Sun Microsystems Inc's StarOffice office applications suite is expected to wrest a 10% market share of the desktop productivity software sector away from Microsoft by 2004.
Technology analysts at Gartner Group predict that Sun has a "slightly better than 50:50 chance" to win a 10% slice of business away from Microsoft, as organizations start to count the cost of licensing changes being brought about with the introduction on August 1 of Microsoft's new Software Assurance renewable subscription scheme.
Palo Alto, California-based Sun has been giving StarOffice away free of charge ever since it acquired the software along with its German parent Star Division in August 1999. It has also made the code available to the open source community through openoffice.org. But as ComputerWire reported in February, plans are being readied by Sun to start charging Linux and Windows users of its StarOffice desktop office suite from version 6.0.
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