Google has started loading its free software productivity suite, Google Pack, with Sun Microsystem’s proprietary suite StarOffice. Prior to this development, StarOffice was being sold by Sun Microsystems for a hefty $70. And now that StarOffice is integrated into Google Pack, millions of users can download and peruse of the software for free.

StarOffice is the commercial version the popular OpenOffice suite, which has been downloaded 100 million times since it was released by Sun. The inclusion of StarOffice in Google Pack will boost the company’s current online desktop applications, Docs & Spreasheets.

StarOffice has also been enhanced to include an option to download Google’s search toolbar.

Industry analysts say this announcement as a competitive move by Google to take on Microsoft Office, which has dominated the productivity software industry for decades.

Although, there were no official statement on the financial agreement between Sun and Google regarding the deal, industry experts are speculating that Google paid Sun in order to release the productivity software for free download. It’s also believed that in order to recover expenses, Google will eventually embed the download site with paid advertisements.

StarOffice is a very competent product, certainly more than adequate for home users, and is a serious option for many business applications. Perhaps with the backing of Google, StarOffice might actually start hurting sales of Microsoft Office.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 10:44 pm under Google.

Read more entries by Arnold Zafra.
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