Users may like to discover some familiar interface conventions in a new product, but what counts more--as the lukewarm sales history of
VP-Planner suggests--is whether buyers believe a new product offers dramatic advances in power and performance.
Others require a spreadsheet template such as Lotus 1-2-3,
VP-Planner,
VP-Planner Plus, Twin, Symphony,or Quattro.
VP-Planner Plus has superior wordprocessing capabilities, but its main distinction is its database functions.
The other was against Paperback Software, developer of
VP-Planner, also competitive with 1-2-3.
We then tested the educational versions of two other programs, The Twin (Mosaic Software, Inc., Cambridge, Mass.; the educational version is distributed by Prentice-Hall) and
VP-Planner (Paperback Software International, Berkeley, Calif.), to see how they would handle the multiscreen, non-stop simulation.