StarOffice/OpenOffice Team
I am glad to have an occasion to write a blog about our StarOffice engineering group in Hamburg. Sun acquired StarOffice from Marco Boerries in August 1999 and I was hired shortly afterwards as their HR Manager to integrate the company into Sun Microsystems.
Last week Simon Phipps, our Chief Open Source Officer (read his blog about software market 3.0) and Aisling MacRunnels, Senior Director in the software organization, visited Hamburg and held an all hands meeting hosted by Michael Bemmer, Director StarOffice / OpenOffice Software Engineering at Sun. From left to right: Simon Phipps, Michael Bemmer, Aisling MacRunnels.
Probably StarOffice has been one of (if not the) most successful acquisition in Sun's history. Of approximately 120 employees who came to Sun in 1999 today we have still 82 on board! More than 100 employees are working in the team for more than 5 years. This stability can be seen as the main element for extremely high efficiency. Let's just estimate how many employees are working on the development of Microsoft Office... hundreds or even a thousand? This small team here in Hamburg made a product that is fully competitive to Microsoft Office. Automation of processes and close team collaboration having the end to end process at one location are other elements of this success. And one more not less important point: the passion for the product, a high identification with what they do! A really great team! Congratulations to all these years of success! Today this team is the main contributor to the open source community OpenOffice.org with roughly estimated around 100Mio users out there!
Posted at
11:17AM Jan 22, 2007
by Volker Seubert in Sun |
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