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HP Drops Microsoft Word in Favor of WordPerfect
nexex points to this Financial Times article, which says that HP has dropped Microsoft Word from the software lineup in the personal computers it sells to customers. From the article: "The move follows a decision last week by Dell Computer, the number two PC maker, to replace Microsoft software. Both companies said they would offer WordPerfect productivity software from Corel of Canada instead of Microsoft's Works, a scaled-down version of its top-selling Office software." Nexex writes:"I think it should be noted, MS Works does include the full version of Word."
buy are overpriced non-OS software product... or buy the scaled down version and get the full version free.
HP, why not just go OpenOffice? Word Perfect has just as many bugs, and you'd save yourself (ultimately your consumers) a lot more money.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I am surprised they aren't going for something more compatible with Microsoft Office like Star Office. People are used to using Office products as the 'standard', so why not give them an alternative that will operate approximately the same. Putting Word Perfect on them will just confuse the people who are used to Word, and they will be upset when their Word at work will not read what they did at home. They won't understand enough to install the converters, and even those don't work 100%. I realize that SO and Open Office aren't perfect either, but I am not sure this is the best way to go Microsoft-free for the average consumer.
HP also just became the first big VAR to base "business" PCs around AMD's processors. HP is busy kicking sand in the faces of the big boys. Then again with Compaq HP isn't no small player itself.
It really is remarkable though: It seems that Microsoft was their own worst enemy, and they've pissed off so many of their large corporate partners that they have very few allies, and absolutely no one trusts them. I doubt that Microsoft is going anywhere for years to come, but these are fascinating twists that would never have been considered but a few years ago.
I still use WP to this day, and have since v5 for DOS. Reveal codes is good!! it makes word processing closer to html editing in notepad. Total control over the document layout. I can not stand Word at all with its lack of this hugely important editing feature. Go HP!!!
Morphing Software
People are used to using Office products as the 'standard', so why not give them an alternative that will operate approximately the same.
Word is MS's crown jewel, but Word got where it is today buy stealing users from WP.
Wordperfect is *still* used in the Legal Industry far more than MS office. When I worked at the NYS DEC a few years ago, I didn't have word on my shiney Dell PC--I had wordperfect, and so did everyone else in all of EnCon.
Though it's a mind-boggling hack, Wordperfect and MS Word can and do talk to each other. In fact, having the two of them duke it out might be just the thing that OO needs to get some real work done on it, and get to be a usable beast...
MS Works does *NOT* always include word. The MS Works suite, full version ($99) includes word. The pre-installed version of works on your friendly OEM Computer MAY or MAY NOT have MS Word.
Back when I worked for Best Buy a year ago, this was a big advantage of buying a sony computer. They included the full works suite. Many (read: HP / Compaq) only included the MS Works Word Processor, MS Works Spreadsheet, etc.
MS Works Word Processor is a very stripped version of MS Word. It has no spell check, no auto format, and is missing many key functions of Word. As far as I could tell, it's existance was only to whet people's tastebuds to get them to buy office, because after using Word, trying to use "MS Works Word Processor" is a joke.
~Will
sig?
I just bought a computer for my son from Dell, and by dropping the option for MS Office Professional, I saved close to $400. Now, that's Dell setting prices, not MS, but it still saves me a bundle. My son (just entering college) seems perfectly happy using OO.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Before people go trashing on WordPerfect, let me point out some things you might not know about it:
And if you say it's not for you, you're right. It definitely fills an important niche that a lot of other apps can't or don't want to.
----- obSig
Ask any secretary that actually TYPES for a living, especially the ones that need to do complex text formatting (e.g., legal secretaries) -- the secretaries that type 90+wpm. They *all* agree, and I mean every single last one, that nothing can *touch* word perfect for speed of text input. The function keys, which have mapped to more or less the same functions since 1985 (...earlier?), allow experienced users to do many things in less than a second that would otherwise take quite a while to do with a mouse. WP was, and is still *keyboard* based -- that means that if you know what you are doing, you can do everything in WP, very quickly, without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. I can't imagine ever having to use that horrible MSword to do anything except under threat of starvation. Of course the very best thing about WP, that I have never seen any other WP do, is that the "control codes" option always lets you see exactly why a document is behaving the way it is on screen: each formatting option is just a simple code between text brackets in a text document. There's never any question of why something looks the way it does in WP. No matter what the function, whether it be bold, or column size, or printer type, or whatever, it is just a simple code between brackets. In contrast, MSWord users are constantly baffled by a program that is trying to "assist" the user, by doing things it wasn't asked to do (and of course, cannot be undone) -- which is generally chalked up as being "just the way the program is,;" or else the users just feel like they are stupid and don't know how to use the program properly.
MSWord exists today only because it was bundled by OEMs (originally as MSWorks, in crippled form... though the full version is still crippled...) It never could have caught on otherwise as no one that actually knew about word processors would have chosen it over WP if they actually had to pay for it.
Oh yea, what platforms does WP work on right now? At least these:
Amiga, every version ever made
Linux, every version ever made
Unix, every version ever made
Windows, every version ever made
Mac, every version ever made
I'm sure there are other versions -- the above ones are just the ones that I have personally used.
Do I know what I'm talking about? Well, I used to be a legal secretary before I started accumulating degrees. I have been tested out, several times, at 100+wpm. I was word processing on a Prime mainframe (using a text editor) before word processors (and PCs) existed.
When making a living depends on how fast you get a document out of the printer -- which word processor you use is extremely important.
The typing ability requirements for a legal secretary are far more stringent than any "normal" secretary. Glance in the want-ads in your local paper and you'll see what I mean. Legal secretaries are, on an almost daily basis, required to pump out GIGANTIC documents, always suddenly, always in a complete crisis situation, and always mere minutes before they must be faxed out. It is the rare law office that does not use WP, and the secretaries in the occasional law office that uses MSWord instead are extremely unhappy about it, bitch continuously, and quit constantly.
As someone who's used OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works, ClarisWorks and WordPerfect, I can say from a writer and printer standpoint, WordPerfect is the best choice.
The ability to have nearly full DTP style justification and control, as well as being a great word processor, grammar-checker and thesaurus, WordPerfect for the price is just the best choice for most people who would use Microsoft Word anyways.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Hahah yeah Microsoft is the only company in the world that tries to lock people in with propreitary formats!! Haha, have another bong hit!
Have you ever considered Gobe? It rocked on BeOS, and now its available on the Windows platform. And if you don't want to trust their marketing, then here's a review from Ars Technica. And if you still want to complain, go use vi or emacs or even notepad.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
word processor documents that they can't print in our labs. Headaches, ahoy.
Heck, at NCSU, we had that problem with Word documents, too. My favorite is when Word writes out a file that it can't read back in. I run those through OpenOffice and save them as RTF.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Thanks for playing.
Yes, I'm sure if you know your way around the 15 function keys, and understand how to read the control codes then WP is lovely to use.
I don't... I find Word easy enough to use, they keep adding features that get around my problems (e.g. format painter), and after a while, you come to understand why it's doing what it's doing... you empathise. Well, some of the time anyway.
I guess my point is that Word is easy and friendly if you're NOT a 90wpm legal sec, but someone who does a different job but still needs to knock out the occasional half-decent document.
Oh, and you can undo anything that word helpfully (bless it) tries to do for you. Ctrl-Z undoes first word's attempts at helpfulness, and then whatever you last did.
Watch me disappear beneath the waves of ACs now for having actually stood up for microsoft...
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
Try asking your mom/grandmother if they've heard of StarOffice or WordPerfect. That is your answer.
WordPerfect Office is freaking $5 to OEM's. That is close enough to free (hell they may be getting it for free, that wouldn't hurt Corel either since no one is buying it anyway).
It's all about maximizing revenue. Oh and BTW the Word in works is stripped down (less templates, clipart, etc) and there is no comparing excel, access, outlook and powerpoint (oh yeah and publisher) to MS works (oxymoron if i've ever seen one) tools. And since when does a company care about saving their customers money? they only care about saving themselves money.
The company I work for chose WordPerfect back in 1995. We went to Word for a while in 1998 but upgraded back to WordPerfect when MS got into DOJ trouble again (we figured that if MS was on our payroll to develop software and they broke the law, we'd have fired them so why would we go buy their software now?). It turned out that most of the time, WordPerfect can read Word without too much difficulty. Better yet, it can save to nearly any version of Word.
Sadly for Microsoft, Word is not nearly as adept. It can barely convert to WordPerfect 5.1. Because of this (and nearly 40,000 WordPerfect documents on our networks), using MS Word in our organization would be reckless.
Finally, in the last three years, we've acquired 3 other companies. I converted all of them to WordPerfect Office 2000 (upgrading all locations to WordPerfect Office 2002 this week). Some users were so MS Word brainwashed that they panicked...and continue to panic even today. They believe that if it's not MS, it's not good. They also can't understand why we don't use AOL to get online! Needless to say, I don't worry too much about them. The rest of the organization wants to create word processing documents...quickly, reliably and professionally. WordPerfect does exactly that. Yes...you can share files and yes, it is more advanced than Word when it comes to complete control over formatting.
With all this going for it, why wouldn't HP and Dell offer this software? And the more people who go home with it, the better off we all are. We've never regretted our decision and we've never been hurt by it. Kudos to these industry leaders for taking the hard, but high road.
Although certain aspects of the DOJ case against MS are important, for the most part I always asserted that the market would correct itself. Apple is gaining ground thanks to the fact that they are finally making a great OS, and now MS is losing to big OEM's on their office products. As long as the competition doesn't suck, MS will not be a monopoly.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
I feel the need to clarify on the following statement:
"The legal profession still relies on it - your lawyer uses WordPerfect and most legal forms are available in that format."
This is absolutely not true.
Now, you may definitely argue that a larger proportion of the legal community relies on WordPerfect than does the general office community. However, the legal profession itself does not rely on WordPerfect.
My father is a lawyer. I set up his law firm's computers. I've known many other lawyers and set up their law firm's networks. What you said was true 3-5 years ago, but most of them have now switched to Word.
And as for legal forms being in WordPerfect format, with the hundreds of legal forms I have had to use, they have been in one of three formats:
a) Hard Copy (as in, a piece of paper that you have to use a typewriter to type on)
or, more often,
b) PDF
or
c) a proprietary format that has to be used with a $5,000-$50,000 piece of crappy software.
ALL of the government forms that a law firm needs are in PDF. Most of the other things that lawyers used to get in hard copy (for instance, the legal books that you see in their offices) are now available for a subscription fee via sites like FindLaw.com. About 50% of the forms that come through a lawyer's office are hard copy, 40% are PDF, and 10% are proprietary, and honestly, I haven't seen a WordPerfect law document in years. Most of the hard copy ones are saved directly to either Microsoft Word or PDF via Acrobat, so the number of hard copy forms will continue to decrease.
From reading your post, it sounds like you haven't encountered WordPerfect in a couple of years, either, and are basing your opinions on what you saw a few years ago. The Internet is becoming quite integral to any lawyer these days, and as such, the number of non-Word proprietary formats for documents is decreasing rapidly (especially since there was a huge government initiative to convert everything to PDF.) Thus, your post was accurate as of a few years ago, but is no longer the case.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Excel is the killer app and I've still NEVER seen a decent substitute for a complex multi-sheeted calculation rich spread sheet. I have OO, and Star Office loaded as well but neither does the job. As for a word pro I could use notepad, or heck even VI when you get right down to it. Props to them for exploring alternatives, WP suite 7.0 was quite nice but why make life harder and sacrifice that 'synergy' that Word and Excel have by replacing just one half the tool-set. Given my druthers I'd use OO and screw the Visio/Excel issues but work requires that I use such documents.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I'm wondering what Corel is charging OEM's for WordPerfect Office nowadays? Considering that they are hard up for customers at the moment, I'll bet that they gave HP a sweet deal in order to get some volume sales.
Hell, for all we know, Corel might be offering WordPerfect Office for LESS that Microsoft is charging for Works! Considering the the basic version of Works doesn't come with any of the full-featured addons like Word or Microsoft Money, this might be a good deal for both HP and consumers alike.
I happily use WordPerfect on Windows every day, and I have my choice of apps.
/. users should appreciate it.
e rfect/
The reason: "Reveal codes", which shows you the source of the document -- the text with all the formatting codes, with all the benefits you can imagine: You can see exactly which codes are doing what and where, insert and edit codes precisely, search for codes, double-click on one to change it, etc.
I always keep it open in a small window at the bottom, so I simultaneously get the source and the WYSIWYG. I'm not sure it appeals to the typical end user, but
Also, it should be a very good low-end XML editor: It natively uses formatting tags [b]like this[/b] (open Reveal Codes and see), it's supported SGML (an HTML/XML precursor and (superset?)) for over a decade and XML for a couple years. I've never had to try, but these guys think so (or try searching Google for much more info):
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/05/31/wordp
Eww. How about RTF? It's an MS standard, but it's a good one. I've never gone wrong with RTF moving between my NeXT, my Mac, and PCs. It supports enough formatting to be worth it, but not so many awful features that it's all crufty and hard to implement.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Give me a break, WordPerfect is still more functional as a word processor. The interface is better and the placment for items in the menus and the toolbars are more functional.
_ _
You don't have to know any function keys or know how to read the reveal codes. Every tester in the software development labs I met prefer the interface of the WordPerfect app itself. Many still like Excel over Quatro Pro and would be lost without NT so they are not exactly anti-Redmond. They test lots of Office apps for creating documents in their testing.
I used WordPerfect8 in Linux and on Windows for awhile and liked it a lot. Try out a recent version and you may be surprised. If you have the chance, get a copy and use for a week when you have a few things to type up.
_______________________________________________
ACK
if you want more control of your document and you like reveal codes then latex is for you. really though to make something bold it's just:
\bold{something in bold}.
there might be a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it. the quality of the document is much higher than anything i've seen a word processor put out. it takes eps for figures which just rocks when printed.
latex is free and comes with most linux distros. there's even a version for windows, search for miktex on google, but i've never used it.
it's a bunch of macros to interface with tex, written by that uberpimp donal knuth.
-- john
Do they still include Notepad? Because you know that's the only reason I buy Windows PCs. Everyone used to have Notepad but then they switched to the Boston stapler, and they were married, and if they take my Notepad away again I'll... I'll... OK...
When I started college in 91 (not all that ancient times really) our computer facility used an IBM mainframe, VM/CMS. It was quite a shock for some folks who had never seen a computer before to be stuck on IBM 3270 style terminals, some were real orange screen 3278s, others were ugly greenscreen Esprits with bad 3278 emulation. Many that never worked anyway. "Where do I put my floppy?" HA! you get your A disk on the mainframe, all 1Meg of it, LESS than a floppy. There were PCs, PS/2 386s. (Can you tell our comp guys was an IBM guy? rumor is we got kickbacks from them) At first the PCs only had software that wasn't available on the Mainframe, math apps and such.
;)
But the main word processor was WordPerfect 4.2 for the mainframe. And this is on the block oriented 3270 terminal. You had to get used to the clunky interface and how the cursor moved funky because of the 3270isms. It could do fonts and bold, italic yes, but on printout only. Remember these are character based terminals, "print preview" essentially just showed you margins, maybe some bold, and underline. Font size chagnes? Right. Change your font? Well, print it and hope for the best. Turnaround was attrocious; big jobs (anyting over 20 pages) jobs were automatically routed to one of the "big" printers, where they printed and the operators collected them and put them in bins. So you had to wait for the bin guy to vome around every hour or so to get your work. Saving your files, also fun!!! At that time VM/CMS didn't allow hierarchical filesystems, so all your files were in the same namespace, limited to 8.3 filenames. Good luck remembering what file is what 3 years from now. If you need more than 1.2Mb storage (yeah, nobody does) you can store it offline to tapes... then if you need it, you have to request it to be restored. That might take a day.
Slowly we changed from that. The PS/2s became more plentiful. You could actually print from them once in a while; at first you had to print to a postscript file, then ftp it to the mainframe, then print, but then we got real print servers. Pretty soon we became a real comp lab, with real apps where you could save somethng to a floppy. Now the mainframe is mothballed. Never updated it for y2k. Odd, cause Niketown uses VM/CMS, I should work there.
PCs for Everyone lists the following prices (all OEM, which requires a hardware purchase):
- WP Office 2002 Standard: $19
- Works 2002 (incl. Word): $89
- Office XP Small Business: $219
- Office XP Pro: $369
I have no idea what HP and Dell pay, but this is one data point.When I finally "upgraded" the OS from Win95 to WinME (I know I know but I was told that it was basically Win98 3rd edition... anyhow) WordPerfect would not function.
Uninstall, reinstall.
Nothing.
One call to tech support later I had a solution given to me: Just pay $100 to upgrade to WordPerfect2000. This did not quite fit my budget at the time (and still doesn't) given the fact that the only added functionality I needed was the ability to work under the operating system I had bought to fix the Microsoft glitch of not recognizing AMD processors in Win95 that were faster than 300MHz.
Needless to say I have been glad to see StarOffice evolve and ecstatic to see OpenOffice mature. If I already bought your software, please don't make me suffer just because time has moved on...
It was fine software but I am not going back. They had their chance and blew it.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
Can a 2GHz PC with only 128MB RAM really compare with a 600MHz PC with 1GB RAM?
Of course not. My rule of thumb is to knock off enough MHz from the CPU you think would be cool to have, to cover the cost of doubling (or more) the amount of RAM. For common tasks, this makes a huge difference in performance. That's the advice I give to everybody who makes the mistake of asking me, and then they look at me funny.
I wonder if this is some screwy cost-saving measure?
Gee, I have no idea! But I have a gut feeling that it is.
Your point is valid - I forgot about the stupid amounts of RAM manufacturers ship their low-cost machines with.
Dell and HP save money buy puting Corel on. But when was the last time someone other than a lawyer used Word Perfect, and Quattro oh yuck. So when they need to learn Word and Excel because they need to know them to get a job in the real world they will have to by MS Office.
So I suffered. Man, did I suffer. I cursed Word up and down as I spent 45 minutes trying to create a two-column, wrap-around index. Word tried to be "helpful" by automagically turning my page numbering into an ordered list. Yay! It did this about 97 times, even after I thought I'd cleared all the formatting. Clear it, reformat it, hit a carriage return or a backspace, or some other innocuous key, and BAM! there goes Word, helping you out, whether you want it or not.
I pined for WordPerfect. Oh, sure, you can reveal formatting in Word, but it's those non-text areas that jump up and MAUL YOUR ASS in Word. I hate Word with the intensity of a thousand white-hot suns. Word is evil. It is the best example I can find of a crappy product winning out over several really good ones (WordPerfect included). WordPerfect is smooth, it's reveal formatting makes formatting simple and straightforward, rather than making you resort to endless menu selections. it's not a page layout app either, but man would my life have been easier with it.
Oh, that reminds me! Tabs! I can't f*#$Y# stand how Word handles tabs. I mean, Jesus Christ, an app as simple as AppleWorks has more capable and far more intuitive handling of tabs. In Word, you have to actually open up a freakin' menu and delve into it in order to use numeric controls to format something you should just be able to format in the ruler bar, but can't because it's such a pain in the ass!
And another thing...!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Modern word processors are bloated messes. "Creeping featurism" has run rampant. How many of your average users ever learn more than a very small percentage of their word processors features? How many of those features would never have been added if the word processor's company's business model wasn't built on selling their customers an upgrade to a "new, improved" model every couple of years?
Hmm. With cries of `DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run' ringing in my imagination, it's not that hard to figure out what one of the reasons was. It's not as if DR-DOS was welcomed to Windows or anything.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
well when you create a section called ``goatse'' it places a number beside it-say for example 1.0. then the figures are named 1-1, 1-2, etc. say you want to insert a section called ``midget'' infront of ``goatse''. then figure 1-1 becomes 2-1, and 1-2 becomes 2-2, etc. latex renumbers these for you.
if you previously referenced equation 1-1 in the text, latex will also change this to 2-1 automatically.
latex will also change the table of contents, table numbering, references to these sections/tables in the text, etc.
i think this is too cool, and nifty.
-- john
The great irony, of course, is that the standard class files supplied with LaTeX were never intended to be more than examples of what you could do. The people who wrote them viewed them as a decent showcase, but hardly high quality typesetting. The rest of the world, comparing them to what it had already, bowed down and cried "We're not worthy!" :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Um, no it doesn't. Works Suite 2002 does. MS Works 6.0, however, does not. Works Suite 2002 is a new and different program (I think it's designed to replace Office - Small Business Edition). MS Works, which is a fraction of the cost of Works Suite 2002, has always included scaled down word processor and spreadsheet - it's only recently that those two applets have started res. Trust me - I've been using Works since version 2.0 in the DOS days. It never has, and never will, include a full version of Word.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
With that said, I'm glad to see Microsoft take one in the shorts, however small. Hmm, that works on two levels.
I agree with the multitudes who point out that OpenOffice might be a better choice, but then again, maybe they were thinking about liability.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"