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SoftMaker Rolls Out Office Suite for BSD, Linux, and Others
martin-k writes "Commercial office suite software is coming to FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, Sharp Zaurus and Windows Mobile. SoftMaker, a German developer, recently released SoftMaker Office, a multi-platform office suite that excels in Microsoft Office compatibility, claims to be much leaner and faster than OpenOffice.org and works on many operating systems, down to PDAs." While SoftMaker certainly isn't new, it is nice to see them roll out a finished suite as opposed to one-off programs.
I'm downloading the trial version now.... more on that in a minute. My question would be, "How much better is it than OpenOffice, and how razor thin is the difference between it and Microsoft Office, and how compatible compared with Open Office?"
I've had expectations raised many times in the past and while always initially excited found myself not using any products that had rough edges. For the longest time that basically meant I used Microsoft when I had to, vi and vim the rest of the time :-). Open Office was the first product with sufficient polish
and compatibility, so much so I could pretty much plug and play
replace Office for people with little fear they would have
trouble adapting.
Anything that falls short of that is likely to have problems gaining purchase in market share. I've used all of the KDE products, ABISoft, etc.... none of them really measured up. That isn't to they were bad products, many of them would be considered excellent in and of themselves, but that isn't the yardstick the buying public uses (and will use).
Well, I've downloaded and installed the trial version. I know it's not fair, but here is my five minute review (which is about all I have time to give for new products competing with products with which I already have perfectly good solutions):
Download and install went flawlessly, a requirement for any product anymore -- if the install doesn't go seamlessly, I won't spend a lot more time trying to figure out why. The program fired up cleanly, and was easy and intuitive enough to use especially if you've used any word processor or spreadsheet before. The graphics, layout, and presentation were good but the icons were not crisp as Microsoft's or Open Office's.
I don't have a suite of files to test for compatibility with Office and Open Office, but as I indicated, I have a solution for this type of work (Open Office), and I'm not inclined to spend much time beyond apparent return on investment.
PROS: Easy download and install, very similar to Microsoft Office (though that will change with the new Microsoft Office, not necessarily a bad thing), inexpensive comopared to Microsoft Office, established company, multi-platform and multi-form factor (for PDAs, though other than browsing, I'm not inclined to do much word processing and spreadsheeting (verb?) on PDAs).
CONS: Expensive compared to Open Office, not enough better (in my opinion) to warrant the switch, expensive to add typefaces, "compatibility" with Microsoft is a moving target -- one for which there is no guarantee of currency.
Cool that there's another player... Would I switch? Probably not. YMMV.
As far as I know, there are only 2 forces in the world; 'love' and 'money'
OpenOffice.org has a monopoly in the 'distributed for love' channel.
Microsoft Office has a monopoly in the 'distributed for money' channel.
Who will buy Softmaker Office, and why ?
I'm glad to see more competition in the office space. Open Office has its issues, and Microsoft Office is still the gold standard for the general public. There are plenty of players in the space, but more can't really hurt. What I really would like is to see a suite that doesn't ape MS Office, but comes up with unique ways to do things that are more effective. Of course this is almost impossible as the cost of retraining from MS Office is prohibitive in most environments, but if MS Office is making major changes that necessitate retraining anyway, then maybe there is an opportunity for the myriad "me too" office suites to move in an unique direction as well. Probably not, as most sheep will upgrade to MS Office, but the more players in the market, the more chance that people will switch come upgrade time.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
I think the prices for Europeans seem a bit steep. For Americans it's $69, for Europeans it's EUR 69. That is 30% more. I know that they might have to pay more taxes, but this is quite a lot. They don't even differentiate between EU and non-EU, but just 'Europe'.
I suppose the product may be fine, but from a German company I wouldn't expect these kind of things.
Nothing sickens me more then a commercial office suite software going commercial. And for offices no less. Offices are the worst kinds of room. Where will all this filthy commerce end?
I was just about to post a comment that asked, "Is there room for another commercial office suite, especially for Linux and BSD?"
After looking at the screenshots (very impressive!) and price (very competitive!), I think the answer just might be yes.
Of course, my meager needs are entirely met by Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets, which runs just fine in Firefox.
I just checked some of our Microsoft Office documents from work with their "textmaker" app, which is supposed to be "100% compatible" with Microsoft Word.
Of course, it's not. It exhibits the same sorts of glitches that OpenOffice does. Which doesn't surprise me given the hoary nasty Microsoft Word file format, but hey, if they're going to claim it, they better back it up.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Unfortunately, SoftMaker is only a Word and Excel replacement, and for many users, the level of Word and Excel support in OpenOffice, Abiword, or Gnumeric is probably more than they need. Sure, SoftMaker may have better support for the really complicated Word and Excel formats (see their comparison page for some examples), but how many people really come across 3-d graphics in everyday life?
The bigger problem for most people is PowerPoint slide decks, especially the ones generated by marketing departments that have sound and animation. This is where the shortcomings of OpenOffice hit me the hardest --- and unfortunately, SoftMaker doesn't have a solution. So is it worth it to pay USD $70 for a Word and Excel replacement which is more complete than what is currently available in the OSS world? Not for me. I'd much rather spend $40 for a copy of Crossover Office from Codeweavers and then get an old copy of Office 97 or Office 2000 that I have lying around (or which you can no doubt buy on Ebay for a relatively small change).
At first I was kinda let down by the demo. The load time really wasn't that impressive compared to OpenOffice on my Pentium-M Edgy system. Then I came across something amazing....
Planner (spreadsheet program) can actually do excel style charting (read: crappy but easy for routine tasks) with half-decent trendlines and the ability to show the forula on the chart.
This basic functionality has been on my openoffice wishlist for years, I've filed requests for it with OO.o but got nothing. I've even tried to implement it myself but OO's code is kinda scary. Since then I started using gnuplot for plotting, but for basic stuff its kind of overkill.
According to the manuals, a machine running Windows 2000 or XP needs only 64 MB of memory to run these applications. On Windows 98, ME, or NT, only 16 MB will be enough. On Windows 95, only 8 MB.
OpenOffice.org is great for modern computers, but those of us who like to extend the useful life spans of our older machines could be attracted by these very modest system requirements, and willing to spend a reasonable amount to buy the software.
Assuming the software doesn't slow to a crawl on a system with those minimum specs, of course.
These applications appear to be built upon Qt. For those who are not familiar with it, Qt is the premiere C++ GUI toolkit on the market. Not only is it portable, but it's damn fast and resource thrifty. KDE uses it as its underlying toolkit, and it's one of the main reasons that people often find KDE to be more responsive, while also using less memory, than GNOME.
While it is completely unlikely at this point, were OpenOffice.org to be rebuilt around Qt, it would be far faster and less bloated than it is today. The OpenOffice.org rendering and GUI toolkit framework is one of its weak points, and Qt would go a long way towards improving the situation.
I'm one of those Linux users that buys software for Linux.
I bought ApplixWare. I bought WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. Both became orphanware. OpenOffice, meanwhile, continues to hum along and is not only compatible with new versions of Linux every time I install one, but actually comes as a part of each Linux OS I've installed for years now.
OpenOffice imports word formats with a reasonable degree of accuracy and I can still open and use files all the way back to when it was StarOffice 3.0. My Applix and WordPerfectOffice 2000 files, on the other hand, are not so easy to get back into.
Plus, I now have Office XP anytime I need it running through Crossover, though I prefer OpenOffice in most cases. There's just no reason for me to buy this stuff. I wish them luck in a pretty much taken care of market. It's like trying to sell a web browser for $69 at this point, I think.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
i don't see why people are so obessed about being compatable with office documents. the whole point is to force office out, adding compatablity only give it greater leverage to change their formats and screw you over. far better to create a suite that uses open format documents in xml. while you continue to pander to the make everything compatable with MS products crowd, you will not win.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have no idea why this small operation out of Nuremberg, Germany keeps on trying
(and how they're able to purchase press coverage). With a choice between full
compatibility to Orifice 200x by buying the original or getting a free kick-ass
Office Package that is maybe 80% Microsoft compatible - what niche does that leave
the guy asking money for something that is 80%-90% compatible?
I've got a huge (17.5MB) spreadsheet that Excel handles, no problem. Excel takes about five seconds to open it and recalculates it in about a second.
No Linux program I tried could handle this spreadsheet. Gnumeric and OOo both choke on it. If they even load it, they then take several minutes to recalculate it. KSpread doesn't even have all the functions that are in the sheet.
So I was eager to try this new spreadsheet--PlanMaker, they call it. I downloaded it. Installation was really easy (to me, refuting the people who claim that it's too hard for ISVs to release proprietary binaries for Linux.)
Planmaker has now been cranking one of my cores at 100% for about five minutes, just trying to get this worksheet open. Still hasn't opened it. Remember that Excel does this in about five seconds.
If Gnumeric is any indicator, converting from the proprietary Excel file format isn't the problem. Gnumeric performed worse in its native XML format than it did with the Excel format.
Yes, I can already see holier-than-thou geek saying that I shouldn't have a 17.5MB spreadsheet and, to tell the truth, this sheet is not as efficiently written as it could be. But part of the value of spreadsheets is that they allow non-geeks to put some simple data models together. Spreadsheets need to be able to cope with inefficiently written sheets.
Excel can cope; nothing else can. Maybe Crossover is the next option to try.
Planmaker *still* hasn't opened the sheet.
Penny - plain text accounting
Send out PDFs, not virus prone .docs. Anyhoo, the way a .doc renders, depends on the installed printer. Yes, that is correct, the printer. You don't control the client's printer, so if the exact rendering is important, you should not send out .doc files.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Fortunately, SoftMaker is only a Word and Excel replacement, and for many users, the level of Word and Excel support is probably more than they need. Sure, SoftMaker may have better support for the really complicated Word and Excel formats (see their comparison page for some examples), but how many people really come across 3-d graphics in everyday life?
The bigger problem for most people is PowerPoint slide decks, especially the ones generated by marketing departments that have sound and animation. This is where the shortcomings of OpenOffice hit me the hardest --- and fortunately, SoftMaker doesn't have a solution. So is it worth it to pay USD $70 for a Word and Excel replacement which is more complete than what is currently available in the OSS world and avoid having to watch and listen to the inane drivel the marketing department consider the height of intelligent discourse? Definitely.
Go to any Windows publishing house (and this includes most of the major ones, a bunch of whom I've worked in or with). How do you make a PDF? Well, you start with a Word file and you run it through Acrobat. So making a PDF for such people involves... Word.
And yes, the book goes into Quark before going to press, but do the authors or editors work in Quark? Do the page designers even work in Quark? No, they all work in Word. It's the lonely guy at the end of the hall doing final layout that dumps everything into the formatter/publisher application just before it goes to press for a full run.
Until that point, all the way through most of writing, editing, and design, everything is in Word. Word gets used much more than I think people in IT realize. Word/Excel/Powerpoint are the bedrock of corporate America. Most small and medium size companies (and a few large ones, too) do all of their publications with Word, all of their PR with PowerPoint, and all of their databases as Excel sheets. That's just the way it is, like it or hate it. That's all people (all the way up through management) know.
Just try to get them to change... Or to let you bring something novel to the table. You'll be shown the door.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Bah, if they're aiming for "Microsoft Office compatibility", that means more Microsoft-formatted documents, not less. Vote with your usage, stick with OpenOffice and their open formats.
...and you'll find much the same, if not worse.
"Find what?", you may ask. The answer: That for the European price, the company simply takes the U.S. price and replaces the $ with a , and call it a day.
For example, I recently purchased Paint Shop Pro for an aunt.
U.S. price: $99.99
Euro price: 99.99
That price in Euros is valued at $129.579 (xe.net, December 18th, 2006). 30% more expensive indeed.
This is for The Netherlands. The Netherlands carries a Sales VAT of 19% on such goods. In other words, 11% is pure profit*
Add to that that in the U.S. there's a discount on the product to $79.99, and it's a 62% markup, so 43% pure profit*.
* One may argue that shipping costs (as in, from Country X exported to The Netherlands, as opposed to the U.S.) drive up the price. Not true, this is for the electronic download version (not that the boxed version is more expensive, by the way). One may argue that translation costs drive up the price - also not true, as both the U.S. and Dutch-bought versions ship with all languages.
So naturally, I purchased through the U.S. store.
You'll find that it is much the same for any software product, and Europeans are, sadly, used to it. If you happen to know any Dutch, go check the news posts over at www.tweakers.net on newly announced products. Whenever somebody wonders what the price in Euros will be, the standard reply - which tends to work out as being correct - is that if the product costs $100 in the U.S., it will cost 100 in Europe.
That's probably a bit of a self-perpetuating issue there. Why would a publisher be so silly as to charge less when they can obviously charge more with the consumer half-cursing the practice while at the same time making the purchase anyway?
So I wouldn't say that I wouldn't expect it from a German company; in fact, I would expect it from -any- company.
=====
You might think that $30 more for PSP isn't so bad - but obviously, it gets worse when the cost of the goods increases, such as the gem that is Autodesk's AutoCAD 2007:
U.S. price: $3,995
NL price: 4,750
NL price in dollars: $6,217.48
Mark-up: 55.63%
'Profit': 36.63% or $2,277.53
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
Don't forget Scribus, it's excellent for DP! My company switched for all our new publications (to avoid the Quark mafia, $900 yearly or publishers can't read your files.) It saves directly to PDF with perfect color, fonts, embedded icc profiles etc. Oh, and it's Open Source!
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Looking over the course of this Slashdot thread I'm not surprised by the now-familiar Microsoft-bashing/LaTeX/Lyx recommendation/OO.o zealotry/refusal to pay Softmaker's price. But I have been reading Slashdot now long enough to know the words to this particular song.
I bought Textmaker back in 2003 and liked it so much I also bought Planmaker, their spreadsheet (now sold together). But because I'm a (professional and prolific writer, I care a lot about my tools, and I've tried just about all of the products out there; plus, because I use Windows at work and both Linux and Macs at home, I've been exposed to a lot of word processors.
On Linux, I use Textmaker. Here's why.
Stable. I've never crashed it, even with ridiculously complicated documents
Fast. I like OO.o but on my old 555Mhz PIII it's unbearably slow to start up, and on my Mac, NeoOffice is just not fast enough, and even repainting the screen after a window stretch/shrink is ghastly. I appreciate the effort and even use the software, but it's not the first thing I reach for. On Textmaker menus are snappy, the graphics are fast, and things work as though it had been designed and built by professionals that want to make a product good enough to convince people to spend money on it.
Easy to use. That means keyboard shortcuts for everything, sensibly laid out, familiar interface, professional.
Lightweight. It's been designed to be resource friendly and is, even on my outdated hardware.
Fast enough to be a useful document previewer for your mail client so you can get a glimpse of what's in the Word docs I receive.
Basically, it's fast, reliable, and works well. Its Word doc import is much better quality than OO.o's. I gave Abiword a try but rejected it because of frequent crashes and a somewhat amateurish feel to it; Kword has never been usable for more than simple letters in my opinion and the font kerning issues make Kword printed documents ugly. OO.o is simply too slow in spite of all its other endearing qualities.
Textmaker's downside? The TML format is a mystery to me, so I don't use it. You can save to Doc format as a default, but I hate Docs. I would be thrilled if they would adopt the ODT format. It's also not as feature rich as OO.o, which is in turn not as feature rich as Word. On the Mac there are far better alternatives (I happen to love Mellel, and Apple's Pages is top-notch). And I use LaTeX for what it does best, and RTF or even plain text all other times.
But face it, GNU/Linux (and BSD more so) lacks a small, fast, good word processor. Abiword and Kword are fast but not good, and OO.o is good but not fast. For professional writers that care about their work and their tools, this is a great piece of software and I'm not alone in representing a market of GNU/Linux OSF fans that believes in freedom but is not against paying for software (SUSE, Rekall, Textmaker, Planmaker, Xandros, NoMachines) if with that software comes additional quality, reliability, or convenience. Textmaker provides all three.
Finally, the above doesn't even take into consideration the fact that its primary market isn't Linux/BSD in the first place, it's Windows users that synch docs to a PocketPC. And in that niche, it is unsurpassed and very critically acclaimed. Be glad they even make a Linux version at all, whiney slashdotters.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.