StarOffice 5.0 marketplace [by] Hal Crawford [in] The West Australian Saturday December 12 1998 Weekend Classifieds
One way to make money in technology is to create some really useful software and charge a lot for it. You will sell it to people who need it and from those limited sales you will make enough to get by.
The other way is the complete opposite--you give your software away and hope it becomes a standard. With millions of users you can really rake in the dollars with add-ons and commercial licenses.
The latter option is being taken by German software house Star Division with their office suite StarOffice. It seems the Germans decided the only way to loosen Microsoft Office's stranglehold on the market would be to allow potential users a free download from the Internet. They have gone truly cross-platform also--StarOffice is available in Windows, OS/2 Linus, and SUN Solaris versions. A MacOS version is expected. Go to <http://www.stardivision.com> to get the software. So what do you get for absolutely nothing? StafOffice is comprised of a word processor (StarWriter), a database, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a scheduler, a drawing program, and an Internet module. It used to sell for about $450 in Germany--you can imagine the paying customers might be a little annoyed now.
According to Star Division the Internet part of the suite can handle email, newsgroups and allows web browsing. The drawing program apparently... [this is where the article in the newspaper runs out of words]
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