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UK's Biggest Supermarket Challenges Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "The UK's equivalent of Walmart is taking on Microsoft in the software game. Tesco is famous for it's cheap 'value' food, but it's now offering 'value' alternatives to Microsoft's biggest products. From the article: 'Now, when you traverse the aisles in search of baked beans, sanitary towels and two-for-one packs of raw mince (hamburger), you can grab yourself a copy of Tesco Office (£20) — an alternative to the almost de-facto standard that is Microsoft Office — or Tesco Antivirus (£10), which is designed to keep your PC free of malware.' Tesco apparently 'takes one in every eight pounds spent in the UK'."
According to: http://www.digitmag.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=62 27 the company coopertating with Tesco is FormJet. They'll distribute via http://www.tescosoftware.com/. FormJet has a Website online (a bit difficult to find from their homepage) where the products are listed: http://www.formjetplc.com/500-products.htm. They list an office suite there called "Ability Office".
l n=en and has a wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ability_Office.
The "Ability Office" website is at: http://www.ability.com/sales/products/office.php?
This is not just one of the usual OpenOffice forks.
The office software is called Ability and will just be branded as Tesco. More information about Ability here. The website lists their entire office suite at a cost of $70 (US). The individual packages (Word processing, spreadsheet, database, paint, presentation, photo album) are available for $27.90 each. 20 Pounds = $37 so that's considerable savings. The interface is appears to be a straight clone of Microsoft's office suite. It is able to open and save to Microsoft Office formats, no idea on how well, tho.
Portland, North Dakota Puppies
As the article says, they're selling Ability Office - see http://www.ability.com/
Ability charge 30 quid for it (the basic version); Tesco selling it en masse for 20 seems credible. That's certainly a lot less than MS Office, but it's not the 20 vs 300 numbers that some people quote - you can get MS Office Basic (word and excel only) for around 145
It's probably not competition for Office in the workplace (where any file incompatibility sends folks into something of a tailspin), but it's solid competition for the abomination that is Works - particularly if Tesco preload it on the large number of (really pretty good quality) Acer PCs and laptops they also sell.
I think this is because the range hasn't actually launched yet. See pre-launch web site here.
Anyway, speaking as someone from the UK who shops at tesco regularly... yep, their website sucks.
Formjet PLC for the software, Formjet owns:
* Panda Software (UK) distributes Panda Software antivirus and security products in the UK.
* Ability Software International distributes a powerful suite of office products.
* FileStream (UK) is involved in applications ranging from the backup of computer resources to highly sophistcated graphics solutions.
* Software Dialog UK is a specialist security reseller to the corporate marketplace.
* South Coast Distribution is an established supplier to the OEM market.
* Ideal Innovations.co.uk is an online marketplace. It services the electronic trading requirements of the Formjet Group and third party vendors.
So I think we can see where this is going, Panda Anti-Virus, and Ability Office 4 branded for Tesco... c'est la vie say the old folks, it just goes to show you never can tell.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Yes, mince is called hamburger in the US. Kind of like ground pork in the UK is usually called sausage meat even though it can be used for more than just sausages. So the summary was translating for the USians as mince doesn't really mean much as a noun here.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"