2002's Top 10 A Three-Way Tie for Third Place Eric Grevstad
7. ScanSoft Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6: We've seen upgrades with more new features, but we've rarely been as pleased to give a "welcome back" award as to this pace-setting speech-recognition program, which ScanSoft rescued from the corporate and legal train wreck of Lernout & Hauspie.
We can't swallow the $700 price of NaturallySpeaking 6 Professional Solutions, even if it does support Outlook, PowerPoint, and macro recording. But both the $100 Standard and $200 Preferred versions (the latter adds Excel, text-to-speech, and transcribe-from-handheld-recorder functions) are solid performers -- on today's powerful hardware, remarkably close to real, desktop-secretary PC dictation.
6. Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0: For studio professionals, there's still no substitute for Adobe's $609 Photoshop 7.0. But civilians with digital cameras can get a surprisingly high percentage of the legend's power -- plus a friendlier, easy-access-to-touch-up-tasks interface -- for $99, in a deal good enough to finally unseat Jasc Software's classic Paint Shop Pro as our favorite everyday image editor.
5. Norton Internet Security 2003: The standalone version of Symantec's Norton AntiVirus falls off the recommended list because its McAfee and Trend Micro (PC-cillin) competitors now include firewalls. That's because Symantec hopes you'll buy this $70 bundle, which combines exemplary virus and firewall protection with pretty good banner-ad and pop-up blocking and a first-line-of-defense filter against e-mail spam.
4. Visual Communicator Plus: As reviewer John P. Mello Jr. said, this $150 package is a clever alternative to your ten millionth PowerPoint presentation -- it makes it easy to create local-news-style video shows or narrated marketing or training clips with professional-looking titles and transition effects and "green screen" backgrounds. When your competitor's pitch is the same old slide show, you can open the client's eyes with an infomercial.
3. Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, Corel Grafigo, and FranklinCovey TabletPlanner: On principle, we're not wild about software that requires the purchase of a whole new hardware platform. But we're impressed enough by the new crop of Tablet PCs to honor Microsoft's new clipboard operating system and two of the first wave of applications for it -- Corel's free tidied-up-freehand-drawing package and FranklinCovey's nicely intuitive $199 port of its popular paper planner. By reimagining what can be done with pen input (as opposed to handwriting recognition), they open new vistas that might genuinely change the way people use computers.
2. Macromedia Contribute: This brand-new site-management tool ($99) makes a radically simple distinction: Let skilled Webmasters use complex creation and authoring packages to set up a site, but then free those pros for other work by giving even the least HTML- and FTP-savvy employees an effortless, idiot-proof way to maintain, update, or add content to the site or company intranet. If easy-to-publish Weblogs were 2002's big thing for civilian diaries, Contribute could be 2003's top tool for "real" business sites. Stay tuned for a full review.
1. OpenOffice.org 1.0.1: When we reviewed this open-source suite in May, we predicted it would be the product of the year. We were right: OpenOffice.org is a completely free quartet -- Word, Excel, and PowerPoint workalikes plus a drawing program -- with a full and rich array of features; unparalleled (though not perfect) compatibility with yesterday's proprietary Microsoft Office file formats; rapidly building momentum for tomorrow's interchangeable XML formats; and seamless deployment across both Windows and Linux.
No, it's not without flaws and rough edges, and no, it's not going to make Office's 95-percent market share suddenly blow away like a dandelion. But it's good enough to make it tough to justify paying Microsoft's prices, or at least give Microsoft incentive to make next year's Office 11 something special instead of another screen-panes-and-pop-up-windows upgrade. You don't have to use OpenOffice.org to appreciate its impact; you just have to use a PC.
