Slashdot Mirror
Looking At Gobe
mneptok writes: "OSNews is running a review of a beta version of Gobe Productive, the office productivity suite initially developed for BeOS by the former producers of ClarisWorks. The beta tested by OSNews is for Windows, but a Linux GTK (and that's toolkit only) version is planned for release after the Win32 version ships. A public beta of the Win32 version is imminent. Looks like a nice, affordable 'army knife' office app for Windows users, and a serious contender in the Linux office space." We had some coverage of this a while back,
For $125, you get a "family liscense" which permits you to install their software on all the computers in your home plus one computer elsewhere (presumably one at work). This demonstrates a surprising amount of prescience on their part.
The real money for liscensing is in corporate liscensing. The really financially damaging software "piracy" is among corporate (or government agency...) clients. There's not terribly much to gain from having draconian liscensing schemes that prevent multiple parties in a household from having the software installed; one might even argue that there are no economically justifiable reasons from curtailing any installations, but that's another argument.
Historically, office-suite penetration has occurred from the corporate level down to the private level; that is, people are forced to use software at work and therefore find themselves having to use it at home as well. The corporate market is fairly well saturated by microsoft Office so it'd be suicide for Gobe to fight there first. Far better would be to worm into the home office market, and try to get employees familiar with it so they can demand their employers reconsider.
By making it almost pleasant to use their product (and for a reasonable price), they get my vote.
To me, the most interesting thing about Gobe is that apparently a group of at most 10 seasoned programmers (see picture on their site and some of those guys are the executive team) came up with a high quality MS Office replacement from scratch in a relatively short amount of time. And they did it without any help from the Open Source community. But alas, this post is not another cowardly retreat call to proprietary software. Quite the contrary. The difference is that these guys were paid to work on Gobe full-time until it was production quality. If similar talent could be focused on say.. KOffice or OpenOffice, imagine how fast those projects would move along. Who would pay them? Quite simply, any smart company that is tired of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a black hole every time MS decides to put out a new version Office. All that's needed is a company or non-profit to organize this effort. A non-profit, of course, may be of greater value to businesses because it'd be a tax write-off.