Star Division, a small and little-known German software firm, thinks it has figured out how to wrestle market share from mighty Microsoft: It's giving away its full-blown office applications suite to individual users.
The program, Star Office 5.0, is available in seven languages for the Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, Linux, and Sun Solaris operating systems. It includes a word processor, a database app, drawing software, an email client, and a spreadsheet. A Java version is available, too, as are server versions for NT and Sun SPARC systems. The software generally received favorable reviews and, until recently, carried a price tag of roughly 500 German marks (US$300).
Three weeks into the offer, which has been widely announced only in Germany, 200,000 people have downloaded Star Office from the company's national and international Web sites. So far, about 70 percent of the downloads have come from outside Germany, Star founder and CEO Marco Börries says.
"Our goal is to have a minimum of 10 million personal users worldwide by the end of next year," he says.
It's an audacious plan, considering that Microsoft (MSFT) sells more than nine out of 10 office software packages in the United States, according to market researcher International Data Corp. Microsoft has routed tough competitors like Novell (NOVL), Corel (COSFF), and IBM's (IBM) Lotus development unit, which are now left with mere crumbs of the US$2.4 billion market. So how can Star hope to succeed?
"There's definitely a backlash against Microsoft controlling everybody's lives," Dataquest analyst Peter Ffoulkes says. "There's also a backlash among people who use Microsoft Office but don't like the way Microsoft has been developing it. The last couple of versions have introduced a number of annoying features that often can't be turned off."
Handing out the program for free might entice a lot of disgruntled users to give Star Office a try, Börries reasons.
The 30-year-old entrepreneur is savvy beyond his years. He founded Star Division when he was 16, distributing software for home computers from his father's garage. Within months, he had made enough money to buy his dad a Mercedes.
