Sun Microsystem sees big gains ahead for Star Office suite

Indranil Chakraborty in Kolkata

KP Unnikrishnan, Sun Microsystems

Microsoft Corp’s proposed licensing policy for its software is expected to open up opportunities for Star Office, the free office suite from Sun Microsystems that is the rival to Microsoft’s MS-Office.

Sun hopes that a sizeable number of Indian users from enterprise, government institutions, education and small businesses will shift from Microsoft’s popular office suite to Sun’s free office suite.

According to Mr K P Unnikrishnan, country manager for marketing, Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd, it would be tough for the market to accept the new Microsoft products like Office XP, and Windows XP especially with weaknesses like cost, platform lock-in with no support for Windows 95 and new licensing model. Said Mr Unnikrishnan, “Today, there are over 25 million copies of Star Office installed and a sizeable chunk is in India. There are a lot of corporates, governments and media houses in India using Star Office.”

Star Office, which has both Linux and Windows versions, can be freely downloaded or collected from Sun’s customer hotline cell. Sun’s plan is to distribute Star Office throughdistributors and system integrators to put Star Office curriculum in Sun’s certified education centres.

According to Microsoft’s new licensing policy, which is to be implemented from October 1 in India, users of Microsoft Windows Millenium or Windows 98 will have to upgrade before September 30 to Windows XP and enter into a software assurance programme to get free future upgradation.

Otherwise, the user has to shell out the full retail price for future upgradation like for Windows XP which is slated to be launched in October this year.