Will Symphony play taps for Suns StarOffice ambitions?
By announcing last week it would begin providing indirect technical support for OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems Inc. took another quiet step towards admitting that the ‘freemium’ business model it has employed for the past five years has been — at least in regards to sibling StarOffice — a failure. Now the rise of Symphony, which pairs free software with the option of paid enterprise support plus the massive Notes userbase, bids fair to stick a fork in the project. In August, Google Inc. began distributing StarOffice 8 free as part of its Google Pack download. Sun’s director of marketing for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Mark Herring, declined to say how many copies of StarOffice had been downloaded via Google Pack. Nevertheless, it was just one more blow, albeit self-imposed, to Sun’s efforts to sell the $70 StarOffice as a low-cost competitor to Microsoft Office. The free OpenOffice.org has long been a favorite of the open-source community and anti-Microsoft sympathizers. But it
