Corel To Test WordPerfect For Linux

prostoalex writes "CNET News says Corel will introduce a native Linux version of its WordPerfect Office product on April 15th . This will be a pilot project, as Corel executives want to find out whether it's worth competing with the other products (namely StarOffice and OpenOffice)." The piece mentions: "Corel previously produced a Linux-native version of WordPerfect 8, released in 1998, and offered a Linux-translated version of WordPerfect 9 in 2000, when Linux was still a cornerstone of the company's broader strategy."

Comments

The Corel stable of products

[Bushcat]

Corel's always been a strange company. They've had products that have had potentially fine futures, but they've ALWAYS been as buggy as hell. I had a company that did wonderful things with Ventura Publisher many years ago, way back when VP was being spun off and relocating to California. It was robust and clearly authored by people who understood publishing. We did some seriously large projects with it, I even wrote a tagging preprocessor for it. We could lay out 1000 pages and it would look pretty good the first time a human opened the document.

Then Corel got ahold of it, and the added feature sets were late in coming but full of promise, but the damn program just never worked. We got accidentally on some kind of instant-updates-at-all-costs program, maybe because I was vocal on Compuserve at the time, so I can't fault Corel on the number of update CDs we received each month. But the thing just didn't work.

Our word processor was WordPerfect. It was wonderful around 5.1. I beta-tested its Postscript drivers and this was in the days when the Apple rep ran away because he couldn't believe a Laserwriter was being driven by a PC through the serial port. We loved WP. Then Corel got ahold of it, and we had to move on to a product that, well, actually worked most of the time. So we went to Word, but it was a struggle because everyone tried to use WP secretly. What's wrong with a "Reveal Codes" option? Nothing. Why doesn't Word have one? Because the people who design it don't use it for creating pretty language. But we simply couldn't keep using WP, because it broke enough files to affect our ability to perform as a publishing house.

We also used Xara, which was cheap and powerful. Bugger me, Corel got ahold of that, too, and killed it.

Corel's the sort of company that one would love to support as a kind of perpetual underdog, but the reality is that there's been something perpetually wrong with their development cycle: stuff just gets buggier, and buggier, and buggier until it's too frustrating to use.

I'm sure there's room for a Wordperfect-like product, but it's a real shame Corel is the vehicle to provide it.