IBM Lotus Smartsuite 9.8 released...

[gcutler]

http://www.lotus.com/products/smrtsuite.nsf/110299fb8a80831785256776006a918f/f9016a147a62b0458525698800672280?OpenDocument

Talk about beating a dead horse. I've worked at many true blue places (full of Lotus Notes, AS/400, WebSphere, DB2, etc) and they have all migrated to MS Office. I don't even think IBM/Lotus uses it anymore. Perhaps they want to include a suite of SW on the IBM machines, and this way it only cost them the development costs, no additional cost like it would if they included Office or Works.

I noticed on Dell machines the cheapest suite is Wordperfect, then like $15 more for MS Works, $100 More for Office Small Busines. WP must be free, if it is $15 extra to get Works (which used to be cheapest option)

[Richard King]

I have been using Lotus products for many years, since before the first version of Smart Suite, and still use Smart Suite 97 (one generation back from current) for my day to day operations. I haven't ever had the need to switch over to the MS product, although with all the playing around with new software that I have been doing lately, who knows, maybe I should try a new horse. Before Lotus I used Quattro Pro (before Corel buy out) and Ami Pro (Lotus WP). Before that I used an integrated DOS product called Frameworks from Ashton Tate. Frameworks was actually very powerful for it's time.

[gcutler]

I just got a free copy of Corel Suite (which is just WP, Quattro Pro, Quicken and Britanica Reference) the equivlant of MS Works with a new machine, to be honest Wordpad is good enough for me for my wordprocessing needs :D

I used to be such a Quattro Pro fanatic, but now I'm not a fanatic about anything :D

[Neil Derryberry]

Sun openoffice isn't bad, and you can't beat free.