IBM Deutschland Informationssysteme GmbH is kicking off something it grandly calls The Year of the Application for OS/2 Warp. To fill the gaps in its present office offering, and better compete with rival Microsoft Corp, IBM has announced a development and marketing partnership with Hamburg-based software house Star Division GmbH (CI No 2,622). IBM, said applications manager Andreas Gallmeister, chose Star because it has best of breed applications. Star, he added, has exemplary object-orientation. The product, IBM StarOffice, will be available later this year and will consist of IBM StarWriter, a word processing package; IBM StarCalc, a three-dimensional tables and analysis package; and IBM StarDraw, a graphics and presentation package. The product, however, may not have the same name in every country. It will be launched first in Europe, in nine languages, and later introduced to the US and Asian markets. A price has not been revealed, but Gallmeister stressed that the package will sell at a price competitive with Microsoft Office. A PowerPC version is also planned, which is due sometime in 1995.
