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Microsoft Office Faces British Invasion
jdkane writes "CNet reports that a small British software maker, Ability, plans to challenge one of Microsoft's most profitable markets by selling its low-cost package of productivity applications in North America.
Ability Office faces competition from Corel's Word Perfect, Sun Microsystems' StarOffice package and OpenOffice, it's free, open-source sibling. None of these products have captured a significant share of the market from Microsoft's Office.
Does anybody have any hands-on experience with the Ability Office suite, or are there any general speculations as to why this move will make a difference in the office software market (if not just for the bottom line of the software company)?"
OpenOffice rocks. The new 1.1.0 is even better, since now you can make PDF files. Anyone paying $500 for Office XP needs to visit Openoffice.org.
I wonder what disrespects Microsoft more: pirating their shitty office suite, or hating it so much that you refuse to even pirate it.
Until someone breaks the Exchange Server lock on Outlook clients, and until some office suite offers something way better than Outlook -- which is entirely possible, there's no going to be much buy in to another office suite.
DRM could certainly become an issue at some point, should Microsoft choose to pursue it. IMHO if they did, all it would do is push more people to the various alternatives. They would be complete retards to even consider it.
What I would like to see is an office suite built around something like a framework similar to Eclipse. Not everyone performs Mail-Merges, nor does everyone require all the little drawing tools in MS-Word. If it was an open platform/open framework where extensions could be supported by pluggable bean components, I think that might be even more highly adopted.
Of course, one of the "Save-As" beans could be setup to do some form or fashion of DRM too if it was necessary but even that would be a plug-in, as would various plug-ins to translate between the various Office suites.
Granted, something like the Eclipse approach would be better served with components that can more easily be downloaded/integrated via some means of automation to insulate the average Joe User, but I think the idea itself would have merit. Not only this, but a single group, company, whatever wouldn't have to spend all that precious time working on 2% of the functionality that an even smaller percentage of the user base needs or uses. Small focused groups could work on those plug-ins directly outside of the core framework. In fact, I could envision an HTTP based delivery mechanism where your copy of "PlugOffice" could automatically go to certain trusted sites and install signed beans to give you the precise functionality you (or your corporate team) is looking for, or remove those components you don't find useful to keep the package light.
Just my $0.02
Spiritgreywolf
Never have a philosophy which supports a lack of courage
The website is not responding right now (Slashdot-effect, I presume).
The original incarnation of Ability appeared on the market years ago. It came from a Canadian company, Xanaro Technologies, on Bloor Street in Toronto. When the company went bankrupt, the assets were auctioned off. I had the opportunity to look at the source code (assembler naturally) and I also took a look at the market. At the time, there were a couple of similiar products. Context MBA (which was pCode running under an OS from UCSD) was already on the market -- but that market had already decided which OS was going to be used on PCs and that wasn't it. There was also a product called Word. Interesting product: in the days of character displays, this one had something like a "graphical window".
The integrated Ability suite came with a word processor, database, spreadsheet, comm package (good for bbs connections), a graphing package and some other odds and ends. The most fascinating part was the ability to hotlink spreadsheets and word processing documents.
The package came in an eye-popping black plastic case. The dies for the case must have cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars. The package was sold for about $400 or so but because Xanaro wasn't paying their bills, companies that did work for Xanaro were selling unshipped copies for less than $100. I got my copy for about $50.
I shouldn't have thrown it out. Oh, well.
I'm sure it's gone through a number of revisions since those days. For a while, you could find a second release for about $30 at a variety of stores (or in ads placed in PC Magazine).
Fond memories
(Signed) Gramps.