StarOffice 6 Debuts At Last

Sun Microsystems

Retail price for the product, which was to have shipped last year, will be $79.95, but volume discounts will bring enterprise pricing down to as little as $25 per user in large installations. For those who feel even those prices are too high, the OpenOffice.org version of the product, based on the same core code, has been available as a free download since last month.

Microsoft Office, which leads the market with more than 90 percent share in Windows, is a formidable competitor, but one that has angered even core customers with licensing changes that are seen as price hikes. Under Microsoft's new Software Assurance program, corporate users pay a fee up front for the software and then a percentage of that fee for a few years. Those fees add up to real money, corporate users and analysts said. Microsoft Office sells for more than $460 retail to new users.

"I have customers who are very interested in StarOffice [as a Microsoft Office replacement," said one New Jersey VAR who requested anonymity. "There's a sweet spot of companies with 25 to 100 computers who don't want to pay all that money for features most people never use."

Microsoft now claims to have sold more than 60 million Office XP licenses, but a spokesman would not speculate as to how many of those are in active use vs. sitting on shelves.

Microsoft has guarded its Office file formats zealously and in the past has been criticized for lack of interoperability between generations of its own products. "Microsoft Office generates documents that are only readable from Microsoft Office," said Jonathan Schwartz, chief strategy officer for Sun Microsystems.

At least until now. Sun insists that StarOffice 6 users can open, modify and exchange files transparently with Office 95 through Office XP. However, complex spreadsheet macros will likely not carry over so easily.

"Document exchange to us is one of the killer apps of the Internet, and again we invite Microsoft to share these formats," Schwartz said.