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You’re welcome, [@david] and fellow SOS participants.
Check out Ability’s pages at Wikipedia to gain some perspective — it’s an old name from the early PC years that has been bought and sold and re-marketed and passed from hand to hand for discontinuous development and eventual mimicking of Microsoft Office, and is now English-sold ( here ) Bulgarian software:
“… Ability Plus for DOS in the early 1980s by (1984) Ashok Patel, Tracey Allen, Andrew Forber, Richard B. McMurray, Tom Keith, Mike Gore, Drew Sullivan, Tom Dressing, David (Collier-) Brown, Karen Banks, (1986) Michael Smith, Rita Khan, Pete Sketch, (1991) Phil Roach, Mike King, Mike Young, J Raymond, Vassil Stoilov, George Georiev … Development ceased in 1995 with the last build made in November 1997 … succeeded by Ability Office on Windows … Xanaro Technologies, Toronto, Ontario, initially sought to market Ability in 1984. After a business reorganization at the request of the investors, the product was taken over by Migent Inc, Incline Village, Nevada, around 1984/85 and released as Ability v1.2 in 1985 … Ability Plus was released in 1987 by Migent … in Europe, Ability v1.2 and Ability Plus v1.0 were bundled with Amstrad personal computers. In 1987 Ability Plus won the Barclays Bank British Micro Computing Award … Migent Inc fell into financial difficulty (see Migent vs Ashton-Tate) and eventually reversed into LANware Inc, Markham, Canada in 1989. Migent (UK) Ltd, based in London, continued for a few more years, closing in 1991 … a new company was set up in the UK, Ability Plus Software (UK) Ltd, and it joined forces with LANware, with new funding, to develop and market a new version of Ability Plus v2.0 released in 1992 and then v3.0 in 1995 … Ability Plus Software acquired the source code for the Ability Plus package and with some of the ex-Migent staff and the help of LANware Inc, which had acquired sales and marketing rights in the US from Migent Inc, began a program of product development … in 1993 Ability Plus Software teamed-up with Great Bear, a US company with an office in Sofia, Bulgaria, to develop Ability Office for Windows in 1995 … Great Bear are now based wholly in Sofia and the partnership remains intact … A second version was released in 1998 called Ability Office 98. The framework was changed from Borland’s Object Windows Library to Microsoft Foundation Class Library and the database was re-written to use the Microsoft Jet Database Engine … Ability Office is C++, 32-bit and uses the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 compiler. In 2004, Ability Plus Software entered into a long term marketing and sales agreement with Ability Software International, part of the Formjet PLC Group. Ability Plus Software now manages the software development and Ability Software International handles all sales and marketing worldwide … In October 2006, Tesco launched a range of own-brand software that included Tesco Complete Office, a Tesco branded version of Ability Office. Corel (Home) Office, Corel Home Suite are based on Ability Office 5 …” — Thanks for perspective, Wikipedia folks.
Follow all that?
Ability Office is yet another Microsoft Office clone that even WordPerfect’s current owner / developer bought into a bit, but it’s a disparate group of groups of separate programmers and separate marketers, who’s goal, I think, is “value” in being cheaper than Microsoft Office for a claim of many similar features, who’s offering of v7 here at SOS I don’t think we can even buy, considering that it’s been replaced by v8, $40 … or $45 with database and, get this, Adobe Photoshop compatible photo and graphics editor.
We’ve come this far in not discussing Ability Office without any mention of a $45 Adobe Photoshop compatible photo and graphics editor in Ability Office Professional!!!
“… A feature-rich photo and image editor that will instantly feel familiar, both in interface and functionality, to users of Adobe Photoshop. Its fundamental components include paint tools, colour palettes, brushes, selections, special effects filters and layers, delivering you the ability to create the exact graphical effects and edits required. Compatible with both Adobe Photoshop psd and all other mainstream graphics file formats …”
THAT’S news.
THAT should have been the offering here, because THAT differentiates Ability from all other Microsoft Office clones.
And considering that adding the database and photoshop-clone are only $5 more than the office suite, then they have a market value of ~$2.50 each, and that, also is news.
A $2.50-value lifetime license to an Adobe-Photoshop-clone.
Wow.
Whodathunkit?
Does the Ability marketing department know about this?
Do I have to do all the work for them?!?
;-)
.