Competitive Strategy
The SoftMaker Office sales strategy is based on cross-platform usability along with reasonable pricing and free post-sale customer service. However, since SoftMaker Office is not free like competitors KOffice or OpenOffice.org, its greatest marketing strength is its high degree of Microsoft Office compatibility. As a major sales point, SoftMaker cites its ability to render graphs and charts within PlanMaker which are often indistinguishable from those created within Microsoft's Excel. Significantly, this level of compatibility extends to non-Windows platforms. Even on Windows platforms, SoftMaker Office competes with native Windows office suites based on its Microsoft Office compatibility.
SoftMaker also claims its Office suite is faster, with smaller memory and hard drive footprints than MS Office or OpenOffice.org.
The most significant areas of incompatibility, like with all non-Microsoft office suites, are in documents which use VBA scripts. While BasicMaker is a step forward, it still doesn't offer seamless VBA compatibility. There are also some minor incompatibilities with page layout formatting where page boundaries may not match without adjusting the margin settings. Most of these problems have been solved in SoftMaker Office 2008.
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