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EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003 478

Posted by michael from the with-the-speed-of-pure-java dept.
ryen writes "Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java therefore able to run on both Windows and Linux. EIOffice 2004 offers features which should get a few users' attention, but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office? Flexbeta has the review." That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.
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EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003 More

EIOffice 2004 vs. MS Office 2003

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  • Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:33PM (#9278784)
    That's Evermore Integrated Office, if you're wondering.

    Heh. Not anymore.

    Ack, even I'm getting tired of the "we slashdotted your site" jokes.

  • Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by the MaD HuNGaRIaN ( 311517 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:33PM (#9278785)
    "Written in Java so it can run on both Windows and Linux"

    hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?

    How myopic.

    • Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:43PM (#9278917)
      "hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?"

      You're forgeting the Java moto. "Write once, run once, mabey twice, three times if your lucky".

      • Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Funny)

        by JUSTONEMORELATTE ( 584508 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:47PM (#9279584) Homepage
        "hehe, what about all the other platforms there's a JVM for? Like, uh, OS X? Solaris?"

        You're forgeting the Java moto. "Write once, run once, mabey twice, three times if your lucky".
        Back in 99, Symantec (of Visual Cafe fame) sent me a flyer for a new Java Debugger. They were trying to play off of Java's motto, but "Write once, Debug everywhere" made me laugh really hard.

        --

    • Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:5, Funny)

      by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:59PM (#9279096) Homepage
      "Written in Java so it can run on both Windows and Linux"

      Reminds me of Blues Brothers:

      "What kind of music do you usually have here?"

      "Oh, we got both kinds. We got Country *and* Western!"

    • "Support for Macintosh OS X and Solaris is in development [evermoresw.com]" -- bottom of the page.

    • Yes, I noticed on their download page [evermoresw.com] that they have seperate downloads for linux or windows. I'm not fully sure, but I believe that the reason for that is probably because they use native API calls for each OS which will make it execute a bit faster. It seems like all of the more portable Java programs I've seen are all very slow. Don't get me wrong, I love Java as much as the next guy, but the only programs I've seen with decent performance made use of native API calls for a specific OS.

      • Re:Both Platforms? WOW! (Score:3, Informative)

        by coljac ( 154587 )
        One usual reason why there will be separate installers for different OSs is just that - it's the installer. Things like desktop icons, start menu, which shell script to run, these things are platform dependent, whereas the application itself is pure java.

  • It's about Standards (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:34PM (#9278794)
    While I can try out a million different versions of office, and get equal satisfaction. Everything really comes down to standards.

    Until there is something 10x more superior than .doc .xls .ppt standards. M$ is still winning the same game, just different players.

    • Re:It's about Standards (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DaHat ( 247651 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:36PM (#9278832)
      Regardless of how superior a new format may be, the fact that many use MS software means that many will stick with MS formats because they are nearly ubiquitous.

      I know I'm going to get flamed for this, however...

      Ex: Many claim Ogg is a superior format to AAC, MP3, WMA and others, however the fact that it is not supported by as many pieces of software and hardware limit its use. The reason that MP3, a format which many claim is inferior to nearly everything continues to thrive is because an MP3 works nearly everywhere, just as a .doc.

      • Re:It's about Standards (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ThisIsFred ( 705426 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:10PM (#9279202) Journal
        Exactly! It's about network effects. Microsoft can deliver MSO through OEMs if they wish, or even through WU if they had to. It doesn't matter if Office is huge, slow, a virus vector, and has a file format which is basically a memory dump of OLE streams (which get corrupted quite often).

        If Microsoft gives away 10 million copies of Office 2005 XPNTME, they will still break even, because another 10 million will need to be able to read and revise the data.

      • Re:It's about Standards PERCEPTION (Score:4, Insightful)

        by DonGar ( 204570 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:28PM (#9279396) Homepage
        I'll go a step further. .doc often breaks when you move it around, but it doesn't matter because everyone BELIEVES that it'll work anywhere. The reality doesn't matter much (in this case) only the perception of it.

    • Re:It's about Standards (Score:3, Informative)

      by GeckoX ( 259575 )
      Standards? Hardly.
      Wish there actually were some.
      • Hey. If I write a word doc and send it to you, can you open it in your copy of Word?

        Sure you can. If it's any of the versions written in the past 5 years. And if I save it as an older version, SANS cool new features, the past 10 years. Which means hundreds of millions of computers can open that document

        That makes it a standard. Not an open standard, but a standard just the same. In fact, the reason most people would give for why they use Office is that it's an "Industry Standard."

        Lots of closed sta

  • Summary of Slashdot comments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:34PM (#9278795) Homepage

    1) Great another competitor, we should support it

    2) Its in Java it will suck

    3) Java sucks

    4) It should be in Perl

    5) It should be in C

    6) I use vi and troff.

  • It looks interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:34PM (#9278797)
    But the web site doesn't have any trial versions.

    Its hard to put down $150 without seeing if it will actually open up my spreadsheet and documents.

    The review had an eval copy, but no such animal on the web site. Too bad; Do you have to wait for a warez copy to figure out if its worth buying? Makes me think they have something to hide.

    Believe it or not, I think real Excel compatibility is the hardest to achieve because there are so many different macros (VB Script), charting features, and other goodies in Excel that its easy to get "locked in".

    • java warez! ahaha.

      "Java Warez: Turning 0-day warez into 7-day warez before it even finishes loading"

      sorry, mandatory Java bashing. Parent AC has a good point. I want to try it out first. If there is too much lag in response time when I type, I get really frustrated. A lot of IDE's i've tried have some lag. For instance, Netbeans IDE also written in Java.

      If the wordprocessor has the same lag, i'd throw it away in a heartbeat.

    • Lack of trial version aside, the review hardly inspired confidence either. I only managed to catch parts of it before it got slashdotted, but take this little excerpt regarding the spreadsheet functionality:

      The only difference can be seen after the chart is created. The bars in EIOffice's chart are grouped together, where in Excel's chart the bars are not close together. I tried editing the spacing between the bars in EIOffice by changing the gap width of each bar, but the chart was at an angle where the

    • Re:It looks interesting (Score:5, Informative)

      by cyfer2000 ( 548592 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:06PM (#9279158) Journal
      download [evermoresw.com]

      A chinese page, click the links in the table.

      you won't believe it is a Java software.

      • Sorry for a little confusing information, i think these direct links may work better for non-Chinese dudes.

        linux:

        http://soft.66169.com/dl.php?id=1032591&cknum=7 4 81 &svr=1
        http://www.evermoresw.com/download/eioffic e2003_fo r_linux.tar.gz

        windows:
        http://hlbr.onlinedown.net/down/EIO200 3_for_Win.ex e
        http://crc.onlinedown.net/down/EIO2003_for_Win. exe

        And for other platform, I heard some people simply unpack the tar ball and run the jar files, i had never tried personally, so I don't warrantee it
  • I read the first page then it was gone, anyone have a mirror?

  • The real question is... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:34PM (#9278801)
    ... does it have enough features to get people to switch from OpenOffice?

  • EIOffice? (Score:3, Funny)

    by DrCode ( 95839 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:34PM (#9278804)
    Was this done by Old MacDonald?

  • as in... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    write once, debug everywhere?

  • Java? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by KrisCowboy ( 776288 )
    The site seems to be slashdotted. And, entire apps written in Java are damn slow, particularly on Linux.
    but does it have enough to have people switching from MS Office?
    No, not as long as Openoffice is kicking ass!!!

    • Re:Java? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rleibman ( 622895 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:39PM (#9278871) Homepage
      Re: Java GUIs being slow
      They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse on my PIII500Mhz on Fedora Core 1 and it runs very nicely. Some changes coming down the line in Java 1.5 might actually make it even more responsive, for some things even faster than typical C++ applications (the run-time optimizer cannot easily be duplicated in statically compiled languages.)

      • Re:Java? (Score:4, Informative)

        by phatsharpie ( 674132 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:30PM (#9279410)
        They can actually be quite fast and responsive, if written correctly. I run eclipse...

        Actually, Eclipse doesn't use the standard Java GUI library (Swing), and uses the IBM developed SWT, so it takes more than just coding the app "correctly".

        The standard Java GUI can be written to be fast and responsive without using SWT however. Just check out the IntelliJ IDE.

        http://www.intellij.com

        I used it exclusively for my Java development, until I switched to Eclipse because of cost. Swing development can be tricky and responsive apps become harder to develop with it. Good thing thread programming is so easy with Java, because with Swing, you'll need to use it plenty.

        -B

      • Re:Java? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kazoo the Clown ( 644526 )

        The question is then, does anyone actually know how to write Java correctly?

        Every once in awhile I figure I'll give Java another chance and try running a Java app. Every one I've ever seen runs like a three legged dog. Based on comments I've seen I get the impression that the runtimes vary widely, and those who are claiming how great it runs must be using something other than what I'm running-- in which case they are rather out of touch with their users. I don't know that in fact this is the problem, as

    • Re:Java? (Score:3, Informative)

      by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 )
      Java UIs are pretty fast if you use the proper tools (SWT as opposed to SWING). A quick comparison of NetBeans (Swing) to Eclipse (SWT) should bear this out.
  • I thought that said ELOffice. I was gonna ask if Mexico or on of them southern areas decided to get into the software industry.

    Good idea though...seems like Java is really trying to bitchslap MS as often as they can.

  • Better than OLE? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beatbyte ( 163694 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:36PM (#9278824) Homepage
    "EIOffice 2004 puts a word processor, presentation package and spreadsheet into a single application, not a collection of programs. The integration is smooth and deep, and there's a natural feel to the way it all works together."

    Is it good enough to never need OLE?

    And yet it still has the fatal flaw of no database program.

    Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).
    • Build an office suite with a file based database with a GUI and then you can start to attack the MS Access component of MS Office. Until then, you're replicating Star-Office and OpenOffice for some reason (and then trying to sell it for $149 USD on top of that).

      If one was going to make such a thing, SQLite [sqlite.org] would be a good starting point. It has some flaws that need ironing but it is much faster than Access and is under public domain.
  • Does anyone know if it's written using Swing? SWT? Something else? depending on that it may actually be very usable (or not).

  • get this out of the way (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tsiangkun ( 746511 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:37PM (#9278838) Homepage
    This is great ! I have been waiting for the helpfulness of clippy combined with the performance of java.

  • Sticking with OO.o (Score:4, Interesting)

    by goldspider ( 445116 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:37PM (#9278842) Homepage
    I'm more inclined to trust a program built/optimized speficically for different platforms than one that claims to be compatible with all of them.

    I'm sticking with OpenOffice.org for now. Just MHO.

  • Bad Name (Score:5, Funny)

    by greyhoundofdeath ( 783411 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:39PM (#9278861)
    In Canada EI stands for Employment Insurance, something you collect when you lost your job, affectionately known as "The Pogy." So looking at EIOffice, does it mean that your employment in an office is ensured, or is it the Pogy Office where you pick up your cheque?

  • Runs in Java on Windows (Score:3, Funny)

    by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:40PM (#9278879)
    I have NEVER seen a Java application RUN on Windows. Instead, they just seem to execute slowly...
  • Since the server is apparantly powered by xbox

    http://freecache.org/http://www.evermoresw.com/w eb en/images/indexBig.jpg

  • It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:40PM (#9278884) Homepage Journal
    Please, to all non-MS developers out there: stop chasing Microsoft!

    I understand the motivation behind designing office suites to look like Office clones, window managers to look like Windows clones, etc.: the idea is that people switching from MS products will find it easier to get used to the new software if it looks like what they're used to. But I really think this is a fundamentally flawed line of reasoning, for two reasons.

    1. No one will ever be as good at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. You may expend endless blood, toil, tears, and sweat trying to clone $MS_PRODUCT down to the last widget, but you'll never get it exactly right. And if you try to lull users into feeling like they're using $MS_PRODUCT ... well, the instant something doesn't work, or just doesn't work exactly the way they're expecting, they'll dismiss your product as a cheap knockoff.

    2. Microsoft interfaces may be the "standard," but they're not the best. In almost every market niche I can think of, there's some product that's faster, more powerful, and/or easier to use than whatever Microsoft is pushing. If you're going to copy something, copy something better than Windows, Office, IE, ad nauseam -- or better yet, start with the best as a baseline and innovate from there.

    • Re:It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by js3 ( 319268 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:55PM (#9279059)
      I disagree. To effectively overtake a product with a commanding lead in the market you practically have to make a clone of it and sell it cheaper. Anything different is too different for many people and they won't switch.

      Many times people just want something better not different. I want a better government not a different one and so on and so forth.

    • Re:It's becoming a cliche, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DukeyToo ( 681226 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:02PM (#9279125) Homepage
      Actually, it looks like they have innovated in their own way. They have a common file format for all of their office apps, and they have focused on building it from the ground up to support robust linking of data between documents. Their focus is on integration, because that is the weakness of their competitors. It seems to me that they have looked at what MS did, and taken the good stuff and left out the bad. Can you say "embrace and extend"?

      From their whitepaper...

      None of the Office suites currently sold today constitutes a REAL Office. Instead, they are separate components packaged together for marketing purposes.
      Microsoft adopted this approach, in part to gain an advantage over software publishers that did not have a complete line of products. Unfortunately, the result is based on domination rather than innovation - an environment that touts minor enhancements yet gives many users no economic reason to incur the cost of an upgrade.
      Evermore Software believes software users deserve a better solution than a system that requires the launching of four or five separate applications just to complete one task. This premise guided our development of Evermore Integrated Office - the only REAL Office - the first coherently-designed, well-conceived Office suite. It is one integrated program, not many disjointed applications, and delivers one standard user interface in screen layout, display screen style, keystroke usage, dialog boxes, menus and submenus, icon sets, function key usage, help system and file format. It stores all data in one file format - not the several file formats used by others. It saves all data related to any one project in one file or a binder. And, when the user changes the source data of linked data, EIO applies that change automatically, immediately, correctly, to all other uses of that same source data to assure data synchronization.
      Evermore Software believes that true integration distinguishes the Office

  • Still looks like MSoffice: :( (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pedantic bore ( 740196 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:41PM (#9278893)
    EIOffice 2004 looks so much like MS Office 2003 that you wouldn't have a hard time getting used to the graphic interface once you get started with it.

    Does that mean that it sucks as much as MSoffice?

    My main complaint with MSoffice is that the UI was apparently designed by lunatics. A free, open-source clone of MSoffice is a start, but it will still suck just to be backward compatible. Why doesn't someone put together an office suite that transcends this junky interface?

    To their credit, it looks like they've improved on MSoffice in some details, but as long as their goal is still be look/feel compatible with MSoffice, it doesn't make me excited.

  • Text Mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by lafiel ( 667810 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:45PM (#9278934) Homepage

    Five pages compressed into 1 post, lots of pics that I never saw so I think the italics stand for captions.

    EIOffice 2004 Vs MS Office 2003 - Page 1
    Posted by Team Flexbeta on 26 May 2004 (28566 views) Rating: 4.94 EIOffice 2004 looks so much like MS Office 2003 that you wouldn't have a hard time getting used to the graphic interface once you get started with it. Coded in Java, EIOffice features a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation graphics application. All three applications look and behave similar to MS Office's applications; Word, Excel and PowerPoint. EIOffice is able to edit and save MS Office file formats as well as a few other formats we will discover soon.

    Word Processor
    [qksrv.net]
    From the screenshot it is clear how EIOffice's word processing suit looks extremely similar to MS Word. The order and shape of the icons are not the only similarities, so is the labeling. For example, the tabs, File, Edit, View, Insert, and Format are all labeled just like in MS Word and in the same exact order. The word processor offers many features such as spell checking, password protecting document, tracking changes and a thesaurus. There is a nice feature which lets you transform the document you are currently working on into a presentation. Though the transformation isn't 100% the way I wanted it to be, a few editing here and there molded the document into a nifty presentation.

    EIOffice 2004 Word Processor and MS Word

    Another feature which EIOffice 2004 carries is its ability to suggest the entire word you are typing before you finish typing it. For example, when typing the word "feature", by the time the letters "fea" are typed, EIOffice suggest that the word you are trying to type is indeed "feature" and highlights the word for you. A simple enter on the keyboard accepts the word.

    The spell checker in EIOffice 2004 works very well though the suggestions are not as relevant as that of MS Office 2003. Using the misspelled word - woship, EIOffice 2004's suggestions were Yoshi, wish, wash, midship and welsh. The same misspelled word in MS Word brought up the correct suggestion: worship or worships. I don't have any idea why EIOffice 2004 suggested Yoshi as a possible correction to the misspelled word. Unfortunately, EIOffice does not offer grammar checking like MS Office does.


    Mispelled word in EIOffice 2004

    There is a nice application bar floating on the upper part of the current document which enables fast switching from one office application to another. With a simple click of the mouse I was able to toggle between the word processor, the spreadsheet application, and the presentation graphics creator. This is made possible because EIOffice is one application which bundles the three previously mentioned applications.


    Switching Application Bar

    EIOffice 2004 is able to open and save MS Word file format, .doc. This and the fact that EIOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office shows that huge efforts were placed to attract MS Office users into switching. Other file formats that EIOffice can save and open are PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel, rich text format, html and txt format.

    EIOffice also features a nice scientific editor which includes many scientific figures, shapes and symbols. The figures include diodes, transistors, and capacitors. There are also chemistry symbols such as chemical reaction formulas and atomic structures. Apart from the typical math functions and figures, EIOffice also includes curve functions such as the exponent function and the sinusoid curve.

    Science Editor in EIOffice 2004

    Presentation Graphics

  • My one wish for them: file formats (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:46PM (#9278943)
    I think having an office suite written in Java is a fantastic idea. It means that we can have the same software running on MS Windows, Linux, OSX, and others. Hopefully Kaffe [kaffe.org] will soon be at a point where it can run stuff like this, which will means the *BSDs, AmigaOS and whatever else runs GCC will be able to run Java.

    My one complaint about EIoffice is the file formats. The last thing we need is yet another file format. OpenOffice/StarOffice, KOffice*, TextMaker*, and Abiword can all save documents in StarOffice format (* these two will have that feature in their next release). We have a rule here at SteamyMobile that you can use whatever office suite you want, so long as it uses the StarOffice format, meaning that in the future, when document search and indexing programs are released, they will all be able to use the same format. If EIOffice could that, we would use it too.

    -----------
    mobile porn [steamymobile.com]

  • Icon (Score:2)

    by lcde ( 575627 )
    Why can't companies be origional in Icon design? It's like they are asking for MSFT to sue them for some infringement.

  • El Office (Score:5, Funny)

    by CitznFish ( 222446 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:47PM (#9278958) Homepage Journal
    El Office - A product of Mexico

  • Interface is copyrightable? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by at2000 ( 715252 ) * on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:47PM (#9278963)
    IIRC, Lotus Development Corp v Paperback Software Intl demonstrated us in 1990 that copying the look and feel in exact form is copyright infringement.

  • Corel? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by werdnapk ( 706357 )
    Corel tried writing their word processing software entirely in Java 5 or so years ago and it failed rather miserably, but that's most likely because they were way ahead of their time and java was not the fastest platform to be running software on at that time.

    • Re:Corel? (Score:4, Informative)

      by expro ( 597113 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:55PM (#9279061)

      They were having to create the UI from scratch, and there were some very basic things not portable i.e. font sizes in AWT (given in pixels on PC and in points in Mac).

      But by far the worst performance problem reported by a majority of people testing it was that people were demoing it as a browser applet and thought the download time (mostly over modems at the time) was part of the startup time of the program.

      The Java word processing engine was much faster and more reliable (due to redesign) than the C/C++ version of WordPerfect at the time on the same machine.

      I suspect it was also suffering from poor garbage collection and other JVM problems.

      And no one understood the great modularity and pluggability that had been designed into it, due to political problems at Corel, who could never figure out a business model for it.

  • but I have problems with Java and Linux. I think others do too. I think things like this should be qualified with "could run on linux" as opposed to "so it runs on linux". But maybe that's just to raise my self-esteem.

  • Language Indifference (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MidKnight ( 19766 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:50PM (#9279000)
    Designed to compete against MS Office, EIOffice 2004 is coded in Java...

    When are people going to learn that consumers don't care what language a program is written in? For some reason, the Evermore Software folks are attempting to use this as a marketing bullet point (it's the first point on their web page, even), when Joe User really just wants to know why it's better than MS Office.

    I write Java to pay the bills, and as such I'm a big supporter of the platform. But users just don't care. In fact because of the Microsoft FUD machine, saying it's Java might even be a turn-off to quasi-technical people. I once had a government purchasing manager say "Java? We're moving away from that because Microsoft no longer supports it." Idiotic yes, but to paraphrase Forrest Gump: Customer is as Customer does.

    Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have. You can sell it to anybody. But from the customer standpoint it simply doesn't matter.

    • it could matter (Score:3, Interesting)

      by hak1du ( 761835 )
      Writing Java apps is key for the software developer, because your market suddenly is no longer linked to the hardware platform your customers have.

      If you think that, you aren't going to compete on any platform. When I run something on Linux, I expect that it integrates tightly with the Linux operating system. None of the cross-platform dreck that has come out of Sun (OpenOffice, Java), does that--they all treat Linux as a second class citizen and ignore Linux key bindings, user interface conventions, et
  • Maybe they could get Nelly to promote it.

    Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
    OFF-IIIIIIIIIIICE! What's happenin now?
    Andele andele mami, E.I. E.I.
    OFF-IIIIIIIIIIICE! If the head right, Nelly there ery'night
  • http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:PvmFqMTMSZkJ: www.evermoresw.com/+&hl=en

  • I can't tell... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:52PM (#9279019) Homepage
    ...if it's worth $15, much less $150. A real review would be nice. Does it really handle all the things the Office products handle? How is the integration? I, personally, don't care, but my users do.

    I would dearly love to have one suite that would run on Linux, Windows and Macs, *and* interchange documents with reasonably current MSO products. I can't tell if this one meets those criteria, other than not supporting Macs. Sadly, they aren't alone, there.

    OOO does OK at supportoing the MSO standards, but isn't there, yet. ABIword and Gnumeric are great apps, but don't interchange docs that well (my fallback is simply to have apps on all three platforms that interchange documents).

    Then there's the nightmare of scheduling software, but that's another issue.

    BTW, neither the review nor the EIO site exhibited /. effect for me, and I got there pretty quickly after the story was posted.

  • No real place for this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by devilsadvoc8 ( 548238 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @01:59PM (#9279090)
    What is the market for this thing? Its not going to compete against MS Office- no db just to start- and it can't compete with OpenOffice - price alone- so who's going to use it?

    While I am not the biggest fan of OpenOffice (disclaimer I have tried OO and deinstalled it in favor of MS Office- flame away)I would use it in a second over this thing because OO is free and OO really does have some nice features.

  • Did anyone else notice this bit? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ItMustBeEsoteric ( 732632 ) <ryangilbert AT gmail DOT com> on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:10PM (#9279200)
    "Supported Browsers

    * Microsoft Internet Explorer
    * Sun HotJava
    * Netscape Navigator Platforms Tested Linux
    * Microsoft Windows 98
    * Microsoft Windows ME Microsoft Windows NT
    * Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows XP "

    For one, half of those are OSes, not browswers. For two...well, IE is there. Not Firefox, Opera, etc. This just makes me wonder.

  • Like Poe's "The Raven" (Score:4, Funny)

    by breon.halling ( 235909 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:16PM (#9279262)

    Quoth the server, "Nevermore." =)

    • Once upon a midnight dreary, while I p0rn-surfed, weak and weary,
      Over many a strange and spurious p0rn-site of "hot XXX galore",
      While I clicked my fav'rite bookmark, suddenly there came a warning,
      And my heart was filled with mourning, mourning for my dear amour,
      "Tis not possible," I muttered, "give me back my free hardcore!"
      Quote the server, "404."

  • When will office-clones makers learn! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Vengie ( 533896 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:25PM (#9279366)
    *WORD* is the easy part.

    Even powerpoint is almost a non-issue

    How about Access/Excel...

    So for any clone, ask these questions

    Yes, but does it run crystal reports?

    Yes, but does it run access (.db7) and have access-like switchboards off of which MANY soho businesses live? [Dentists, doctors, small mom & pops..] The JET engine may suck, but its the de-facto standard for mom and pops.

    Yes, but do the macros they use at every major investment bank and packages like XLMiner work?

    When there is a suitable ACCESS replacement for small business and something that runs crystal reports and data mining packages like XLMiner run, Microsoft is in trouble.

    That last 10% of features will keep many major institutions around until near the bitter end.

  • competes with? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @02:51PM (#9279622) Journal

    The advantages of MS Office are:

    • It's what so many other have - so file format compatability, macros and add on product compatability, share workarounds and techniques, etc.
    • Feature set.

    The advantages of OpenOffice are:

    • Free.
    • Open source.
    • Accessible file format (compressed XML, but ultimately, TEXT).
    • Ever-improving feature set.

    What the heck are the advantages of EIOffice?

    • Free/cheap? No.
    • Open source? No.
    • Everybody else uses it? No.

    So, WTF?

  • It's from China... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MhzJnky ( 443677 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @03:39PM (#9280084) Homepage
    Just wanted to point out to all that didn't RTFA, this product is from China. Incase you proof check here [desktoplinux.com].

    Now I know slash is full of good 'ol Mickysoft haters, but do we realy want to be celibrating a product from a country that's eyeing our technology jobs probably more so than India? It hasn't started yet, but most people agree that off-shoring develpment jobs to mainland China will happen soon. And this is basicaly their proof of concept that they can do it.

    So, maybe its for the best not to give these guys any more publicity then they allready have.

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