The strongest statement that was made� about my comments on Google Apps� was an email with the subject line: Two words that contained, suprise suprise, two words. Open Office. Open Office was originally StarOffice suite, a collection of software from StarDivision, a German company founded in 1986 by Marco Böries. In the summer of 1999, Sun Microsystems purchased StarDivision for $73.5 million, and with it the StarOffice software.

The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much everyone of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft. (Simon Phipps, Sun, LUGradio podcast)

The purchaseÂ? of theÂ? company and subsequent release of StarOffice version 5.2, a free download for personal use, was in direct competition with Microsoft Office. Not only is the product still be offered at a much cheaper price, which also allows the individual liscensing the software to install it on multiple computers, but the whole task of developing and improving the software is based on anÂ? open-source codebase, allowing the community to contribute. You might describe the added benefit of being able to install StarOffice onto a Linux-based computer the cherry on top.

So, of course, I can understand why that comment might be made, and I have to accept that it is a pretty good argument, but there are a few things to consider. One of the first that comes to mind is the fact that it was never even mentioned in any of the reports about Google’s release of Google Apps. When StarOffice 8.0 was released almost a year ago, it was described as the best Office alternative [eWeek.com’s] tested as of yet. If StarOffice is such a strong competitor of Microsoft Office, wouldn’t it be significant enough to mention StarOfficeÂ? whenÂ? discussing the impact that the release of Â? Google Apps will have? Despite the giant that MySpace is, sites like YouTube, Facebook, and BeboÂ? are almost always at least mentioned, and yet StarOffice can’t even get a footnote with this release?

StarOffice, which is OpenOffice with a few extra features and lisenced,Â? is probably a great product, much like WordPerfect Office was a pretty decent product, much like Google’s Apps are probably great. But why is it that these companies don’t make any ground on Microsoft? And I’m not talking a few percent in market share or anything like that, I’m talking a significant piece of the pie. StarOffice has been around for 12 years now.Â? WordPerfect was originally developed for an IBM PCÂ? in 1982. Thirty-sixÂ? years between these two companiesÂ? and still not even worth mentioning with the release of Google Apps. This is a combination of too much credit given to Google and not enough media attention given to the whole story.

Really, I consider this all supporting evidence of my original statement, that the release of Google Apps means nothing. So many companies have entered this arena or been involved in this arena for so many years and still fail to even register as significant players. Google is attempting to put it all online and make it free,Â? but the product has major gaps that will either require some sort of paid upgrade or a different product all together. Microsoft Office, on the other hand, will continue to dominate as the desktop officeÂ? software of choice and add a complimenting online component through their Live.com platform.Â? This will provide the best of both worlds for their users, and more importantly, it will all be under one familiar and trusted roof.

Digg this entry! This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 2:09 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.