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gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer? 352

Posted by Hemos from the somethihg-that-goes-head-to-head dept.
Deffexor writes "It appears that gobe (that famous software company that made the invaluable "office suite" for BeOS) has unveiled their v3.0 release of gobeProductive for Windows and Linux. ArsTechnica has an excellent review of why this is such an important "office suite". While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP, it certainly does garner a whole lot of Bang-for-the-Buck (especially with the FamilyLicense). The author does a great job of summarizing the superiority of gobeProductive in his conclusion when he says,"This review, which is fifteen pages of graphics and text (in the word processor), along with 5 separate sheets chock full of information, only uses 7MB of RAM while running. Microsoft Word XP (WINWORD.EXE), sitting idle with nothing open, uses 11MB of RAM."" Of course, RAM usage doesn't matter as much these days, with the standard RAM installed being above 128 megs, but still good to know. Update by RM, 8:58 US EST: Only the Windows version of gobeProductive v3.0 seems to be available at this time.
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gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer? More

gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?

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  • Compatible (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flipflapflopflup ( 311459 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:39AM (#3233989) Homepage
    *The* most important thing with new Office suite, is compatibility. Near 100% compatibility.

    Oh, 1st post too ;o)

    • Re:Compatible (Score:2, Informative)

      by qurk ( 87195 )
      Well, the article states it had a little problem importing some word documents, mostly in tables and charts, and the flow of text around images.
  • In general a pretty good program, but a little crude when compared to MS Office. We will see if it can hold up to the onslaught.

  • star office (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    does anyone know how this compares to star office

  • it cant compare to office... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    gobe cant compare to office.

    it's not extortionately priced enough for corporations to bother with.

    feature wise its excellent :)

  • Being a trifle optimistic, aren't we? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:43AM (#3233999)
    XP killer, eh? Just because it's a superior product? Well, if anything'll work against microsoft, that'd be it.
    • Exactly what makes it a killer anyway? It's smaller? Woohoo. Yes, and I'm sure it has lots of other great features too, but please. I'm sure I don't need to list reasons why a newish, unheard of Office suite is not going to sign the death warrant of the most popular, (whether you like it or not), virtually defecato, Office suite in the world today.

      Throwing round headlines liek this ain't gonna help anybody, except maybe make Gobe look like they have failed when it doesn't live up to such outrageous claims, rather than congratulating them for improving their product the best they can.

      • I'm sure I don't need to list reasons why a newish, unheard of Office suite is not going to sign the death warrant of the most popular, (whether you like it or not), virtually defecato, Office suite in the world today.

        "virtually defecato"? Seems to mean "virtually having been defecated", which is an accurate description of Office, IMO.

        You may have meant "de facto", but you didn't say a "de facto" what. My vote is for "de facto monoculture".

  • All incompatible. I'm sick of it. I don't give a toss how good the software is.

    I've switched to HTML for all documentation in the future and that's that.

  • Ram usage doesn't matter???! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Lawrence_Bird ( 67278 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:44AM (#3234004) Homepage
    Speak for yourself buddy. Anybody running multiple applications knows how quick you can chew up 300MB. And I'm not talking about doing graphics work. I work in the financial industry and my basic daily setup eats up 270Mb to start. Open a pdf in your web browswer and tack on another 20+ until you manually kill the acrobat task.

    Its a really bad attitude to have that ram use doesnt matter. Its just an invitation to more sloppy programing and feature bloat.

    • Re:Ram usage doesn't matter???! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by larien ( 5608 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:48AM (#3234018) Homepage Journal
      Our systems here only have 128MB of RAM. I discovered last week that isn't even enough to run Windows 2000 on; I wanted to defrag the disk fully so I removed all paging spaces. I couldn't even open the defragger before it complained about being out of virtual memeory.

      Add on to that the programs I have running all the time (explorer, Outlook, Xvision) it makes running anything else (Word, Excel, SAP etc) a complete git.

      • Re:Ram usage doesn't matter???! (Score:4)

        by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:14AM (#3234150)
        Our systems here only have 128MB of RAM. I discovered last week that isn't even enough to run Windows 2000 on; I wanted to defrag the disk fully so I removed all paging spaces. I couldn't even open the defragger before it complained about being out of virtual memeory.

        Windows will wig out with 2M page file (don't ask me why right now). You should have left it and just defragged away. The result would have been good enough for anyone. And if it wasn't, just create a new contiguous page file, and take off the old one, then defrag the rest.

        I'd prefer 256M, but Win2K will be fine with 128M if you're just running Office-type apps. Honestly, it seems to me that people contrive to create situations in which Windows will fail just to complain about it on /.
        • I'd prefer 256M, but Win2K will be fine with 128M if you're just running Office-type apps. Honestly, it seems to me that people contrive to create situations in which Windows will fail just to complain about it on /.

          The parent post is right on. Why can't more people apply the principles of critical thinking [csicop.org] to software? Windows NT 5.0 and higher doesn't suck. They may not be as good for your particular purpose as *n*x, but its becoming more a matter of taste than an actual performance.

        • Well, I don't know about his defrag problems, but I run Windows 2000 Pro on my work desktop and I find 128MB doesn't cut it. I know how to optimize W2K...I have shut down every unnecessary service...I have taken many other steps to minimize resource waste.

          I run IIS5 (*gasp*), and use Visual InterDev, Visual Basic (eek!), Delphi Enterprise, Corel PhotoPaint, DreamWeaver UltraDev, FireWorks, and MS Outlook on a regular basis, although generally not all simultaneously.

          I also have a few Perl scripts running constantly in the background.

          When I boot my machine, without even IIS5 running, close to 90 MB is already gone.

          Once I spark up a few apps, the remainder is used and the swap-fest begins (or at least it used to). I up'ed the machine to 256 MB and have to push a little harder (generally PhotoPaint with a few TIFs open alongside UltraDev and Outlook will do nicely) but on occassion, I still have more RAM allocated than physically available.

          Granted, I am not your typical office app user, but still RAM MATTERS.
        • I'd prefer 256M, but Win2K will be fine with 128M if you're just running Office-type apps. Honestly, it seems to me that people contrive to create situations in which Windows will fail just to complain about it on /.
          Wow, you must be using the mystical self-managed office machine... because my NT 4.0 workstation, with IE, Lotus Notes, and Word open (along with all the little tasktray stuff like Novell and McAfee), I'm using 167MB of RAM. This is my typical setup every single day. My machine has 128MB of RAM and it thrashes all the time, programs crashing here and there, etc. Yes, if I had control of my own workstation, it would be a much tighter setup. But those of us working for big organizations with administered machines don't have that luxury.

          Don't be so quick to accuse people of contriving situations, which we have to deal with in the *real* work environment. 256MB should be the minimum system configuration on today's workstations, considering software bloat from both our applications and the stuff our system administrators make us run.

      • You could have defragged your disk and then run pagedefrag from Sysinternals [sysinternals.com].

        It's usually best not to mess with the pagefile. Just let pagedefrag defragment it for you. The only catch is that you have to reboot to defrag the pagefile since pagedefrag needs full access to the disk. Oh and it also defrags your registry and other system files.
    • Open a pdf in your web browswer and tack on another 20+ until you manually kill the acrobat task.

      Ok, so i'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, but why is this necessary. I've noticed it too and cacn't see why acrobat keeps a process running that consumes a big chunk of RAM even after I'm done looking at a PDF ion my web browswer.
    • ...that's what the Rock says...

      *grin*
    • Hardware resource consumption is a bigger deal than I think people realize. If I really really want to run $application, and $application requires me to buy a new PC, I will most likely end up going to gateway/dell/whomever and be forced to pay for the preloaded copy of windows.

      Resource intensive Linux apps are good for MS. Think about that before you #include gnome.h

  • It might be a great product but... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tha_Zanthrax ( 521419 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMzanthrax.nl> on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:44AM (#3234005) Homepage Journal
    It might be a great product but when the average user still thinks Micros~1 makes the best/only product it will never catch on.

    It's the same thing with StarOffice for Windows.(which even was free) A great product, a lot more userfriendly when compared to MS Office. But somehow I could convince anyone to even try it.
    Standard reply: 'Office is all I need.'

    Man, MicroSoft does knows how to do their marketing...

    • Re:It might be a great product but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by gfxguy ( 98788 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:57AM (#3234050)
      You're absolutely right, but the problem is that if someone already has office, what's the incentive to switch to something that's not even 100% compatible (in Word documents, especially)?

      So I use it at home, several of my office mates use it at home, and since I'm a developer and they didn't give me office on my work machine, I used it there, too - until they sent me a form to fill out in Word and I couldn't make it work with StarOffice. Now I have Office. It's not any better, but it can read 100% of the crap they send me.

      Sure, I could use WordViewer, but then I couldn't fill in the form. That was the problem.

      Since I only use it five minutes every two or three weeks, it was a giant waste of money, but hey - they wanted it in Word format. Whatever. They didn't even just give me word, they gave me the whole of MS Office. The model of inefficiency.

      • Re:It might be a great product but... (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        A few observations:
        • MS OFFICE is now essentially an un-reviewed corporate purchase item. I'm willing to bet most companies spend more time deciding between janitorial or coffee/refreshment services than they do reviewing their office suite expenditures.
        • It'd be interesting if there was a tool you could run across your HD to pull up all Office docs and report the page size of them. It might help to note that it doesn't take a $300 Office Suite to author 1-3 page documents. I'm writing a book right now (it's notes and scraps at the moment) and I would specifically prefer NOT to write it in a MS product. Thankfully, I have the option of doing that.
        • Most corporate PCs cost ~$1200 or less (having worked at a lot of dotcoms, everyone but the developers got machines than were less than $1000; this was certainly true at Charles Schwab) but they'll give up a few hundred dollars every year or two for Office.
        • Developers are used to using different tools at new jobs .. occasionally certain kinds of developers will find themselves in loose development environments that let them migrate their emacs or other favorite tools into their new jobs. Apparently nobody else in an organization can handle this.
        • Office suite users are, BY AND LARGE, the least demanding of users but it's their lack of technical flexibility that makes Office the default set-up. (this point specifically excludes power users like legal employees and such).
        • My cynical view is that within most small- to medium- sized organizations the group that would scream loudest FOR Office would be the marketing organization, and their job, as defined, is to change or influence purchasing behavior. The irony here is huge.
        • How often do you really change documents with someone who can't be asked to re-send in RTF?
        • Alternatives to MS are still frustrated by other apps, too: I run Opera full-time, but since installing GetRight I can't get multimedia to work properly at all; form handling is often screwed up; Yahoo shows double-stacked ads in Opera. There is no decent email app alternative to Outlook on Windows (hate hate hate Eudora). Fortunately the mail apps on Linux are still very strong; but on Windows not so much (yes, I can probably run pine/mutt in cygwin, but it's not the same). And as another side note: why don't Windows-based mail apps color quoted text? WYSIWYG shouldn't preclude mark-ups that clarify content, IMHO.
        • These guys need to port Gobe to OS X.
      • it's situations like these that show why it's so important we find a way to break the MS monopoly.
        not 100% compatible w/ MS? sorry, you can't do business.
        how do you get 100% compatible? well, we're not going to tell you, and hence your software company will fail.
        monopoly in action...
      • Sure, I could use WordViewer

        I thought the same thing too, after I was sent an annoying .doc file, so I headed to microsoft.com and searched for viewers and headed to the office viewers and couldn't find a viewer for Word [microsoft.com], all other products, yes, but not Word...

        I may be looking the wrong way, but I have the impression than unless I'm using windows 3.1, there's no way for me to see Word documents other than purchasing M$ Word

  • Mmm... Fair Use... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MrHat ( 102062 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:47AM (#3234015)
    Only $75, and they actually give you the rights an ordinary person would expect when buying something. Look:

    "You are allowed to install gobeProductive on each Windows and Linux computer in your own residence. You are also allowed to install gobeProductive on your computer where you work. A certificate is included in the gobeProductive package explaining to your employer that this is allowed."

    I'm one of those XHTML-or-die people, but I may have to give this a look.

  • Linux apps need price tags! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bocaj ( 84920 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:49AM (#3234021) Homepage
    Ok, so it's slightly off-topic, but it follows discussion on recent posts. A lot of consumers beleive you get what you pay for. Most aren't going to spend $400 for a full copy of XP, but they see that in the store and when they buy a computer with OfficeXP SBE (a cheaper version) they think they really have something. "Why would anyone charge $400 for a product if it wasn't worth it?" Linux needs an office app that includes all the basics, but added database and other high level apps most people don't use. Then put it next to the "stripped down" version that has just the apps people want. RedHat knows this. Go to Best Buy, and you see the $200 pro version next to the $60 standard. I'll bet they sell more of the $60 version, but the $200 pro version boosts the percieved value of the $60 standard one.
    • A lot of consumers beleive you get what you pay for. Most aren't going to spend $400 for a full copy of XP, but they see that in the store and when they buy a computer with OfficeXP SBE (a cheaper version) they think they really have something. "Why would anyone charge $400 for a product if it wasn't worth it?"

      Sounds like the same sort of thing computer magazine cover disks do when they say "As sold for xyz". Which could just as easily mean "we tried to sell it for xyz, but no-one actually though it was worth that much".

  • BSD? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:49AM (#3234022)
    Anyone know if this will work under the Linux emulation layer in the *BSD family? I'd love to give it a try, but my only x86 box is running OpenBSD and I doubt they'll release a LinuxPPC build so I can try it with the penguin.

    --saint

  • pricing and availablity (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:50AM (#3234026) Journal
    As seen on the order page [gobe.com], it costs about 80 dollars, and is available for Windows and BeOs.

    Some of which seems a bit odd.

  • waste (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nodrip ( 459776 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:51AM (#3234028)
    Come on people..

    1) drive space makes no difference in the corp world today
    2) cpu power is not a concern
    3) memory usage is not a concern
    4) "runs on linux" is not a concern

    What is:

    1) compatible r/w file formats with what everyone else is using
    2) cheaper
    3) comes pre-installed with a new pc

    "gee look, it only uses 7 MB where word uses 11!!! holly cow.. it's revolutionary!" DOH!

    • Re:waste (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:30AM (#3234210)

      2) cpu power is not a concern
      3) memory usage is not a concern

      Try telling that to someone who's tearing their hair out at 8pm on a Friday trying to get something finished so that they can finally go home, only to have their underspecced machine grind to a halt as it swaps due to lack of RAM, and/or run at a snail's pace due to a slow CPU.

      Admittedly, I'm speaking from the perspective of a programmer, but for me, resource usage is of paramount concern. My work must be finished on time, and I don't get paid overtime. "Sorry it's late, but my PC is too slow to run the software I use" is not something the client will accept if a deadline is missed.

      Cheers,

      Tim
    • I'll tell you where it will make a difference...

      In school districts, where they've got 2000+ workstations and they're all Pentiums and Pentium IIs. My company is converting a local school district over from Novell to linux this week.

      The school has OLD machines. Pentium 90s with Win95b (16mb) are the oldest of them all. However, one or two 486sx33s were encountered as well.

      Every mb counts...

    • Re:waste (Score:2, Insightful)

      by perky ( 106880 )
      gee look, it only uses 7 MB where word uses 11!!! holly cow.. it's revolutionary!" DOH!

      First thing: that's 7MB including the document as opposed to 11MB. Now the important bit is the size of the files that Word generates.


      So it's just before Christmas vacation and I have to hand in two reports and a spreadsheet model for one of the courses I'm taking this year. I don't have MS office on my machine so I am using the machines in the college computer room. After a 12 hours slog I hit save for the final time having cut and pasted all the relavent charts into the document... Cannot save - out of disc space. Which is pretty weird because I already have triple the standard amount of disc on the college system and there was about 45MB spare at lunch. In the end I have to fire up an FTP server on my machine and rely on saving back to that across the network, which took a bit of time since the 12 page document in Word format ended up at over 70MB!

    • Added to which, the momentum of an installed base and brand name recognition. If a company with a little more visibility was behind this product it might have a chance, but as it stands, I give this product a five percent chance at best.

  • family license (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 )
    "...it certainly does garner a whole lot of Bang-for-the-Buck (especially with the FamilyLicense). "

    That is true for certain ... imagine if other companies did this:

    Licensing with "The Gobe FamilyLicense"

    "You are allowed to install gobeProductive on each Windows and Linux computer in your own residence. You are also allowed to install gobeProductive on your computer where you work. A certificate is included in the gobeProductive package explaining to your employer that this is allowed." - From gobe.com

    It saddens me that most people to whom this would apply would never read the fine print anyway. When was the last time you met someone in a household that read the EULA of their software?

  • Offtopic... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Stiletto ( 12066 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:54AM (#3234041)

    Of course, RAM usage doesn't matter as much these days, with the standard RAM installed being above 128 megs, but still good to know.

    It's because of programmers with this attitude that we all have to go out and buy more RAM and a new CPU every six months or so. Kudos to the author(s) of globeProductive for actually making an effort to cut down on the program's RAM usage.

    Still, 7MB is pretty excessive for what is basically words and a few pictures on a screen.

  • I'm sorry, folks... (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by InterruptDescriptorT ( 531083 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @08:56AM (#3234047) Homepage
    While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP

    Then it's not an Office killer. Don't get your hopes up.
    • Then it's not an Office killer. Don't get your hopes up.

      Virtually the first line of the Ars Technica review is: "This is great software, but it isn't an Office killer, nor is it designed to be."

      The Slashdot title is misleading.

    • Re:I'm sorry, folks... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by efedora ( 180114 )
      I think the whole approach to 'killing' Office by coming up with a Linux/Unix/Bewhatever office suite is wrong. These guys have the right approach. First take a big slice of the Office-on-Windows pie. Once you have this action you'll also have the cash to finance less popular versions for discriminating OS users. If this works as advertised it will take a big slice of the pie. I can't wait to see how long it takes for Billy to show up with lawyers guns and money.
    • I compare MS Office to Adobe Photoshop whenever things like this come up: both applications are clearly the best at what they do, with the largest number of features and the greatest extensibility, and wherever they lead, other similar applications follow. They are easily twice as fully-featured as their nearest competitor, if not more. For all intents and purposes, they cannot be "killed" in the market.

      But their prices reflect that. There is a simple reason for this (and it's not "monopoly power"): they're both targetted at professionals. Photoshop has print-editing features that no photographer or web developer will ever need; Office is powerful enough to create entire books collaboratively, but most office employees just want something to build good-looking newsletters. Too few consumers realize that they don't need half the features they're paying for, just to get the half that they want.

      The trick for the competition, then, is to get that half non-professionals want, and then do them very, very well. Even Microsoft Works doesn't quite provide that. If gobeProductive (or StarOffice or any of the others) can, then it has a chance to be successful, even without scoring a "kill."
    • [If it isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP,] then it's not an Office killer. Don't get your hopes up.

      All it would take to kill Office is to break its strangle-hold on the document interchange formats. The reason that MS Office is the standard is because 95% of the people in the world use it. Are these people using anywhere near all of the features of Office? No - most people are using only its basic word processing and spreadsheet capability.

      So how do you figure that you can't kill OfficeXP with a less full-featured product when hardly anybody is using all of Office's features in the first place?
  • Gobe Productive was one of my favorites on BeOS. If this one is just as cool, I'm gonna buy it. I hope they have a special upgrade price for their old BeOS customers.
  • Alas, GobeProductive (like the name) is destined to be a niche product. I read the review and looked at the Web site - it looked good - nice design. However, Microsoft maintains it's lock on the (Office) market, not with it's UI, certainly not with it's licensing terms, but with it's file formats. You need to exchange a document, spreadsheet, etc. with another person. Odds are about 99%, that the other person uses MS Office. If an Office Suite doesn't offer 100% compatibilitity with Microsoft's formats (which is pretty difficult - since MS deliberately doesn't publish them) - then you're out of luck.
    The review doesn't mention compatibility, but Gobe's Web site does - it has limited compatibility with Word and Excel. Unfortunately, that's really not sufficient. Sun (StarOffice) already figured this out. I hope Gobe realizes it too.
    • The review doesn't mention compatibility...
      Actually, it does mention a few points. Import of MS-Word documents works provided you're dealing with straightforward stuff and avoid newest features. Some problems with importing stuff with tables in it, which sounds nasty. Ability to export .doc and .rtf: well, again, it depends how well the importing side likes what it sees. Import of Excel said to be hindered by different naming conventions in the two programs, which sounds like something that should be addressed in the import mechanism. Looks as though it's OK to pull in limited amounts of stuff from the MS-centric universe, but a seamless exchange of data it's not.

      As others have commented, it's nice to see a vendor whose licence agreement gives the impression that they value their customers rather than regard them as crooks who need to be licence-audited into submission.

      I think I'd like to see a more detailed review comparing it with StarOffice, say, or have the chance to try it myself for a day or so before putting down my dollars.

      • Import of Excel said to be hindered by different naming conventions in the two programs, which sounds like something that should be addressed in the import mechanism.

        These "naming conventions" are probably collisions in the function namespace. What if a user defines a function in one program that turns out to be a built-in function in the other? Even worse, imagine if one spreadsheet allowed Python programs in cells and another allowed Scheme programs.

    • I ran some of my Word documents through it and a few things jump out at me:

      1. Font and style importing seems to work perfectly
      2. It destroys any table formatting you have, and in some cases drops the entire table (leaving only the contents as lines of text)
      3. It won't wrap tables. Tables get pushed to the beginning of the next page.
      4. It drops any kind of bullets you may have had. Again, the text is still there, it's just no longer bulletted
      5. It can't align text vertically (title pages have all the text scrunched up at the top). This is a feature I wish more word processors supported.
      6. OLE objects? Forget it.
      7. Word drawing tools/objects? Forget it.

      Also, when saving into Office format, this is what I noticed:

      1. Word can't even load some documents with tables--it complains that the tables are corrupt
      2. Table formatting is gone
      3. Bullets are gone

      And last, but not least, when saving as HTML I got these results:

      1. Table formatting is gone (you get ugly 3-D 4px borders, HTML default)
      2. Bullets are gone
      3. Font formatting seems to work perfectly

      However, I did notice some endearing things:

      1. You can select non-contiguous portions of text and format them
      2. Styles and table formatting are intuitive and easy, assuming you unlearn the way you do it in Word.
      3. Menu options are more informative
      4. Fewer unnecessary features (less clutter, more room for frequently used options on the main menus)
      5. Spreadsheet has impressive functionality

      Moral of the story: if you use gobeProductive and ONLY gobeProductive, it's pretty darn good. But if you have to interface with ANYTHING else, you're S.O.L.
  • It's wrong, completely wrong. I use MS Word as my email editor in MS Outlook and on my win2000 box Word 2002 is using 14MB of RAM. So someone needs to get their facts straight.

    This is nothing compared to our in house CRM app that is written in Java. PC's running it need 256MB of RAM. And I heard rumors that the next version is going to require 512MB RAM on the PC.
    • java app = shitloads of memory.

      I just got the new Oracle jdeveloper. 256mb Minimum. Why? Writtten in java. It was completely, utterly unusable on a p3 800 with 128 RAM. It's ok (but not a speed freak) on a brand new dell p4 1.8 ghz, 512meg ram!!!!

      Java is Ok for the server, I guess, but please, leave it out of desktop apps. Too damn resource intensive.

  • SO6 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:03AM (#3234086)
    gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?

    No, but it is a very likely StarOffice 6 killer...
    • No, but it is a very likely StarOffice 6 killer...

      Why would I run the risk of paying out for gobeProductive, when I know from using SO for the last 5 years that it'll meet my requirements? gobe don't even have an eval download available!

      Heck, I've been evaluating OpenOffice - it'll probably suffice, once they get the showstoppers out and get to one-dot-oh.

      --

  • "gobeProductive 3.0 - Office XP killer?" and "While gobeProductive isn't as full-featured as OfficeXP, it certainly does garner a whole lot of Bang-for-the-Buck (especially with the FamilyLicense). The author does a great job of summarizing the superiority of gobeProductive in his conclusion when he says,"

    In my view, it is a bit too late to speak of "features" and "prices" as an MS Office killer (of any version). Why? For years, corporate office (average Joe/Jane employee/consumer) users have gotten used to the "look-and-feel" of MS Office -- it is a tool that they have become so familiar with for better or worse. Asking them to convert now based on price and feature set of a competing product is like asking them to re-learn walking all over again. Not an easy thing to sell.
    • In my view, it is a bit too late to speak of "features" and "prices" as an MS Office killer (of any version). Why? For years, corporate office (average Joe/Jane employee/consumer) users have gotten used to the "look-and-feel" of MS Office -- it is a tool that they have become so familiar with for better or worse.

      You must be thinking of a different Microsoft Office. The one I am familiar with comes out with a different "look and feel" every 18-24 months :) Also nowhere outside computer GUI's would this argument be anything other than laughable.

  • Tables from Word (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:05AM (#3234101) Homepage
    From the review: "Also, tables inserted inside of MS Word documents do not translate."

    Utterly essential that this works for communicating with the outside world.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  • I'll address this issue right off the bat. This is great software, but it isn't an Office killer, nor is it designed to be

    Quit it with the sensationalist headlines... this program is designed to be a smaller, faster office suite, not the XP killer everyone here would like to see (me included)
  • I remember back when LightWave [lightwave3d.com] first came out for Windows. Newtek thought they would crush 3dStudio becuase of its price/features. To their amazement, sales were low. When they researched to find out why it wasn't selling, they found many companies ignored it because it wa TOO CHEAP. The old saying, "You pay for what you get" made purchasers think that if Brand X is half the price of Brand Z, there must be a reason. What did Newtek do? They raised the price by $1000 and Lightwave sales took off!

    The same thing is happening today with stuff like StarOffice, GoBe, and Linux in general. People that don't know better assume that if it is cheap or free, it must be something wrong with it. Maybe the solution is to charge outrageous prices (with deep discounts for personal uses).

  • Why is everyone saying how great Office XP is? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:14AM (#3234148)
    Why is everyone treating Office XP like it is the best thing that ever happened to office apps? It almost drove me insane. Little icons popping up all over the text - without clicking on anything, those docked dialogs appearing on both sides of the document when least needed, dynamic toolbars that never seem to stay docked... I was glad it was just a 30day trial and I re-installed Office 2000 a few days later.

    I really have to try some of the alternative office apps. Tried StarOffice beta on Linux. Liked it a lot. :)
    • I agree.

      In fact, I don't understand why people think MS Office in general is that great.

      Considering that it is MS's cash cow, it is amazing they haven't put more effort into making it better over the years. They just seem to add junk, rather than simplifying things. Read the review - you'll see what I mean. This office suite does some simple things (from a non-programming perspective) that would improve MS Office a lot.

  • No demo version (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nosse_elendili ( 147250 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:15AM (#3234154)
    There does not appear to be a demo version available on their website. At one level I understand that there are issues with demos that are difficult to get around. (I used WinZip and Paint Shop Pro for YEARS without registering them) But if they really want to make a dent in the Microsoft Office Monopoly they are going to have to earn the trust of the techs. There is simply no way that I will recommend to my boss that we switch away from the most popular piece of software ever without being able to play with it for at least a month. How am I going to justify buying another TOTALLY EXTRANEOUS office suite, just to test it out? Something for the Gobe guys, or any other MS competitor to ponder...

    • So, in the same post that you talk about stealing revenue from WinZip and Paint Shop Pro, you asay that Gobe is going to have to release a demo to earn the trust of the techs? Do you really think that's any way to convince Gobe to release a demo version?

      Dinivin

  • The only thing that matters (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JPriest ( 547211 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @09:18AM (#3234165) Homepage
    It doesn't matter if it's 10x better then XP office and only uses 2 Meg of disk space and 300 k RAM, if I can't read the data everyone else is sending me I have no other choice but XP office. To use any non/semi compliant office suite would require my entire company taking the plunge and corporations want solutions that are proven, they are not looking to beta test. I have enough trouble using a non-MS email client because outlook loves to package everything into a winmail.dat file that my or any other standards compliant email application is incapable of handling. Abi word does OK at reading some word files but does not even have an option to save a file as a .doc, therefore rendering any compatibility entirely useless.
    • And I am not going to say that microsoft should make everything they own open source, but I do feel that they should be required to publish the protocol specifications for handling and writing .doc and .xml files, as well as adhere to standards rather then sending packaging data as a winmail.dat file. If they are going to package everything into a proprietary file why not at least use some form of compression?
      • the winmail.dat problem can be solved 2 ways, one is tell the sending party to change send format from rtf to either text, or if they must have pretty fonts and colors to html, this way outlook will use mime encoding instead of making the entire message one big rtf package. The other one is to run exchange server as the server will break the message apart if it is destined for a non-native client.
  • gobeProductive is a single office application (i.e., integrated) that does the job of five standalones: word processing, spreadsheets, image manipulation (photo manipulation), graphics (image creation), and presentations

    Corel Draw always got bashed for having more features than needed in one app. How come this is suddenly considered a good thing?
  • Seems like everyone and his mother are creating Office Suites nowadays.
  • The Linux version is currently not available but according to this press release: http://www.gobe.com/press/pr8_29_2001.html [gobe.com] you will get a redeemable coupon for the Linux version if you purchase the windows version:

    "Prior to the Linux version's availability, packaging will include a coupon redeemable for a Linux version CD."

    For those of us who use multiple platforms, it would be nice if their license was for any version on any platform. Any one see anything about a Mac OS/X version? An office suite that is uniform an consistient across Linux, Windows, and Mac OS/X would be useful. (I know that an Open Office port to the Mac is underway, so perhaps OO will be the solution).

  • These guys really seem to be a rarity; a company focused on the consumer. Just check out the "FamilyLicense" you can buy:

    You are allowed to install gobeProductive on each Windows and Linux computer in your own residence. You are also allowed to install gobeProductive on your computer where you work. A certificate is included in the gobeProductive package explaining to your employer that this is allowed.

    So for $124.95 you get the Windows version, a certificate good for the Linux version when it comes out and a license to install it on every computer you use! No Product Activation telling you to plunk down another $450 because you have a second computer in your office.

    I wonder if employers would give employees half of the cost back if they used it at work. Each side would benefit by saving close to $390! (Ok, employers might save less due to volume discounts.)

    Still a good deal worth checking out.
  • OfficeXP on Win2k on my machine (256MB machine) uses 9888K with nothing open. That's more than 10% less than 11MB's... not that much more than the quoted 7 of this "XP Killer"

    Can anyone beat that?
  • I bought this about 3 weeks ago after seeing it posted on osnews.com, and so far I really like it. Keep in mind I am far from a Office suite power user. The things that attracted it me to were: the positive reviews, the ability to save as a pdf, the fact that I can get the linux version when it is finished, and the license which absolutely clinched it for me.

    I think it is important to support companies that you feel are doing a good thing. I could have just used a copy of MS Office from the MSDN Subscription that my job provides, but I decided that I should buy this product to support the company. I am at a point in my life where I find it hard to justify pirating things anymore. I want the product, I have the money, I buy the product. I do understand pirating when you don't have the money to buy software you need learn a skill (some would argue if you can't afford it, you shouldn't use it), I wouldn't be where I am today if I was not able to do this in the past. But I don't know if most people are able to weene themselves.

    Wondered a bit topic, oh well...
  • Choices choices! Now I can have MS Office, StarOffice, KOffice, gobeProductive, this is great! But... if I don't know what suite my friends are using, what format should I use. RTF is the closest we have to being a standard, but it's limited. XHTML is good, but not designed really for word processing and MS Office invariably screws it up bigtime when saving it again.

    Every office suite has its own formats, so although I might like to I can't send in them. Where oh where is a modern word processor format that can cope with all the features of a modern powerful word processor, while remaining open?

    I suppose ditto for spreadsheets too come to think of it...

  • Office killer?? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Shiar ( 155118 )
    Does it have the paperclip?
  • 20336K w/ 65MB swap file before
    15144K w/ 68MB swap file after starting with new blank document.

    Obviously a bunch of stuff already running on this Win95OSR2 machine.
  • StarOffice lets me re-assign the Enter key to toggle edit mode in spreadsheets (instead of move to the next cell).

    Can Gobe do that?

  • Company's always like to spend less money, but they don't really like to gamble, so I see the incompatibility with file formats as a big strike against it (the review claims gobe has problems with tables, charts, and images in .doc files, which my company uses extensively).

    Anyway, the real problem is that I haven't seen a good Access killer. Does anyone know a good competitor for it? I'm not trolling, I'm honestly just curious.

  • Heh... Memory? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wedg ( 145806 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @12:55PM (#3235369) Homepage Journal
    Of course, RAM usage doesn't matter as much these days, with the standard RAM installed being above 128 megs, but still good to know.

    Less RAM used means less memory accesses, which means more free memory bandwidth, which means everything runs faster. RAM is still the bottleneck on 99% of systems, so the less you use the better. Oh. And Windows (I still run 98SE) itself takes up about 128mb of RAM with a few agents running. Stripped down to nothing running I can't get it below 75mb.

    RAM still matters. Don't be bad programmers.

  • Office XP? More like Works (Score:3, Insightful)

    by steveha ( 103154 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @03:08PM (#3236456) Homepage
    I read the review. From the way the features were described, this doesn't sound like a product in the same league as Office XP; it's more of a Microsoft Works level product.

    If it truly has 100% compatible document import/export, then people might feel comfortable using it as a replacement for Office on some desktops (much as StarOffice is being used now in many companies).

    I especially like the licensing. I hope that they sell many copies to families with new computers.

    On Linux, I don't think they have much chance of making money. The word processor sounds like it is pretty similar to AbiWord in available features. The spreadsheet sounds like it is not quite up to Gnumeric's level yet. Graphics are not up to the GIMP yet (although they might be a bit more newbie-friendly; I couldn't really tell from the review). In short, there is very little functionality here that is not available already in the free software. Most of the people interested in using Linux probably won't be interested in paying for software that offers little beyond what is already free on Linux.

    The integration features are sort of interesting. When you do a Save As on a document with a spreadsheet, several pictures, and some text, I wonder what happens?) Microsoft Office has had features like this since forever, though: you can pick one document to be a shell and drop other documents into it, or else you can run the "binder" and make a metadocument with several other documents bound up inside. (I think most people just do the shell document thing; MS has mostly retired the binder. You can still install it if you like but it is no longer installed by default.) The clean "sheets" interface is nice, but I think you could get that in Office by using an Excel spreadsheet as the shell doc.

    steveha

  • Unfortunately.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Wednesday March 27, 2002 @07:14PM (#3237855)
    Unfortunately, nothing will ever 'kill' Office until MS gets in (real) legal trouble, and Office loses support or something like that, Office has a huge, damaging exploit in parallel with another product's release, or other such things.

    That, and 100% compatability with current MS Office products. I hear you say, "What about WordPerfect?" This really isn't such a big concern, because most people do, and have used, MS Office for the last 5 or so years.

    The main concern with compatability isn't necessarily, "Can I use this flawlessly with the other documents circulating the office?" but, "Can I use this to flawlessly read documents generated in all the various versions of Office?" or, "Will I still be able to retain my original formatting, and can it be saved with that same formatting as well, so people still using Office can read it properly?"

    Unfortunately, I suspect that MS Office has some sort of 'failsafe' *cough* mechanism that causes any documents written with another program to be rendered differently each time, etc.

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