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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'."
Because the kind of person that will buy anti-virus software in a supermarket is not likely to know what to do with downloaded zip or rar file they will get from sourceforge.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Tesco here in Britain have Apple iBooks for an amazing £0.03 less than the Apple website price!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Where do you think Zonk gets all of the "Anonymousy Submitted" stories that he puts up as editor?
From the anonymous coward who claims he submitted this story three days ago?
This guy's the limit!
Huh? Since when do companies make more money than they know what to do with? The profits are reinvested and/or end up with investors. And since when is it a "bad thing" for a company to turn a profit.
I understand the anti-Wallmart argument where 'the little guy' is driven out of business, but TFA is describing how Tesco undercuts Microsoft and (see 'update' at the bottom) major media outlets. It is acting as if competition between massive multinational, multi-billion dollar companies is 'mean' and 'not fair.'
That, to me, makes no sense. Competition in any marketplace is typically good for the consumers since it keeps prices at a reasonable level, forces companies to innovate, and forces companies to compete for customers!
I wish Tesco plenty of success in their attempt to undercut software in this fashion. If they can use their brand-name to get people to realize that software needn't be so expensive (and moreover to realize that alternatives are viable), this is a net positive.
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
The average person knows more-or-less what an office suite is for (typing letters, right?). They have probably heard or the Microsoft brand. They have definitely heard of the Tesco brand. They are unlikely to have heard of the OpenOffice.org brand, or the StarOffice brand, or the AbiWord brand (or whatever). They will go into a supermarket and see 'Microsoft Office: £200, Tesco Value Office: £20.' They will know that most other Tesco Value products are similar quality (sometimes slightly lower, but not too much) than their branded equivalents, and decide that it's not worth paying an extra £180 for a branded office suite to go with their £200 computer.
The Tesco Value brand used to just be for food, but it's increased a lot recently. I own a Tesco Value toaster; it was a sixth of the price of the one it replaced, and has lasted longer. They also make most other home appliances (washing machines, etc). Typically, they fall into the no-frills-but-functional category.
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Have you seen that commercial, where the employees are sitting at a meeting and one says to use fedex shipping to save money? Everyone ignores him, the guy sitting at the head of the table says the same thing and everyone agrees. Because he made a hand motion. Next time, make a hand motion and maybe you'll get your story posted =D
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.
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
>internet. Open source or just plain freeware?
Because the vast majority of people wouldn't know where to look for such software if you gave 'em a map, and a high percentage of those who did find "free" software would manage to download all sorts of spyware and other crap in the process.
Perhaps Sourceforge should put up a "PC Essentials" list with the more mature free/open source products list on it, today I defy defy the average PC user who doesn't know specifically what they are looking for to find safe free sources of software and get what they need without spending a lot of time and effort.
Because the UK media have been telling people "careful about what you click on when go online, there are bad people out there". People don't trust little weird geeky sites which assume knowledgeable users.
...). Hey I don't mind. Internal combustion engines confuse the hell out of me and don't even get me started on different washing cycles on the washing machines... technology eh?!
It's way confusing out there for non-geeks. It took me a long time to explain to my dad the difference between "being online" and "the web" (...the blue E button isn't the internet, dad, it's a program you can see some of the internet with, yes I know it's weird it's called Internet Explorer but it's not exploring all the internet
Lots of people trust the biggest supermarket in the country, it sells them food they trust, clothes they trust, and they sell computers these days. So they'll trust "Tesco software".
It's amazing how often stating the completely (and idiotically) obvious will get you modded up as 'funny' around here...
This guy's the limit!
They're just as bad as Microsoft. They bought up a large section of London's Chinatown, under the guise of creating a massive supermarket in the centre. The shops were sold, their chinese tenants evicted, and then the shops were re-opened with much higher rent (which was far higher than could be paid by the current tenants), causing half of Chinatown to stop being Chinese. Fuck Tesco.
Bah, this whole thread contains the wrong question. It's obvious why the supermarket shoppers aren't using free alternatives; a better question is, why isn't Tesco selling a CD with Free/Open Source software? Slap OOo on there and charge $20 for it. None of the supermarket shoppers would be the wiser, and it saves Tesco money.
Penny - plain text accounting