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.
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