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'."

Comments

Re:If people want an alternative to the de facto..

[cliffski]

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.

tone?

[kebes]

The tone of TFA confuses me. It's clearly anti-tesco (anti-big-business?), with phrases such as:

The supermarket chain may be saving the consumer hundreds of pounds (MS Office can cost in excess of £300), but it's already making more money than it presumably knows what to do with.

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.

Re:tone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you and think the company should offer whatever product it thinks will increase its customer base and profits. However it is a common phenomenon for large companies to have more money than they know what to do with. Investors only rarely get their money back in this way. In the early 80's companies figured out that people had stopped investing in companies and started trading stocks. This means people made money of the stock price not the actual return on investment so dividends dried up and the culture of short term gain for stock price goodness was born. Happily the dot com crash did bring the "investor" back into vogue and companies are starting to rediscover the wisdom of the build a strong business that returns its profits to investors strategy. If this continues we should see a decrease in market volitility in exchange for dividends being brought back and licked to actual profitablilty.

Anyway back to the point. Very large profitable companies (we should all have this problem) sometimes make more money than they have ideas to spend it on. Different companies handle this differently Wal Mart, Microsoft and the oil companies tend to store massive cash reserves and keep doing business as usual contributing to the stagnation of the economy. More resposable companies hire better management with new ideas and some companies like Google just throw money at every crazy Idea they can until something sticks and makes more money.

SO after that rambeling mess it currently is not popular to return money to investors and soemtimes it is just hard to spend the huge wave of cash that some large succesful businesses generate.

Although if they wish to remain on top they will need to distribute the money in reserve properly. Since this is Slashdot I should mention perhaps Microsoft should have spent a little more of that massive reserve on making Vista not suck.

Some background information

[lonesometrainer]

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".

The "Ability Office" website is at: http://www.ability.com/sales/products/office.php?l n=en and has a wikipedia article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ability_Office.

This is not just one of the usual OpenOffice forks.

Office Software

[tyleroar]

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.

Re:Microsoft will not be unseated

[TheRaven64]

You are seriously missing how branding works. This is not aimed at people like you. You know what Microsoft Office is, and you could probably list half a dozen competitors easily.

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.

Re:Microsoft new slogan

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Tesco is using...

[Sfing_ter]

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.

Re:If people want an alternative to the de facto..

[NSIM]

>Then why don't they just use free alternatives from the
>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 Tescos is a trusted brand name

[fantomas]

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.

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 ...). 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?!

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".

Re:old news...

[gEvil (beta)]

It's amazing how often stating the completely (and idiotically) obvious will get you modded up as 'funny' around here...