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?"

Comments

minireview

[peterb]

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.

comparison to OO.o?

[timothy]

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

Re:comparison to OO.o?

[garcia]

I'm a geek. I think OO sucks.

I have used WP8 for Linux for years. I can't open any of these documents in OO. What good does this LINUX WordProcessor do me when I can't open LINUX documents?

I will stick to Abiword, the footprint is small and it does what I want.

Re:comparison to OO.o?

[ites]

I have used WP8 for Linux for years. I can't open any of these documents in OO. What good does this LINUX WordProcessor do me when I can't open LINUX documents? OOo is not a LINUX word processor. Export your WP8 documents to something resembling an industry standard - RTF or MSOffice - and you'll find that OOo handles them just fine.
As for OOo's functionality, apart from the obvious pain of changing habits, the suite works significantly better than anything else I've used, in the last 20 years.
It crashes perhaps once every week. But it always saves everything first, and I've never lost an hour of work.
It integrates graphics, presentations, and text in a simple and effective way.
It is well organised, I can find the functions I want, and (unlike MS Office), they actually work. Like outline numbering.
It uses compressed XML for its documents, which means they are small, take less disk space, are easier to backup, and faster to send by email.
Its XML file format is easy to understand and produce mechanically for more advanced uses.
It is free.
It runs on both Linux and Windows, very nicely.
I don't have to kill the paper clip.
I can exchange documents with revisions with people using MS Office.
In short, OOo is functionally less rich than MSOffice, but it lacks exactly that functionality I never wanted, and which made the whole package slow and unstable.
After using OOo for a year or so, I'd not switch back.

It's happened before...

[imag0]

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!

"Competition creates better products."

[mumblestheclown]

Irrespective of the Microsoft / Corel issue, I want to comment on the idea that "competition creates better products."

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.

Re:Gateway customization

[Dukebytes]

Sure, if you actually want a Gateway.

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

$135M from Redmond

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon me, but have we all forgotten whose team Corel is batting for?

My hell that is wordperfect......

[shftleft]

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 :(.

Re:WordPerfect

[frank249]

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.

Is this a pattern, or is it just me?

[chrysrobyn]

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!"?

economics 101

[johnos]

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.

Reveal Codes

[frank249]

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.

Re:Oh.. the pressure!

[gorilla]

I then had to spend a long time fixing hte document so it looks right in OO.

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.

Ooh fun, a Vantive bash!

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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.