WordPerfect Back From the Wilderness

Man With Broom writes "Just when you thought they were riding off into the sunset, they come back into town and start hanging around the mayor's oldest girl... WordPerfect 12 was described today on news.com, with Corel claiming compatibility for the small business user. But can they withstand the juggernaut? And what of OpenOffice?"

Comments

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The full version will sell for $300, and upgrades from a previous version of WordPerfect or a competing product will cost $150.

Why bother when OpenOffice is equally as good and costs nothing? Not to mention it is open source.

Re:Why?

[oldgeezer1954]

There is a cost to switching from wp to openoffice. We've (the company I work for) been a wp user since the early 80's. We have in excess of a million word perfect documents many of which we would need continued access into the forseeable future. We simply can't leave them behind in order to switch ship. While there are ways to do that conversion the cost in mantime alone is fairly prohibitive.
We've been following open office fairly closely and they've come a long way in terms of their wp connector. It's not quite there yet but it's close.
Once we consider it to be a usable state for us then we can look at using OO on a go forward basis for new systems.
It's my understanding that the sun version of wp will do conversions but as wp has been a good product for us there's no incentive for us to try to skimp a few dollars based on the price difference between wp and OO. For us the major incentive with OO will be we can consider switching from windows to linux.

Compete head to head in Windows?

[-tji]

It doesn't seem like there is a huge market available for Windows options.. Even if they come up with some great leap in technology, how long will it take MS to "embrace and extend" it?

They need to go somewhere MS really doesn't want to.. like Linux. Make a cross-platform suite that works in Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. Force MS to legitimize Linux on the desktop, or give the market to you.

Who do they think they are competing against?

[chamilto0516]

The full version will sell for $300, and upgrades from a previous version of WordPerfect or a competing product will cost $150.

Have they been hanging out too close to the glue bins in the packaging department? Let's see, you want to grow your user base. So you have to convice people to leave Microsoft Office and not go with a lower to no cost (I know, there is TCO) solution that supports the same file format. And so you set your price right up there with Microsoft Office. WTF? Do they think they are competing only with Microsoft?

Re:Who do they think they are competing against?

[Vancouverite]

An interesting point, as marketing experts will tell you, is that people involved with purchasing software for the office will generally not buy something that is too inexpensive.

In other words, if WordPerfect 12 was priced at $49/desktop, it would not be purchased, because of the perception that "if it needs to be sold that cheaply, it's probably no good".

Balancing the price to inducement ratio is definitely the problem that a company like Corel has when dealing with marketing software against MS, especially Word. After all, you can get a full copy of Word + extra software for $99 list by buying MS Works (which has, for the last few versions, used Word as its word processing component). How do you compete....

Re:word perfect

[(54)T-Dub]

WP has a better markup than word. For example word aligns text on a line by line basis, so if you want something left aligned on the same line as something right aligned you have to use freakin tabs ~:(

Also WP has the best command in any word process. I believe it's called show commands and it brings up a 2nd pane with all the text with it's markup tags. It's freaking wonderfull for tracking down those pesky stray font tags.

Alas I'm forced to use Word so that I'm compatible with the masses. All those converters are to much hassle for how little I actually use a word processor.

The Linux Bandwagon

[Supp0rtLinux]

Hmmm... ironic that companies like Novell that were on the brink of being nothing adopted Linux as their new strategy to get cash flow positive. And Sun, who many thought were on the way out, are being forced to swallow Linux more and more. Its no secret that Corel jumped into Linux quite some time ago, but perhaps the market is a bit better for them now. Many companies are still shy of StarOffice simply because Sun has been so Linux wishy-washy the last few years. And while OpenOffice is good, it has neither the history of Corel Office, nor the compatibility (at least looking back... Corel Office was much more compatible with Office 2000 than OpenOffice ever was). Perhaps the time is right for Corel Office to once again be what Word Perfect was before MS came to town. And with a cross-platform base, perhaps they can topple some of the MS dominance.
Now if only someone (Corel, OO, Sun, etc) would put together something like Ximian's Evolution, but have it co-exist with an office suite, maybe we'd have a good, robust, cross-platform office suite worth switching too.

The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers

WP in Law Offices

[ashitaka]

Much will be said about the continued use of WordPerfect in law offices where it has been a traditional choice. We still use WP 5.1 for DOS to create our bills but this is dictated by our ancient accounting system which will be gone by year-end. (Thank $DEITY)

However, any law firm sysadmin worth his salt recognized long ago that the current legal document creation paradigm involves cooperative collaboration with clients absolutely none of whom will be using any version of WordPerfect. In addition, the pool of new legal secretaries will all be coming with Word as their background. The look of shock on our new recruit's faces after they've gone through the WP billing section of their training is a sad sight but one that reflects the reality that, for even Wordperfect's most loyal users, the time has come to use what the market requires. Legal documents are no longer created in isolation.

OpenOffice is nice to dream about but the forces that dicate a move to Word for a firm of any size are what is currently keeping OO out.

The most successful law firms in the future will be able to define a new, non-document-based legal information exchange paradigm. We need to get past the days of everything being done in the word processor.

Re:Wordperfect should be made Open Source/FS

[Endive4Ever]

What would be the benefit to the people who own the Wordperfect code base to gain market share at zero dollars per unit sold? 'Socking it to Microsoft' is only a valid business goal when there's renumeration available for the product sold.

I know, I know. Let's hear some preaching about the benefits of giving it all away for free.

Two Words...

[elbarsal]

Reveal codes

MS Word is better than it used to be, but I'll tell you, when it's doing something wonky, I really miss being able to reveal the formatting codes so I could see why the entire previous paragraph was stuck as heading 3.

Formatting is really just markup (like HTML) - why can't Word show us where it starts and ends when we want to see what's wrong?

Re:Why? 'Cause it ain't!

[BiggerIsBetter]

Submit a feature request. This is probably the first anyone outside lawyerdom has heard of this, so tell them what you need and odds are it'll happen. Maybe OO.o 1.2 will be Lawyer Compatible(tm).

Re:word perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, for some reason WP makes it VERY difficult to get service packs. On MSO, you can just use Office Update, or download the whole thing for yourself.

You don't have much experience with office update. For many of the office updates to work, you have to find the original CD that office was installed from to that computer. Did you lose your CD and buy a replacement? Tough. You have to remove & reinstall office.

If you made an administrative install of office on a network share, you can only run the updates from that administrative install. Did you move the network share to another server? Tough. You have to remove & reinstall office.

Not to mention that many office updates refuse to install on a win2k server if you are logged on through terminal services. You have to log on to the console. Or use VNC.

Re:word perfect

[Reziac]

I'd check your configuration ... I run WP8 and CorelDraw v8 on an ancient P233/128mb, and it's plenty nimble there. On the P3-500/768mb, I have WP11 and CorelDraw v11, and it's also slick. I mostly use the PhotoPaint component, and it runs rings around Photoshop6 on the same machine, and for that matter around PSP7 as well. Rendering time is maybe 1/4th of what the same operation takes in Photoshop, plus particularly with JPGs I have more control over the output quality (and Corel's files average about 30% smaller for the same compression level).

And as to Reveal Codes, there's nothing else in the same league. Trying to tweak complex formatting any other word processor is like being blind, gagged, and hands tied behind your back.

Re:word perfect

[cybergrue]

Excuse me, exactly the same arguments could be made by substituting MS Word for Wordperfect in the comment. It is far too easy to make a big mess using a modern word processor, especially when working on pre-existing documents. The difference is that the reveal codes option in Word perfect lets you figure out what what is really going on, whereas in Word, you are screwed. I have seen people get fed up with the formatting in Word, and were forced to retype the entire document (I then showed them how to cut and past the text into a plain ascii text editor, and then back into a new word doc so they would only have to do the mark-up again)

Anyways, in conclusion, the reaveal-codes function in Wordperfect does not allow you to create a mess, but will let you get out of one quickly.