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WordPerfect Back From the Wilderness

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-it's-a-whole-new-wilderness dept.

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?"

6 of 488 comments (clear)

  1. Compete head to head in Windows? by -tji · · Score: 5, Insightful


    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.

  2. Who do they think they are competing against? by chamilto0516 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?
    --
    Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
    1. Re:Who do they think they are competing against? by Vancouverite · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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....

      --
      We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
  3. WP in Law Offices by ashitaka · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
  4. Re:Why? by oldgeezer1954 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Two Words... by elbarsal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?