Last Friday Sun Microsystems, its fortunes about as low as a snake’s belly, moved its StarOffice franchise into a new Cloud Computing unit with clear instructions to “grow revenues.” StarOffice 9, the latest rev of the Microsoft wannabe, was sent to market Monday priced at $34.95 for a one-off download, half the price of its predecessor, leaving one to assume that it wasn’t selling at 70 bucks – especially since pretty much the same thing can be had for nothing from OpenOffice.org.

Volume licenses from Sun start at $25 per user.

StarOffice, which Sun bought in 1999 for $74 million and released as an open source project in 2000, is supposed to have 1% of the market, OpenOffice 5%. And Sun is not only competing against itself and Microsoft it’s also competing against Google Docs – which already has the same market share – and folks like Zoho.

Like the month-old OpenOffice 3, which was reportedly downloaded three million times, the new StarOffice 9 and its Asian counterpart StarSuite 9 run on Intel-based Apple boxes for the first time. Good timing that. Apple’s the one thing that’s been selling lately.

The stuff also runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris and supports its native ODF file format as well as Adobe’s PDF and Microsoft’s legacy and controversial new OOXML formats.

A license includes support – three phone calls or e-mails the first 60 days and Sun has migration tools for companies that want to abandon Microsoft.