considered to be the best.

sun open sourced a version of star office as open office, but kept it's clip art, filters, and the language localization proprietary. to get those things for OO.O you need to install third party add-ons.

the question is, oddly enough, will google distribute the linux version for free since google pack is exclusively for windows.
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Joel Coehoorn, 14 Aug 2007 @ 9:55am

Actually, Star Office pre-dates Open Office. Well, sort of. IIRC, Star Office is the original, closed source office suite that very few people ever used. So few people, in fact, that Sun decided to release the code and be done with it. Thus was born Open Office. Open Office disappeared for a some time while the community took and code and 'updated' it to a new version. This new version was bloated, slow, and not many people used it, either. Then some of the late version 1 releases and now the version 2 releases improved considerable and gained popularity in the open source community. A decent Windows version became available and there a significant number of people started using it. Sun saw this and Star Office was re-born. I'm not sure if it is a fork of Open Office or just a co/re-branding of whatever is the current most stable build.
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Joel Coehoorn, 14 Aug 2007 @ 9:57am

Re:
Ugh and my bad typing and grammar, and no way to edit them :(
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Jerry, 14 Aug 2007 @ 10:02am

StarOffice was first.
As the first comment stated StarOffice was first. Sun then helped to setup OpenOffice, http://about.openoffice.org/index.html#history

I wonder if the plan IS to take down Microsoft office? Start with the Windows world and expand. Perhaps a Google flavor of Linux?
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Steven, 14 Aug 2007 @ 10:42am

Google Pack and Linux
The Google Pack may not be available for Linux, but most (if not all) of the Google apps from the Google Pack are (Google Earth, Picasa, Google Talk).

Google has actually been getting better about releasing their apps for Linux.
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Joseph, 15 Aug 2007 @ 4:14pm

To be accurate, OpenOffice is based on StarOffice. Not vice versa.
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