[link|http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1618813,00.asp|Strange Bedfellows Dept ]

"... We know that nearly $2 billion is far too much money to throw away only to swap some code and make friends. The Windows OS and Sun's StarOffice Suite are the only products generating money that dwarfs this settlement. The word on the message boards is that Sun will do Microsoft a favor and dump StarOffice. Sun will also pull all of its support from the less popular OpenOffice product.

Over the past year, Sun has made big gains with this product in Asia. China plans to take perhaps a million Linux/StarOffice systems. And in a heated battle in Thailand that pitted a Microsoft Windows/ Office machine against a Linux/StarOffice machine, Linux and StarOffice won a huge bid\ufffdeven though Microsoft dropped the price of its software to $40. Since dumping is not allowed in the bidding, Microsoft had to show that it profited from selling its $500-to-$600 software package at $40."

This makes a lot of sense as it removes the 1 real competitor that Microsoft has in teh Office suite business where Microsoft makes huge amounts of money. In fact, $2 billion dollars is cheap.

Yes we sold out to Microsoft??? The fact is that Star Office is a desktop application, something that Sun does not do very well and a category of applications that they not been interested in, in the past. Sun is not exactly rolling in money and if they do need to cut back they would cut Star Office before cutting either Solaris or Java. Sun bought Star Office when they were rolling in cash in the late 1990's to annoy Microsoft. Sun has reached a point where they can't afford the luxury of maintaining a product just to annoy Microsoft.