The Java Desktop System will now cost no more than a maximum of $12 million a year.
It was launched in September as a low-price alternative to Office, which retails around $399 for Standard Edition. Sun’s product is priced $100 per-user, per-year.
Prior to September, Sun indicated its flexibility on price, adding there would be no situation where its own software would be more expensive than Microsoft.
The company sees the cap as furthering Sun’s objective of helping organizations build so-called shared network services – providing services to their own customers, such as millions of e-mail inboxes.
The company, though, is also targeting call centers and governments who either can’t afford or don’t need a fully featured desktop productivity suite like Office.
Sun believes it can create a volume business and dismissed skepticism from investors over its decision to target the desktop, regarded as a commodity market.
It would also like Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET developers to build web services using Java. Sun’s goal is to grow the Java community to 10 million developers in three years, up from 2.5 million.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
