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As with Microsoft Office, Star Office offers a word processor, spreadsheet, spreadsheet, drawing application, presentation development program, and a database front end. While the software will run under Windows, Star Office 8's core market is the Open Source Linux community. Many of the leading Linux distributions including Red Hat and SuSe bundle either Start Office or OpenOffice with the operating system.

In a world where over 90 per cent of documents are created using MS Office, Microsoft compatibility is seen as key. Star Office

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has always been reasonable at importing Microsoft Office documents and has now improved to the extent where it can read most Word and Excel files. SO8 also claims to support spreadsheet pivot tables, 3D renderings, and HTML publishing.

However, Sun is not claiming 100 per cent compatibility and with the launch of Office 12 next year, these goalposts are likely to be on the move again.

Star Office 8's own document format is based around the OpenDocument format. This may prove to be an ace-in-the-hole for Sun. Recently the state of Massachusetts caused a storm when it announced it will standardise around the OASIS open document format. If others follow suit, Star Office could be well placed to pick up some government sales.

Compared with Microsoft Office, Star Office is remarkably cheap. StarOffice 8 costs $99.95, though the program can be downloaded for $69.95 from the Sun website. For bulk orders, Sun charges $35 per user. At these prices, it is just possible that some business users will decide to try it out ahead of the scheduled launch of Office 12 at the end of 2006.