Sun says that Google is distributing its StarOffice software in a bid to knock Microsoft offline.

Over the weekend, Google quietly began including Sun's StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download. However it made no announcement about the plan.

Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, said his company had also added Internet search capabilities to all of its StarOffice products using Google.

Green told AP that the plan brings together office productivity, networking and search into one offering.

More here.