Star Division

Star Division (also written as Star-Division) was a German software company best known for developing the now discontinued StarOffice suite. It was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg as a garage company.^[1] After a neighbour denounced the operation of a business in a residential area to the Ordnungsamt, the company moved to Hamburg.^[1]

Star Division

Company type	Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung
Industry	Computer software
Founded	1985; 39 years ago (1985) in Lüneburg, Germany
Founder	Marco Börries
Defunct	August 5, 2000; 24 years ago (2000-08-05)
Fate	Acquired by Sun Microsystems
Headquarters	Hamburg , Germany
Products	StarOffice
Number of employees	170 (1997)

As its first product the company distributed StarWriter, a word processor application developed by friends.^[2]

Positioned as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office, StarWriter later became StarOffice, for which the company became famous.^[1] The software had sales of over 25 million worldwide, and at its peak it had a market share among other office suites of about 25% in Germany.^[1]

Caldera, Inc. supported the Linux port of StarOffice 3.1 with ca. 800.000 DM in order to offer the product with their forthcoming OpenLinux distribution in 1997.^[3][4][5][6]

In 1998 Börries released StarOffice free of charge for private use.^[7]

Star Division was acquired by the software and hardware vendor Sun Microsystems on 5 August 1999 for a higher double-digit million amount in US dollars.^{[8][nb 1]} Sun reintroduced the software as StarOffice 5.1a, and for the first time also free of charge for commercial use.

The StarOffice suite has since been further improved by Sun Microsystems and the OpenOffice and LibreOffice communities.

Sun Microsystems became a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation on 27 January 2010.

Notes

1. The exact amount is unclear. Many sources state a purchase price of more than 70 million US dollars, e.g. Neue Eigentümer bei Star Finanz (2001-01-26). Other sources cite 59.5 million USD, e.g. Star-Division-Gründer Marco Börries verlässt Sun Microsystems (2001-01-18) .

References

1. Schäfer, Ulrich (1997-01-13). "Die neue Gründerzeit". Der Spiegel (in German). 1997 (3). Archived from the original on 2018-05-31. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
2. Vermes, Timur (1999). "Operation Nulltarif. Zwei deutsche Hersteller attackieren die Office-Preise". c't - magazin für computertechnik (in German). 1999 (3): 112–114.
3. Brors, Dieter (1997-02-20). "Caldera OpenLinux und StarOffice im Bundle" (in German). Heise Online. Archived from the original on 2018-08-08. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
4. "Produkt-Telegramme: Star Office 3.1 für Linux portiert". Computerwoche (in German). 1997-05-16. Archived from the original on 2018-08-06. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
5. Strobl, Rudolf (January 2003). "Der Gründer über Gestern, Heute und Linux". Linux Magazin (in German). 2003 (1). 100. Archived from the original on 2018-08-08. Retrieved 2018-08-08.
6. Bantle, Ulrich (October 2017). "Linux-Distributionen und frühe Protagonisten aus Deutschland". Linux Magazin (in German). 2017 (10). Archived from the original on 2018-08-05. Retrieved 2018-08-05.
7. Dworschak, Manfred (1998-11-23). "Kalkulierter Selbstmord". Der Spiegel (in German). 1998 (48). Archived from the original on 2017-11-20. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
8. Kerbusk, Klaus-Peter (1999). "Brücke in die neue Welt". Der Spiegel (in German). 1999-09-06 (36). Archived from the original on 2016-03-06. Retrieved 2018-05-31.

External links

• Star Division, Inc. (archived web site stardivision.com from 1996-12-19 to 1998-04-22)
• Star Division GmbH (archived web site stardivision.de from 1996-12-19 to 1998-02-13)