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![]() ODF Compatibility: Has only an ODF import filter. Also, a client/server based version of SoftMaker Office (work name: SoftMaker Office Anywhere) is under developmentĪccessibility: Small size prevents accommodate customers will need to rely on Windows and Linux based tools. ![]() Least competitive features (per SoftMaker): Low market awareness proprietary not as suitable for business usersįuture development plans: Add Datamaker, Presentations, ODF export, PDF export. Most competitive features (per SoftMaker): Speed, MS-Office compatibility, availability for different platforms low disk and RAM demands modular design The PIC is part of AMD’s ambitious “50×15” plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. Most interesting customer: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) includes SoftMaker Office on its “Personal Internet Computer” (PIC). SoftMaker Office is fully localized in 10 languages (including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese). Resources: 8 full time developers 20 freelancers It plans to expand its sales and marketing efforts to cover additional countries in Europe.ġ987: Company founded TextMaker 1.0 for MS-DOS releasedġ991: First font collection together, with scaling toolġ994: TextMaker for Windows released includes spreadsheet (PlanMaker) and database (DataMaker)ġ999: Font offerings split: MegaFont for home users and infiniType for designers, printers and publishersĢ003: New releases: TextMaker for Pocket PCs Handheld PCs Linux, followed by PlanMaker for same platforms, followed by FreeBSD and Zaurus versions of both products.Ĭurrent Version: SoftMaker Office 2006 for Windows includes TextMaker 2006 and PlanMaker 2006 versions to follow shortly for Linux, FreeBSD, Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs, Windows CE.NET, Qtopia (Sharp Zaurus). The Company/Timeline: SoftMaker is a relatively small German company and focuses its sales activities primarily in Germany. If you have contacts at Abiword or Novell, please tell them that I’d be delighted to run an interview with them as well, as the hope is to provide a complete, comparative picture of the entire ODF ecosystem. I have exchanged email with folks at Writely and Gnumeric, but do not yet have commitments to be interviewed from either of them. My hope is to present a complete set of interviews, including also Google Writely, Abiword, Novell and Gnumeric. The next interview in this series will describe IBM’s Workplace Managed Client. All concerned will have the opportunity to make final comments at the end of the series - and if you have comments to make based upon personal experience, by all mean, please add them as comments to this or any other intereview. Inge Wallin of KOffice, and Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreesh of OpenOffice took me up on the offer, and their responses appear at the end of the interview. Since SoftMaker was not mentioned in the earlier interviews, which invited each respondent to compare its product to those of its competitors, I invited KOffice, OpenOffice and StarOffice to respond to this interview, with Dr. (The prior interviews can be found as follows: with Inge Wallin of KOffice here, with Louis Suarez-Potts and John McCreesh of here, and with Erwin Tenhumburg of StarOffice here.) Īnd that, of course, is the point of this series of interviews: presenting each competing product in detail illustrates the rich environment of applications and tools that are evolving around the OpenDocument Format ( ODF) specification developed by OASIS, and now adopted by ISO/IEC. Perhaps most interesting is its availability on mobile devices, and the fact that it has been selected by AMD for bundling with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. While SoftMaker Office is not as well known outside of Germany as KOfiice, another German ODF-compliant software suite, it has a number of interesting and useful unique features, as does each of the other suites that I have featured in this series of interviews. Unlike some of the other products profiled so far, SoftMaker Office 2006 currently includes only word processor and spreadsheet functions and is still bringing its product up to full ODF compliance. Martin Sommer, SoftMaker Product Manager, of Germany's SoftMaker Software GmbH. In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr.
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