Netbooks with Intel Atom like CPUs will trigger the next Internet revolution: not a ubiquitous web, but more in a sense of offering a good compromise between computing power, mobility and the ability to do things like email, chat, office functionality and what else you tend to do with your private PC. But netbooks will add a new class of computer/software solution packages for businesses as well: for the millions of employees world-wide that don’t need the full functionality of an expensive desktop system with an equally expensive Microsoft Office product. First signs of the revolution could be detected when Google signed a global partnership with CapGemini for the Google Apps Premier Edition – a service which CapGemini calls “Workplace Services”. It’s amazing to see what Google managed to do within the browser with their Google Apps offering, but I personally like the performance of desktop applications and offline availability for my office solution.
Then again, running Microsoft Office on a Netbook is not fun, loading takes long, everything feels a bit sluggish – not a good user experience. And what about the OS questions: why not use a slim Linux OS instead of the bloated Microsoft Windows OS? There a lots of powerful and safe Linux system in the market, and companies like Ubuntu offer a great user experience with Linux distributions optimized for Netbooks, like Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix. If you settle for Linux system and need good Microsoft Office support for your documents, OpenOffice doesn’t offer the Microsoft Office compatiblity you need in an workplace environment
In that case take a look at the powerful Thinkfree Office solution: Thinkfree – the Korean office software company – has been entering the Netbook market with a powerful offering in late 2008: the Thinkfree Netbook Edition! A Microsoft Office like solution which is Java based an runs on Windows, Linux and OS X! Here’s a Youtube video explaining with an introduction of the product:
Thinkfree Office Netbook Edition demo
Thinkfree is owned by Haansoft, one of the largest Korean software companies, offering products like Hangul (HWP, the leading Korean text processing software), Asianux Linux and of course Thinkfree Office. Since late 2008 Fujitsu offers netbooks bundled with the Thinkfree office solution for the Asian market, like the brand new Fujitsu M2010 Netbook:
The Fujitsu 2010 Netbook bundled with Thinkfree Office Netbook Edition
I’ve tested Thinkfree Office in 2007 and in the last months, and have the feeling that the product has much better compatibility with Microsoft Office than OpenOffice, offering features like online/offline support, workspace synchronization. The performance is great, and we have been testing the system on our bluuBOXX nettop system with Ubuntu 8.04, giving us a much better performance than OpenOffice. Thinkfree certainly is an extremely interesting product for the netbook/nettop solution range, especially in combination with Linux as an OS.
