Apple Still a Ripe Business For ThinkFree

To put this number in perspective, ThinkFree was selling fewer than 1,000 Macintosh-based units a month prior to adding support for OS X. The company has approximately 200,000 total users and sells its software using several hundred resellers.

"To have this kind of sales level with the Apple channel is very exciting," says Jim Sullivan, vice president of sales and marketing at the Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor. "We are naturally a cross-platform vendor since we support Windows, Unix and Mac systems." OS X support was the critical missing piece to enable Apple to whole-heartedly support ThinkFree, Apple has included the software in its online software store and offers other promotions featuring the software.

ThinkFree Office is one of a large number of office-software suites that are available on Unix and Mac platforms. Such suites compete with the likes of Sun's StarOffice, among others. The suite includes three major applications,Write, Calc and Show,that mimic the popular Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications. The suites can read and write documents produced in the Microsoft versions. It also includes a special "cyberdrive" feature similar to other Internet-storage services. "Our cyberdrive also handles free updates to the product [and enables the user to download an unlimited number of copies of the software and 20 MB of online storage," Sullivan says.

Sun has been trying to sell StarOffice on the basis of compatibility with Microsoft's offering, but ThinkFree isn't taking that particular tack. "While we aren't 100 percent perfect" in terms of Microsoft document format fidelity and compatibility, Sullivan says, "we are pretty good and can cover about 60 percent of the features found in Microsoft's current offering."

ThinkFree sells its software for $49.95, roughly a tenth of the retail price of Microsoft Office.

Instead of targeting the whole compatibility and features arena, ThinkFree Office competes with Microsoft Office in a number of niches, large and small. For example, Microsoft has been slow to support a Mac Portuguese version of Office, so ThinkFree did well selling into Brazil.

ThinkFree shows what big benefits can be created just by making small changes in a product engineering plan. In this case, including support for Mac's OS X generated some fairly big sales and marketing wins for the company, and enabled ThinkFree to leverage the Apple channel in new and exciting ways. And while Apple is stuck at roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of total computer sales, ThinkFree would still be taking advantage of several thousand units a month.