Star Division
 | |
| Type | Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | 1985 in Lüneburg, Germany |
| Founder | Marco Börries |
| Defunct | August 5, 2000 |
| Fate | Acquired by Sun Microsystems |
| Headquarters | , Germany |
| Products | StarOffice |
Number of employees | 170 (1997) |
Star Division was a German software company best known for developing StarOffice, a proprietary office suite. The company was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg, and initially operated as a small startup. Its first product was StarWriter, a word processor that later evolved into the StarOffice suite.
Positioned as a lower-cost alternative to Microsoft Office, StarOffice achieved over 25 million sales worldwide and held an estimated 25% share of the office suite market in Germany by the late 1990s.[citation needed] In 1998, Star Division made the software freely available for private use.[citation needed] The following year, on 5 August 1999, the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems for US$59.5 million,[1] reportedly because acquiring the company was more cost-effective than licensing Microsoft Office for its employees.[2]
Sun subsequently released StarOffice 5.1a free for commercial use and later open-sourced the software as OpenOffice.org, which served as the basis for related projects such as LibreOffice. Sun was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010.[citation needed]
References
[edit]- ↑ "Star-Division-Gründer Marco Börries verlässt Sun Microsystems" [Star Division founder Marco Börries leaves Sun Microsystems]. Chip Online DE (in German). 18 January 2001. Archived from the original on 22 September 2013. Retrieved 21 June 2013.
- ↑ Hillesley, Richard (21 June 2010). "OpenOffice at the crossroads: Every bug is a feature". The H Open. Heinz Heise. p. 2. Archived from the original on 8 December 2013. Retrieved 20 June 2013.
Simon Phipps, now an ex-Sun employee, later claimed that 'The number one reason why Sun bought Star Division in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one 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.'
External links
[edit]- Star Division, Inc. (archived web site stardivision.com from 1996-12-19 to 1998-04-22)
- Star Division GmbH (archived web site stardivision.de from 1996-12-19 to 1998-02-13)
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