One way and another, it seems to have been a pretty uninspired CeBIT Hannover Fair, but one company that will definitely be going home happy is Star Division GmbH, the Hamburg-based company that has caught IBM Corp’s eye to the extent that IBM is to market its suite of applications for OS/2 as IBM Star Office worldwide (CI No 2,620). The story seems to have passed most visitors by, but was lighted on by the International Herald Tribune, which reports that Star Division was founded 10 years ago by Marco Brries, who is still only 26. The company employs 130 people, it is doing $35m a year, and its Star Writer is the top-selling word processor under MS-DOS and OS/2 in Germany, and number two under Windows. Key selling point of its suite is that the separate elements – word processor, spreadsheet, graphics, have as much as 60% of their code in common, saving memory space and making the thing run faster. Brries retains all the votes, but 20% of the share capital was bought three years ago by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, the man who established Sun Microsystems Inc’s subsidiary in Germany.
