Software Publishing Corp has its first product ready for for the Windows 3.0 market: a word processing package Professional Write Plus. Software Publishing was wrongfooted by Microsoft, since being already committed to OS/2, it had to sprint into the Windows market at the last minute by licensing technology from Samna Corp (CI No 1,428). Professional Write Plus is built around the Samna engine, however, as Software Publishing’s director of marketing, Chris Randles, points out it is not the same product as Samna’s word processing package Ami. The differences start from the assumption that the Write Plus user does not have a large and powerful system and wants a fast, comprehensive but not difficult system. Consequently, the product was designed to address productivity rather than feature sets. Key features of the product include transparent access to electronic mail including Profs and All-in-1, as well as integration with Harvard Graphics. It reads 36 different file formats including 17 word processing file formats, costs UKP250 and will ship in April. Randles says his company is targeting a similar kind of user as its Harvard Graphics user base with Write Plus – that is the business user within medium to small companies who might well want to print documents with graphics in them. Randles says that the fact that Lotus now owns Samna in no way jeopardises the Windows 3.0 product because Software Publishing took the source code from Samna and worked on it to develop a separate product and is now completely independent of the agreement. Nevertheless, when Lotus was proceeding with due diligence prior to acquiring Samna, it reached an agreement with Software Publishing to honour existing contracts. For this reason Randles says it surprised him that Lotus spent $65m on Samna to give the product away. Using this Windows technology Software Publishing intends to address the corporate market with a family of graphical products for the desktop. Aside from this the technology will be used for the InfoAlliance products that integrate data on a network, which will run a Windows client with the server on OS/2, or the product may go on to other servers in the future. The InfoAlliance products are also being developed to address more databases as an open programming interface will soon be ready for third parties to develop drivers for them.
