Complaints about the cost of Microsoft products are a perennial gripe in UK educational institutions. Whether this is a valid criticism or simply an expression of wider anti-corporate sentiments is often hard to discern, however the new alliance between Sun Microsystems and Google may be about to shake things up for Microsoft. Last month Sun and Google made a series of announcements including a collaboration with OpenOffice.org.
Five years ago, Sun donated the source code for its StarOffice productivity suite to OpenOffice.org who have developed an open-source productivity suite designed to compete directly with Microsoft Office. Sun are still developing their own version of StarOffice, however this has had limited success in competing with Microsoft even though it is free to almost all educational institutions.
The difference between Open Office and StarOffice is that by linking with Google they are opening up the possibility of delivering their productivity suite to the desktop through a web browser. Sun say they don’t see a browser as a way to deliver ‘heavyweight office productivity software like StarOffice’, however educational institutions disagree when it comes to using OpenOffice. For a start schools and colleges are already linked to very fast networks making it easier to use productivity suite software that is accessible via a web browser. Secondly, few computer users (including students) actually need or use of most of the features included in productivity software suites like Microsoft Office. Linking the OpenOffice/Google’s partnership and the UK’s high-speed education networks with tight budgets, may equal much more competition for Microsoft.
