Marc Hamilton's Weblog: Marc Hamilton's Weblog

Today, Sun and Google announced that, effective immediately, StarOffice will be available as part of Google's free Google Pack software. Google already has online, web based office tools (spreadsheet, word processor, presentation) so why would Google want to give away StarOffice? Why would Sun want you to get it for free from Google when we sell a $69.95 version of StarOffice?.

Simple, volume drives value. By offering StarOffice as part of their Google Pack collection of software, Google hopes more people will use their other Google Pack software. For Sun, the more people use StarOffice, the more likely we are to sell our supported $69.95 version.

Of course Google and Sun both have another reason for wanting to see increased usage of StarOffice (and it's open source twin, OpenOffice). While StarOffice reads and writes in many different file formats, including many versions of Microsoft Office files, the default format for StarOffice is something called Open Document Format, or ODF. As the name implies, ODF is an open format. Anyone can use it and anyone can write an office tool that uses it. That means that your documents really do belong to you, even if you don't want to pay $69.95 (or much more for competing products) to someone to be able to read your files. That isn't just good for Google and Sun, that is good for all of us!