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Another Office Alternative
MiTEG writes "The Washington Post has an article on a cheaper alternative to Microsoft's Office Suite, ThinkFree Office. Currently selling for $50, their product also includes a one year subscription to Cyberdrive, a 20 MB web file-storage service. While it's no StarOffice, this glowing review may help people realize that Microsoft is not the only option." 'Glowing review' probably isn't the right term to use, since the reviewer found quite a few faults.
"Less than glowing" review is right. To paraphrase the reviewer, it's buggy and slow.
My experience with Java, the language this app was written in, is limited to a little experimentation, web-based javascripts and using Limewire (the Gnutella client). Limewire is also an app that I would describe as buggy and slow, with emphasis on slow.
Does anyone else have an opinion on the suitability of Java in medium (Limewire) to large (thinkFree's product) desktop applications?
I wish that the industry would get together an agree a usable file format that would be supported by all document processors even if they just settled on some SGML based format such as Xml.
Hmm imagine if every word processor used Xml for storage...that would be miles better than having every business use Word.
Look at WordPerfect, look at Lotus Word,they were both excellent word processors and the market leaders and look where it got them...
Microsoft eroded there market share using its by now commonly known tactics.
The problem is, right now we have Word and Pdf as being the only file formats of choice that are universally accepted.
Pdf is ok, but again the file format itself is proprietary
Word is especially bad not so much for its bloat, but for the bugs that never get fixed and worse of all Microsofts habit of changing the format frequently