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Vistasource In Trouble
starseeker writes: "It looks like the financial picture is not good for Applix - "the company intends to report VistaSource as a discontinued operation in its audited financial statements." The financial report is online.
What happens to Applixware Office now?" For the backstory: Vistasource is the division of Applix - we've talked about this before. Still with the various K* options, the G* options, and OpenOffice the competition is tough - not to mention Abiword and all the others.
As a proud owner and distributer of multiple licensed copies, I have the following observations:
1.) It had a nice email client. Trouble is, no documetation existed anywhere, and the company would answer no questions about it, so we couldn't ever get it to do much.
2.) The primary purpose of a word processor is MAIL MERGING letters to clients, customers, and others who send you money. And mail merge it out of a contact database. I was never able to figure out how to do this, not from a dBase file, an SQL file, either My or PostGres, not from anything. And the company would answer no questions about it.
3.) Applix Words couldn't handle handle jpg or gif. Duh. When would this be included? Don't ask.
4.) They had little SHELF modules to retrieve stock quotes and weather, where could I find them? Right, we don't have an answer.
Do you see a common theme here? They could have sponsored a book on it, like MS and Borland do, and open source projects finally are (the Momjian book on PostgreSQL is a helluva book for beginners, by the way, atta boy Bruce), but they were to lazy to do it.
So another stupidly run company bites the dust. What a bunch of idiots, the investors were, to let these morons squander their capital. The only hope is to GPL it, and even that isn't a sure bet.
First of all Applix doesn't have any open source products. They happen to have an office suite that runs on Linux, but nowadays everyone has an office suite that runs on Linux (and most of those applications are free as in free beer). You don't see a lot of people making money selling air either, and that's because the competition (the atmosphere) is under-cutting them. In 1995, however, Applix was pretty much the entire market for Linux office suites. Their decision to keep their code probably seemed like a good idea then, but it has doomed their product in the long run.
Open source businesses are about making money. And in fact, most are doing a pretty good job of it. After all, without Linux and the Free Software that is available for Linux RedHat and VA Linux and the rest wouldn't even exist. Yet here they are with millions of dollars in revenue, and most will probably even reach profitability on a scale that would have been impossible if they were using the old proprietary software model. Honestly, those folks wouldn't have had a snowballs chance in hell in getting the types of contracts they have been able to grab without Free Software. Linux clearly is good for business in that sense. More importantly, Linux is good for it's users. I know that I have saved thousands of dollars with Linux.
The difference, long term, is whether or not service and support is a viable business to be in. It's almost certainly not going to be as viable a business as selling binary-only software, but that's just life. Ten years from now no one is going to pay money for the right to run an Office Suite or an OS, in much the same way that no one pays for a text editor today. These types of computer software will merely become part of the infrastructure.
Applix simply didn't offer customers enough of an incentive to use their software, and now they are done. However, their Free Software competitors are still around, and they are looking around for fresh blood as well. My guess is that Corel is going to have a hard time convincing people that using Perfect Office is a good idea as well. Windows users will continue to gravitate to MS Office, and the rest of us will probably end up using something like Abiword/Gnumeric or Open Office.
If you aren't going to be Open Source, it had better be software so special that you don't have competition, or an Open Source project might come along and eat your lunch. This means your product should probably be in a vertical market, not something everybody needs, or something that really does not work in the Open Source model (like TurboTax). And never try to compete with the Linux folks at systems programming, it's what they are best at.
Sure, this limits how much money you can make selling Linux software. We like it that way, and we are getting all of the software that we need, thank you.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
> Here's the fact - YOU CAN'T
:)
> MAKE MONEY FROM LINUX
Tell that to all the Sysadmins in academia.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Applixware is powerful, flexible... and eccentric. It was one thing four years ago when they made the only full-featured office productivity suite for Unix. It's quite another nowadays with StarOffice 5.x on the market. StarOffice has a UI easy to transition to from mainstream office suites, it offers an implementation of VBA as a macro language and a lower cost per seat (free, if you don't want ot trust vendor support).
It didn't help when Applix spun it off into a new division with a new name and didn't do any marketing whatsoever to inform anyone that the product still existed, or where to find it. A cryptic "Vistasource" logo tucked away on the Applix website doesn't cut it.
Anyware, their thin-client solution, beat Sun, Microsoft, Corel et al to the market by four years and counting. It was written in Java and actually works! However, Applix made accessing the demo difficult and confusing, and must have spent $30 on marketing it.
On a side note, what exactly does Abiword pose a threat to? Windows Wordpad? Netscape Composer? Surely not to a word processor. Wake me up when it does tables. And floating footnotes.
I purchased Applix 5.0 several months ago and use it regularly. It is excellent for spread sheets and document editing, and can import and export to many, many formats including most if not all of those obsceneties foisted upon us by Microsoft.
The company is looking to sell the division, not kill the product, indeed, they said as much (follow the next link, search on string "VistaSource Response") in the last round of round of rumor mongering here at slashdot.
There are no plans to discontinue Applix, just to sell it. As with any sale, this may or may not kill the product, depending on whome it is sold to. Even if the product were to be bought (by, say Microsoft) and subsequently killed, the capability to export to so many different file formats makes exporting spreadsheets, documents, etc. into a format something else (like K-office, gnome office, or whatever) understands easy to do.
When one of the open source (read: unkillable) projects reaches the same level of stability, interoperability, and polished design I will consider switching, but until then I find Applix 5.0 an excellent choice for doing my office related stuff without rebooting into Windoze (and much prefer it to the other suite which began its life as a commercial product, namely StarOffice).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I can open up Word, and just start typing what I want to see, sprinkle in a few bits of formatting and hit print, all within 30 seconds.
LaTEX just doesn't allow you to do that. You can't just drag images into it either.
It may well be great for massive documents, but I wouldn't have secretaries type up letters on it.
_____
My Journal
Applixware Office is not free software. It is a traditional closed-source, proprietary software product that just happens to run on Linux and use GTK+ as it's widget set.
So, what "proof of a broken business model" was that again?
> Here's the fact - YOU CAN'T
> MAKE MONEY FROM LINUX!
SuSE is making money.
Red Hat is going to be profitable by the end of this year.
There's a lot of consultants around implementing Linux Solutions. They make money.
Yes, it's difficult making money selling gratis software, so you should focus on selling added value.
> Linux is by hackers for hackers remember?
No. Linux is fun for hackers. It's fun to hack, but it's also working. That means it's out there to get a job done.
To stay on topic: Applix is used to get a job done: producing documents. Unfortunately for Applix, there's a lot of Free alternatives, so they have to focus on selling added value.
--
The imp hits!
Framemaker has been around quite a while and has the added benefit of using the same GUI interface on Windows, Mac and Unix. I believe it only runs on 3 Unix flavors: Sun, AIX & HP-UX. No Linux release.
I strongly recommend using Framemaker for writing large documents such as manuals, textbooks or novels. It is the favorite choice among technical writers when a GUI is preferred. The SGML version adds the ability to write content without needing to know if the output is going to be print, web or CD media. It can also publish to XML or PDF.
Framemaker 6.0 is currently available from Adobe for $799. It is worth the price if you are getting paid real money to do write the docs. Software companies that value their Tech Writers time and effort have standardized on Frame.
I don't know.. I'm one of those people who are interested in Linux and Open Source in general and appreciate the availability of source code (and may even contribute once in a while) but who don't see it as a silver bullet suitable for everything. I for one have never really believed that open source is a good business model and seeing all kinds of "open source companies" (that is, companies that have an open source related business model) fail only confirms my belief.
While some older companies like IBM might have some use of open source (their ventures into Apache and use of Linux for example), I see it largely as a PR manouver.
I recently read The Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) and some of the stuff really hit me while a large part didn't. I mean, yeah, I believe companies should have conversations with the market, like open source does, and yeah, I believe in subverting hierarchy, something open source accomplishes, and yes, companies don't speak in a human voice, which open source does, but businesses need to keep secrets and everything can't and shouldn't be open.
The problem is that people (and therefore companies) don't have a lot of self confidence.. When they have stumbled upon some working piece of code that they refine into a product, they fear that if it got out into the open, their competitor would just reap the benefits of their hard labour and sell it for cheaper. Maybe their fear is rightly founded too! In any case, the result is that they hide the code as well as they can and try to make as much money from it as possible until the others "figure it out". The worst possible thing that could happen, they think, is if the competitor would get their secret!
People (and therefore also companies) are greedy and interested in making money. They do whatever gets them the most money - and preferably, gets them a lot of money soon! Open Source is not a great way to make a lot of money.
It's a question of values really.. It is very rooted into us people in the western world that money is the most important thing. For companies (publicly listed ones especially), money *IS* the most important thing. Whatever we do is determined by how much money that will get us. If we had different values; if we could work for the society, for example, and try to build as good a society as possible, then open source would probably blossom as a business model. Now, I just don't believe in it - not as a business model.. I for one am not surprised at open source businesses failing.
Unfortunately, the one that matched up was ApplixWare. It is a brilliant product: mature, stable, feature rich, extensible. Unlike StarOffice it gives you multiple windows in the context of the window manager you choose. Also unlike StarOffice, it performs well on older machines with limited memory. It has been far and away the best office suite for Linux, and if it really does fold we will all be worse off.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Try here:
http://www.anywareoffice.com/
>> So we think that the business model of trying to make money on free software is doomed to fail...
My understanding is that Aplix costs $99 and is not released under the GPL. I could be wrong.
Instead of silly statements about a business model failing you would be more accurate saying something like, "It's really hard to make money off a word processor."
Microsoft seems to be the only company that can make money off office suits. And Sun has released Open Office under the GPL because they hate Microsoft and weren't making money with it anyways. This doesn't leave a much of a market for Corel and Aplix.
Applix is not open source, so this has nothing to do with it. Applix is (was?) a commercial Unix product.
Thanks for the link. Too bad the official site didn't provide some clue as to the name change. Guess they're too busy trying to figure out how to liquidate assets.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Over at my local Fry's recently I was checking what all was going on in the Linux software section. This once growing area of their store is starting to recede somewhat. Anyhow, spotted a boxed copy of Applix Office on the shelf for right around $100. I was pretty impressed with what I read on the box, so I decided to find out more about it.
When I got home I popped on over to the Applix web site. No mention of their making an office suite anywhere that I could find. I thought that maybe I had picked up on a different company, so I went to the search engines. Nope, right company, just no mention of an office suite anywhere.
Needless to say, I made no further attempt to go hunting down info. I may lay down $40 for some app that's a one time good deal, but when the price goes into the triple digits I'm going to want some support and upgrade options for down the road.
Well, there's all that and the fact that this company that is supposedly selling Unix products is hosting on a Windows box. That's just got to throw some warning flags right there.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
In the world of linux, some of use seriously need a productivity appilcation of some from than another. I don't know about your, but I'd rather be using native linux binaries, than windows binaries ....
I own a copy of applixware 5.0, and from personal experience, its great. All the other productivity apps, such as Koffice, and Star Office are ok, but they just don't have the fullness of Applixware does.
Maybe there is a chance of them open sourcing Applixware ... hehe ... =)
Yes, there's many different office applications available.
The competition is what makes them improve. If there were only one office application, it's arguable that, yes, the open-source community would make improvements for improvements' sake.
But I doubt it. I fully believe that the only reason these projects come about is because they see the need to improve on the work of others, and to do it as a separate project.
Applix was among the first and best, and it is a shame the future is up in the air.
Corel's wordperfect wasn't all bad, either. I currently am posting from the browser within StarOffice, just because it happens to be open...
without the competition, I wouldn't have had the choice, and moving to Linux would have been a lot more difficult when I did it three years ago.
Hopefully the other projects will continue to mature to fill this void.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Sure, mod this as offtopic if you must - but it is an important question, dont forget that before you moderate!
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
After the news on VA Linux and RedHat, it seems to me that a business model built on Open Source software seems more and more difficult.
From the report;
In December 2000 the Company entered into discussions with several possible buyers and expects to consummate a divestiture or otherwise discontinue the business in the first quarter of 2001. As a result, the Company intends to report VistaSource as a discontinued operation in its audited financial statements that will be included in its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2000
It's safe to say they'll probably find a buyer (even if it's for a dime on the dollar).
The thing about Applixware is that it is a polished product. There are any number of Windows only software companies that could use this as their entry into the linux market.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The thing about Linux from IBMs persepctive is that it doesnt interfere with their current portfolio of 'offerings', but can have strategic advantages for them, namely:
Its the only platform [java aside] that can run on all their boxes.
It allows them to offer a lower cost solution to certain markets who would not be able to afford AIX licencenses, conversely anyone who could afford AIX would take it because it highly tuned to IBMs hardware.
1/2 of IBMs revenue comes from services, anouther big chunk from making chips for other people etc, IBM can afford to lose all software revenue and be profitable.
IBM like the way that a free desktop OS [linux] makes Microsoft squirm, they have a long memory and, to be frank, are rather embarassed about OS/2 (and MSDOS for that matter)
Basically their philosophy these days is that there's no need to worry about a free product destroying the revenue from a premium product, the natural premium product customers will still spend, but the bottom end of the market will grow, and give you profitable services, support and hardware work. quite cuddly really, though more like a grizzly than a teddy were MS is concerned
The reality of this market is that, unless you are Microsoft, almost no software product is a long-term money maker. Sooner or later, someone is going to take your market. Either people get stuff "for free" from Microsoft, or they get stuff "for free" from free or open source software efforts (the latter makes a lot more economic sense).
In this mature market, you can't expect to beat Microsoft with a clone of MSOffice and charge for it. If anything is going to beat MSOffice in the market, it will have to be at the very least free, and it probably has to offer some other compelling features as well. Some companies (like Sun and RedHat) still have enough incentive to sponsor those kinds of developments. But Star and Applix were anachronisms, and it is completely unsurprising that they have disappeared.
Ok, so a lot of Linux companies are going belly up, right? So we think that the business model of trying to make money on free software is doomed to fail...
What does this do for IBM? Haven't they been trying to position themselves as a "Linux Co". Aren't they trying to sell a lot of their boxes as "Linux Inside"?
Will they have the same problems everyone else does? (VA is linux hardware, so don't tell me that it's not related). IBM is linux software and hardware. Will they be big enough to make it work?
-- it's always easier to convince yourself that the other person is wrong
I used Applix pretty steadily from 4.1...3 and now I have a pretty hefty archive of files in native applix formats. These days I've been using staroffice 5.2 and keeping my eyes on the openoffice efforts. Guess I shouldnt have been keeping those files in native formats cuz it doesnt appear that Applixware has been sharing the format structure with anyone. To be expected from a closed source app I s'pose.. still a bummer..