Posted on 7/29/2002


Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems are cooperating on a version of Sun's StarOffice productivity software for Mac OS X, the companies said.

Sun has been looking for hardware allies in its long-running quest to popularize StarOffice, which competes against Microsoft Office. To date, no major PC makers have pledged to heavily promote StarOffice.

Apple also gains a friend to help counter its increasingly contentious relationship with Microsoft, which has been struggling with sales of its Office v. X suite for Macintosh. Microsoft expected to sell 750,000 copies of the software; since its release last November, only 300,000 copies of Mac Office have sold.

The partnership is expected to produce a Java-based version of OpenOffice by the end of the year, followed by a commercial StarOffice release sometime in 2003.

"I think you can see OpenOffice running solid on OS X by the end of this calendar year," said Tony Siress, Sun's senior director of desktop marketing solutions.

Until now, Sun did not plan a version of StarOffice for OS X, although the Microsoft Office competitor is available for Linux, Solaris and Windows. An open-source version of the software, called OpenOffice, had already been planned for OS X. OpenOffice.org released a developer build of the product on Thursday.

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