Almost all the software products signed by the Microsoft giant have had popularity issues over the last period, and the office suites were no exception to that. We have already talked in numerous occasions about the problems Microsoft Office has in convincing users that his product is the most efficient office suite.

The fact that the state of Massachusetts and the Japanese government are planning to switch to open source solutions has shaken the Redmond cruiser, and the launching of the latest versions of OpenOffice and StarOffice has succeeded to sink some more ships of the Microsoft fleet.

And things are getting even worse for Bill Gates and his company, since it has been found that Lenovo is starting to make performance tests with StarOffice, produced by Sun. The Chinese company, which took over IBM's PC division, has announced that it will offer StarOffice 8 as a preinstalled solution for the new notebook model, ThinkPad R512e, a system available only to the Singapore users.

Several Asian companies, aiming to make significant cuts, are interested in all free and cheap Microsoft Office alternatives. In Hong Kong, Sun Wah Linux, a distributor of open source solutions, has announced that it will fit 140,000 systems with Linux solutions.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is readying the next Office version, Office 12, which is due for launch next year and the beta might even appear this month.