Star Division

» see stardivision.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Star Division sold an office suite on the argument that it cost less than Microsoft's. In Turkey in the late 1990s that argument had no audience, because the copy of Office on the machine in front of you had not been paid for either. Price was not the axis anything competed on here. The suite that held a quarter of the German market was effectively unknown in this country until Sun open-sourced it, at which point it stopped being cheap and started being free, and free is a different product.

The company came out of a school exchange. Marco Börries, born in 1968, went from his Gymnasium in Lüneburg to Silicon Valley on a student program and came back with a plan. At sixteen he set up a company to sell StarWriter, a word processor written by friends of his. Die Zeit profiled him at eighteen under a headline about a teenager on his way to a fortune. The word processor grew sideways until it carried a spreadsheet and a database alongside it, and by the mid-1990s StarOffice ran on DOS, OS/2, Windows, the Mac, Linux and Solaris.

It sold more than 25 million copies over its life and reached an estimated quarter of the German office suite market. In 1998 the company made it free for private use, which put it on a lot of machines and on very few invoices. On 5 August 1999 Sun Microsystems bought the whole thing and Börries went to work there for a short while. The Star Division name stopped appearing on anything within the year.

~ the case file ~

~ the other company ~

The half of the business nobody outside Germany has heard of is the half that is still trading. In parallel with Star Division, Börries set up Star Finanz in Hamburg as a joint venture with the German savings banks, and its product StarMoney became one of the main home banking applications in the country. He sold his shares in it in early 2001, and the company is still trading under that name today. So the founder built two software businesses in the same decade and the one that got written into internet history is the one that stopped existing. StarMoney is still sold. StarOffice is a redirect.

~ the reason sun bought it ~

Scott McNealy's stated arithmetic was that licensing Microsoft Office for Sun's roughly 42,000 employees would have cost more than buying the company that made the alternative. That is a line item in an IT budget rather than a plan for a product, and the price attached to the deal says what Sun thought it was buying: relief from an invoice.

The reported number is 59.5 million dollars and some accounts of the deal put it nearer 73.5 million, which in either case is small for a product on tens of millions of desktops. What Sun actually kept was the Hamburg engineering team, which stayed together and carried the codebase through the OpenOffice.org release in July 2000 and most of the decade after it. The company died on the day of the sale, and the office it worked in kept going for another eleven years, until Oracle bought Sun and shut the commercial product in April 2011.

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