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Tiny SoftMaker's Office Suite Beats OpenOffice in Reviews. What Gives?

Andy Updegrove has an interesting post up in which he analyzes a product comparison from InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. The upshot of Kennedy's comparison of office productivity application suites is that he finds the commercially developed, non-open source SoftMaker suite of productivity applications to be the best suite for sharing and competing with Microsoft Office. He also fires off some notable criticisms of the open source OpenOffice suite. The funny thing is, SoftMaker is a small, commercial provider without an open source arm.

As is true of millions of people, I've used the OpenOffice productivity suite extensively, and I especially like the Go-oo fork of it. (Note that Go-oo has some backing from Novell, and by pass-through, from Microsoft.) That said, OpenOffice has been criticized for years for never quite achieving the level of document compatibility with Microsoft Office that it should have. I don't doubt that if OpenOffice had truly impressive compatibility with Office documents, it would have a much bigger user base than it has.

In analyzing this shortcoming a few months ago, Michael Meeks, a Novell employee, went so far as to pronounce OpenOffice "profoundly sick." We analyzed his thoughts here. He pointed to lack of growth in OpenOffice's development community in particular. In Kennedy's product comparison, he says this:

"OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability. It severely mangled our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files, and no amount of new features or targeted performance improvements could overcome this critical deficiency."

He's not the first person to note that SoftMaker's commercial suite is highly compatible with Microsoft Office documents. The suite sells for under $80 and is available for Windows and Linux. But, as Andy Updegrove notes, SoftMaker has only 17 employees, and doesn't leverage an open source development community, as OpenOffice does.

How can that be? As Updegrove notes:

"It seems bizarre that after all the ink and blood that's been spilled over the last several years over ODF and OOXML that OOo wouldn't deliver better interoperability, particularly if tiny SoftMaker was able to do a better job of it."

I have to agree, especially since OpenOffice is many years old and was started as a commercial suite. Perhaps it is time for a change in the way OpenOffice is developed. One thing to note here is that as Oracle acquires Sun Microsystems, it will also become the official steward of OpenOffice. Could Oracle make much needed changes, and finally help deliver a free, open source suite that competes effectively with Microsoft's? The first step in making such changes may be to look at what tiny little SoftMaker seems to be doing right.

• OpenOffice
• microsoft office
• productivity applications
• SoftMaker
• Go-ooo

by an anonymous user on Jul. 09, 2009

You should never pay for software when free alternatives are available for download. The open source community is just creating more competitors for it self, dividing their efforts in trying to overtake microsoft's office software.

There are many other office suites besides just the open source options.

You can also try SSuite Office for a free office suite. They have a whole range of office suites that are free for download that will meet all your demands.

Their software also don't need to run on Java or .NET, so it makes the software very small and efficient.{written in WIN32} - www.ssuitesoft.com

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by an anonymous user on Nov. 17, 2009

I've used Softmaker's Textmaker (the word processor in Softmaker Office) extensively and well as OOo Writer and MS Word.

I've read the "hyped" reviews about Softmaker, they aren't accurate. They have put a lot of effort into .doc format however, they lack many features that are in MS Word; therefore, it is impossible for them to be able to import/export flawlessly and that is exactly what I've found. They do very well with text and formatting but then go down hill from there. Neither Softmaker nor OOo will ever be 100% compatible/integrated with Microsoft Office, only MS Office will be. To think otherwise is insanity.

OOo Writer imports .doc files very well and even better than Softmaker in many instances--it all depends on the complexity of the document. Furthermore, OOo has the features you will need. You won't find yourself running to Word to do simple things that Softmaker lacks. However, OOo export to Word document formats is weak but I'm sure that is more on purpose. . . why would they want to support proprietary formats?

Softmaker is a nice office suite for what it does but it isn't in the same league as OOo and Microsoft. . . it's as simple as that.

Many of these reviews about how compatible it is with MS Office are either "paid for reviews" or the reviewers simple were not very thorough on their testing. We have to remember that many sites on the internet are making money with their reviews so why would they be critical?

I like Softmaker for what it does but OOo is my main program not that there is anything wrong with MS Office if you like it. . . I just prefer to support the open-source community :)

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