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Software SmackDown: SoftMaker Comes Out on Top
The dominance of Microsoft's Office in the marketplace would be logical (if frustrating, to those that think that competition breeds better products), if it was simply a matter of developer seats. After all, Microsoft deployed hundreds, and then thousands of engineers to develop and evolve its flagship app over the last 25 years. How could anyone expect a less well funded commercial competitor, much less an open source project, to equal Office for features, performance and interoperability with other office suites? At the same time, people keep trying - a lot of them. Not just long-established competitors, like Corel, with the venerable and estimable WordPerfect office suite it bought from Novell, open source projects like OpenOffice and KOffice, as well as projects launched by much larger players, such as IBM (Lotus Symphony) and Google (Docs). Surprisingly enough, though, a review in InfoWorld finds that not OpenOffice, the most publicly acknowledged challenger to Office, but tiny SoftMaker - with only 17 employees - may have the best horse in this high-stakes race. |
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Comments (3)
The issue in question is this one: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=101690
It's fixed in 3.1.1 but that isn't out yet. Plus, most companies will want it to be out for some time before they are going to roll it out company-wide.
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I am not interested in touting another closed, proprietary office suite to replace MS Office. For my personal use and business use OpenOffice has actually done a really good job with MS Office documents. If a document is large and complex and likely to be mangled by OpenOffice converting it to an MS Office file I save as a PDF which is pretty universally readable. That always seems to work.