Re: [Thinkpad] Smart Suite (was T43: Norton Systemworks BasicEdition )

SmartSuite in the late 1990's early 2000's was comparably superior to MS
Office and in many ways still is. The issue with the software is that
the computer media never even wrote a review of it (and what little they
did do never did it any service it deserved - a lot of the times
emphasizing it's small user base and insignificance in the market).
They rather preferred to leave those columns to slowly kill WordPerfect
and company (or companies) and promote MS Office. Perception goes far
in this industry and since SmartSuite never got the light of day, IBM
reduced it to a piece of paper buried within the few other pieces of
paper (or was it just a line of text in some setup document?) when you
buy an IBM computer - giving you a phone number to call for a CD - to be
shipped at a later date.

Sure, you can still buy SmartSuite, but it is the same package that has
been available for several years now. No updates have been made to the
suite for years.

Of all the stuff it could do in the day and with the advancements other
Office Suites have made since then, I can only imagine what SmartSuite
could be today - if it had gotten better visibility. Lotus and
eventually IBM had an incredible ability to take the best of each
component they acquired and beautifully apply them to the rest of the
suite.

Acquisitions that made SmartSuite:
Lotus -> Lotus 1-2-3 (original Lotus SS Component)
(?) -> Freelance Graphics
Samda (Ami-Pro) -> WordPro (Where we got the SmartIcons)
Approach Software -> Approach (Where we got the Info Box)

Some of this stuff even made it into OS/2.

Now, IBM made some mistakes along the way that contributed to the demise
of this software, but had it got better coverage (fair coverage) it
would still be a viable competitor in the arena. What do we have now?
MS Office, WordPerfect Suite (which has become a MS Office clone -
complete with MS Visual Basic!) and OpenOffice (A free Office suite -
again behaving like a clone of MS Office!)

Bottom line: The idea of having all formatting capabilities in an easy
to use simple and single place (i.e. the Info Box) is gone. Instead, we
now have to navigate through menus and dialog boxes regardless of what
we use to process data, word, graphics or numbers! What took SmartSuite
a click or two to do, takes MS Office and others several! It wasn't
competition that killed this idea, it was market bullying performed by
M$ and their Ziff-Davis Partners.

Some credit: the latest incarnation of MS Office has made significant
strides in the area of ease of use, but still has light years to go to
match up with the ease of use Lotus SmartSuite offered. (But isn't that
true of all their stuff?!)

George
 
-----Original Message-----
From: thinkpad-bounces@stderr.org [mailto:thinkpad-bounces@stderr.org]
On Behalf Of Rosen, Robert (NIH/NIAMS) [E]
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 5:40 PM
To: thinkpad@stderr.org
Subject: Re: [Thinkpad] Smart Suite (was T43: Norton Systemworks
BasicEdition )

I believe you still get a free license for Smart Suite (and Lotus Notes)
with each Thinkpad.

____________________________
Robert Rosen
 
>Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 14:00:31 -0500
>From: "Colgrove, George" <George.Colgrove@state.vt.us>
>Subject: Re: [Thinkpad] T43: Norton Systemworks Basic Edition <--> AVG
>To: <thinkpad@stderr.org>
>>RayBay:
>>
>>"Who watches over them besides Consumer Reports.."
>
>And even Consumer Reports never really touches on software. They do
>mediocre coverage on hardware - practically none on software. I think
>this is why M$ got away with the crap they issue every year.
>
>Though other publishers of software made mistakes in marketing, this
was
>not the biggest slice of the pie that killed their software. It was
the
>magazines that controlled perception of the competing products.
>Ziff-Davis was no more than an extension of Microsoft's FUD department.
>
>I blame mostly the heavily biased computing media on the death of
>
>GEOS - GeoWorks - my overall favorite OS (when kept in relativity of
the
>time it was issued)
>OS/2 - IBM
>DR-DOS - Digital Research/Novell
>SmartSuite - IBM
>
>George
>

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Received on Wed Nov 7 07:46:30 2007