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Gateway To Use Corel Over MS For Office Suite
djellusion writes "Dealing yet another blow to Microsoft, Gateway has announced that it will be using Corels Wordperfect office suite instead of Microsoft Office. I can only see this as a good thing because friendly competition creates drive for better(less clippy) products. Can I order my system with no office suite please?"
The WordPerfect suite is installed on the laptop I'm using right now. It's somewhat less useful than Office (in a "my co-workers don't have it installed" kind of way), but the flip side of that coin is that it is substantially less facehugging, although it has its own annoyances (it puts about 63,000 little icons in the system tray. yuck.)
So far my favorite part of it is the calendar applet, which is smart, unobtrusive, and useful.
1 model of GW machines gets Corel over MS Office. These are the low end machines. Hell I don't blame them, it keeps costs down.
This is like Dell offering Linux on on their high end workstations...
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
I've been impressed with OpenOffice (esp. given some of the vitriolic criticism I've heard, I guess none of it applies to what I use it for), and I wonder if you have used that, can compare with the recent Corel suite. I've seen a few screenshots, but the last time I actually *used* WP was when they had a Linux version, which I thought was a neat concept but I never really got into WP, found it rather clunky.
:)
And since a lot of other people are probably asking "Why not OpenOffice?!" I wonder if you've used both and can answer that
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Which is always nice.
Back when I worked for Gateway they began shipping StarOffice with all their low-end boxes and laptops- the consumer models.
Went through with a training session on it (dull) and we were officially supporting boxes with Sun's StarOffice!
For about a week.
Looks like MS got wind of it and made some phone calls because in no time flat all those models shipping with StarOffice was re-imaged with a load using Microsoft Works (an oxymoron if I ever heard one).
I don't expect this to last any time at all. Once MS gets wind of it, phone calls will be made and things will quietly go back to the status quo.
In better news, I heard a while back Gateway finally got rid of Vantive. Yippie!
At least they have Open Office to fall back on. It's pretty intuitive software, especially if you know Word.
I wish I had that option. I'll be one happy man when Open Office can preform all the functions Word can AND the formatting, etc. is fully compatible with all versions of Word. Until then I'll be forced to use Word XP for all the nice little features it has...well, that and the hundreds of documents I edit every week are all in Word and ALL use the advanced formatting / markup features.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Microsoft hates a fair and competetive environment, especially with it's most intensive cash cow, Office (now that DOS is dead). Of course there is still the Windows Tax. Open Standards are against everything Microsoft believes in. It's Developers, Developers, Developers are encouraged to embrace and extend every known component that users find useful.
While I find it very appealing that Gateway and several other PC manufacturers are looking to cheaper alternatives for their low-end PC's, this probably won't make a dent for a long time to come.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. -Samuel Johns
While, don't get me wrong, this is true in the general case, it may not necessarily be true in the absolute case. Let's say that operating systems was a truly "competitive" market with 1000 really world class, interoperable operating systems out there. Each producer, lacking the ability to compete on features (because each would be good enough per users' needs), would compete on price. No producer could get large enough to invest significant amounts in R&D. Overall product quality declines.
So yes, it is nice to see somebody lighting a fire under MS's butt and that's exactly what Corel, with an objectively inferior product will do--it will force MS to innovate and perhaps complete a little more on price. But don't confuse that with the general notion that competition is always good, especially in software, which many people would say has tendencies towards natural (and in practice sometimes not so natural) monopolies.
Come on - where else can you get a computer that MOOOOOS at you when you turn it on. How cool is that!
Actually that was a good question - and yes you can order it with no office suite. BUT it doesn't cost any less. A better question is why can't I order it without an OS.
So Gateway will sell 10 billion machines or so without MS office on them - Bill is still getting his $99 per machine for the OS...
Hey Gateway - BIG DEAL - mooooooo.
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
Even though this is not OpenOffice.org or anything, it is still good news.
Consider that if they hold out on this, and people really want to use MS Office, that they will have to pay the full price for MS Office. When you start seeing a couple hundred clams being dropped for just an office suite maybe folks will come to their senses.
Right now my work is based on MS Office and a number of other MS tools. When I mention the idea of looking into OpenOffice.org they say we get MS Office for free. Which isn't true. We just buy it in bulk (pay an obsene price to have as many licenses of MS Office/W2k/...). It hides the cost. So companies never see the cost of MS Office.
However, the end user will start seeing the price if they buy machines with Corel Office, which does the trick. But if they want to do MS Office thing, then they truely see the price at home.
I like this idea. The whole concept of pricing themselves out of the market.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Pardon me, but have we all forgotten whose team Corel is batting for?
Yes, Dell did the same. You can save $100 on a low end machine by getting Corel Office instead of MSOffice. However, the higher end units are bundled (can I still use that word?) with MSOffice.
The interesting part? Open Office would be more $$$. Why? Because if you select the 'no office suite' option the machine is $50 more than if you take the 'Corel suite'.
Mmmm....
Imagine for a moment a world without hypothetical situations...
I work a help desk for a consulting firm which uses Wordperfect 8 and 9 for many projects(due to client needs). I hate it, and I hate dealing with it. It has many problems including formatting issues, compatibility with other office suites (Office, Lotus, ect.) and applications, printer driver issues and is really slow on fairly speedy desktops. I know MS Office has it's problems as well, but at least you only need to know one set of problems if we all use the same suite.
:(.
P.S. I know about open source solutions, but I don't make those kind of decisions
People who have witty things here blow.
What lack of features? The only features WP lacks is its vulnerabilty to Word macro viruses. WP 10 can publish to PDF and has an integrated XML publisher. I have to use Word at work but I always use WordPerfect at home and on my laptop. Quatro Pro is no slouch either. It can handle worksheets with a million rows, has more functions than Excel and has the best charting on the market.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
"I can only see this as a good thing because friendly competition creates drive for better(less clippy) products."
I've used OpenOffice, Corel, MS Office, Lotus, and a few lesser knowns, and MS Office is by far the best app. Sure the price is a little steep but if you rely on these office applications (i.e. you don't use programming apps all day) to run your business then the functionality MS Office provides is unmatched.
I don't see this as being a good thing. We all hate to say/hear it, but M$ Office is easier, more 'logical' and much more stable than any version of Wordperfect suite (after 5.1/Dos of course). Even though it's Wordperfect that started out in the ice age, and was cloned in Word later on, it has become superbloated and superceded. Quattro Pro ? Where'd my functions go ? Corel Presentations, as a graphics engine, sucks ass and is probably the reason why everything else crashes. As a presentation (slideshow) designer, it feels like a windows _port_ of Harvard Graphics 3.0. Eeeyuck.
Really, my money is with M$ Office, and my heart is with StarOffice. Corel used to have a solid draw suite, but even that's gone to tatters as I've done the unthinkable and switched over to Adobe Illustrator.
They suck, their support sucks, and they're always trying to give away their apps for OEMs to try and gain market share, because very few people would actually pay for this second-rate fluff.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I'm not a karma whore with ready-made "Insightful +1" link-laden posts sitting around, but I'd like to offer an unfounded observation.
Is it just me, or have we been seeing a lot of these types of announcements lately? There was this whole "Lindows" thing at Wal-Mart. Gateway moving to Corel. Didn't Dell (or Compaq or somebody) do the same thing a few months ago? And just before that (weeks?), didn't another of the big boys move to Open Office? I know the answer to those questions is "Google", but I'm no search string guru (Another topic is that I can type in what I think is intuitive for Google, and get nothing but junk, but fellow /.ers can find what they want by hitting the "I feel lucky" button).
In the beginning, the PC world was filled with choice. There was Dos, DrDos and a few clones like that, and they shipped with new computers. Then, there were multi-tasking shells (Quemm? Windows, Norton system commander?), and they shipped with new machines. Word, Word Perfect, Word Star, etc. shipped with new machines, too. Was it Windows 95 that ended the diversity? Or had Office been the de facto before that?
I'm wondering if perhaps the Justice Department thing may end up bringing some diversity back to a previously-diverse world. Not that I think the ruling will be anything to speak of, but rather a warning shot that lets the independant vendors go with other products without (much) fear of retribution. Or is this just noise in the grand scheme of things, and ammunition for M$ to scream, "Look, they chose to go with other vendors, then came back to us for superior products!"?
Such good news, in abundance, doesn't seem to be helping Corel's stock price much. Is the market so pessimistic on any news now?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Open markets are self-correcting. Over time, there can't be too many competitors because new entrants will percieve a lack of opportunity, and invest elsewhere. Existing players will consolidate. Look at the early car business. There were over 200 car makers in the US at one point. The small ones could not command the resources needed to build big assembly lines, they could not compete. They were eaten by the bigger companies.
So you would not get 1000 world class interoperable OS products unless the market could support that many. There is no reason at all why the OS market should tend towards a natural monopoly. In an open market, natural monopolies usually exist only where duplicated infrastructure is inefficient. Like your local power company. It is very doubtful that another power company could come along, string new power lines and still compete effectively with the existing utility. Again, in most open markets, natural monopolies are allowed, but regulated to some degree.
Microsoft is not a natural monopoly. There is no reason at all one company should have a 90% share of the OS market. Indeed, MS has been convicted of using illegal means to protect that monopoly. If they had anything close to a natural monopoly, they would not have felt the need to employ those means.
Economics also posits that unnatural monopolies eventually fall apart. The monopolist eventually puts more resouces into protecting the monopoly than the monopoly is worth. If no competition exists, subsitution begins to happen as people find more efficient ways to accomplish the same tasks. In this case, PDAs are a good example. Between subsitution and inefficient protection, the monopolist's power begins to slip away.
One of the biggest reasons I use WordPerfect over Word is the Reveal Codes feature. I have to use Word at work and it drives me crazy. It puts in formating the way its thinks it should be done, not the way I want it. In WP if something is not right, I can select reveal codes and see exactly what the problem is. Nothing is hidden. I know Word can reveal some of its formating but not everything like WP. When I want to get my work done in a reasonable amount of time I use WordPerfect.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
"Gateway is going to use Corel over MS Office in their day to day office work."?
I think it would be interesting to see large companies like Dell, Gateway, etc switch to non-MS software (Open Office, Corel, etc) for their internal operations.
But then, I've had similar problems when opening documents in Word, just a different version or different print driver to the original authors. The problem is that Word is an awful file format.
Internally, IBM recently signed a corporate license with MS for the use of the office 2000 suite internally. Why did they do this when they own the own the Smart Suite tools? Well the Lotus tools suck, I personally dislike them a lot. I don't know the high level details of the move, but maybe the top brass realized that the tools they provided suck too. Or maybe IBM is just buying into the MS crap. I dunno. Just thought you guys might wanna know what Big Blue seems to think of their own tools. I wonder if they just decided this was cheaper than actually paying for development of the Smart Suite tools to make them worth using. Heh got to love the economics of it :P
"Boys have a Penis, Girls have a Vagina", kids say the darndest things!
As much as I like my job at Apple, brother do I hate Vantive. It is contrary to everything that Apple stands for, seriously impedes my workflow rather than helps it, and is just plain hard to use, buggy, and slow. I hope I meet a Vantive programmer in a dark alley some day, I'll teach him something about undimissable pop-ups and how to connect to a printer API.
How someone was actually paid money to develop it is way beyond me--I envisage the conference room where the deployment demonstration took place while I'm waiting for my page to refresh.
I sure wish Apple gets a serious case of whatever Gateway caught that made them move from Vantive.
--
$tar -xvf
Gateway started out of my hometown, Sioux City, Iowa, so we hear a lot more about the business than most people. As I understand it, a while ago, Mr. Waitt, the chairman (and founder) of Gateway stepped down. Shortly after, the new chairman started making poor decisions and the stock started plummeting. So Mr. Waitt stepped back in last year and has been making lots of changes. AFAIK, it was the first major manufacturer to have their commercials sell directly to the rip-and-burn cd crowd.
So I'm not surprised at all that this is one of the first big manufacturers to sell non-Microsoft Office suites. (Don't bother flaming me with all the companies that did this before Gateway.)
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
I can get the latest version of Corel's WordPerfect Office suite from several local vendors for $20.00 if I buy a piece of qualifying hardware (A floppy drive - $11.00). If any average customer can buy Corel's suite for that, I would imagine Gateway is paying less.
With MS Office costing so much, I wonder why more people and companies don't switch over to WordPerfect Office? I think that Excel is a little better than Quatro Pro, but with the exception of the email program (which absolutely sucks) the rest of programs that make up the WordPerfect Office suite are at least as good if not better than their Microsoft counterparts.
Since word processing is the most used application of any suite, and since WordPerfect is far better and cheaper than Word, it only makes sense.
Mooooo.