U.S. Justice Dept. Chooses Corel over Microsoft

peg0cjs writes "The Justice Department, which challenged Microsoft Corp. in courtrooms for nearly a decade over antitrust violations, will pay more than $2 million each year to buy business software from Corel Corp, according to this article from CANOE. 'The Justice Department will make WordPerfect software available to more than 20 organizations inside the agency, but not the FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration, which use Microsoft's Office business software exclusively, said Mary Aileen O'Donovan, a program manager in the Justice Management Division.' According to the article, the deal is worth up to $13.2 million over five years for Ontario-based Corel. Has sanity finally set in, or is this just a blip in Microsoft's dominance in controlling government software decisions?"

Comments

Alt-F3 Tells All

[ackthpt]

Obviously the Department of Justice (not the Justice Department, which sounds like some government agency in charge of people flying around in their underwear) wants to get to the root of problems more quickly and with Alt-F3 they can find the clues much faster!

A blip? I dunno, seems when the Roman Empire began to crumble it started somewhere, in some little way. Don't discount Corel too quickly and don't underestimate the power of saving a few dollars by a goverment sorely in need of cost cutting. If these tools work well, the next round may embrace FBI and DEA. you have the right to alternative sources of software

Re:Alt-F3 Tells All

[tepples]

Which is annoying, as MS Word .doc is the standard format.

ISO what? IEEE what? ECMA what? You keep using the term "standard", but I do not think it means what you think it means.

No Noose

[matt-larose]

As a former corel employee !2001 they had posters all over HQ talking about how the DOJ and Microsofts Own lawyers in the antitrust thing used WPO, as WP docs are pretty much the standard de jure ;)

How Does A Purchasing Decision Worth of YRO??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so the DOJ chooses to buy one over the other. What's the big deal here? If Corel fit their requirements, why would anybody else care so much?

This story has nothing to do with "rights". Your rights and mine are not affected by this story.

Nothing to see here. Please move on.

Re:What?

[joeljkp]

Perhaps this hasn't occurred to you guys, but maybe -- just maybe -- WordPerfect was a better solution for the DoJ than OOo was.

Do you know what their requirements are? Were you in the board room when this deal was being discussed?

The real reason for lack of interagency coop

[Red Moose]

So....with the FBI *not* having Corel and say, the CIA *does* have it, is this a reason why interagency cooperation is difficult? E.g., Some agent gets info of a terrorist plot and his comp crashes and all he has is the stupid fucking happy-dog in Office to help him? Does the FBI send stupid Outlook HTML emails to the CIA saying look this crazy fucker is going to Guatemala to buy suitcase bombs so stop him, but the CIA get it and can't read crappy illegible Outlook mail, so they send it to the NSA who with their l33t sk1llz transfer it to .txt but they can't get the information out because it's deep inside loads supid meta bullshit from Outlook.

How about no-one buys anything for any amount and just uses Open Office.

Re:Damn Lawyers

[mlmitton]

This is exactly what I was going to say. IANAL, but I work with them, and we regularly get WP files from our lawyer clients.

One interesting story. I work for an economic consulting firm, and we were working for Microsoft (don't kill me--I didn't have a choice!) on one of their class-action lawsuits that came about in the wake of the antitrust conviction. We were of course forced to use Word, and as we all know, one thing MS has *never* gotten right is their footnotes. Our deadline was less than 6 hours away for a major report, and all of the footnotes were FUBARed. The head lawyer called the guy at MS who was in charge of Office (I forget his name) and yelled, "Why can't you guys fix the fucking footnotes! Word Perfect has like three developers and they can get it right!" The MS guy hemmed and hawed, said they were working on it. That was 3-4 years ago, and MS still hasn't gotten the footnotes right.

good drugs

[kirkb]

but not the Drug Enforcement Administration, which use Microsoft's Office business software exclusively

Hmmm... I wonder what they're smoking...

Re:Hrm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Other countries are spending their tax payer money to pay for the US software and other items. That is similar to importing Oil form the ME, Olive oil from Italy or wine from France. There is nothing wrong with that. If you want the government to save tax payer money, call your senator and ask him/her to support and use an open source alternative. Posting your comments here will not go very far.

In addition

[Andy Dodd]

As mentioned earlier, lawyers tend to prefer WordPerfect for a number of reasons. The Justice Department has a lot of those. :)

OpenOffice may actually have proven to be totally unsuitable for the lawyers in the Justice Department, just as MS Office has proven to be wholly unsuitable.

In addition to historic precedent, Corel has been solidifying their niche market by catering towards lawyers. I think they are the only word processor developer that has actually marketed a version specifically catered towards lawyers, and I believe their general overall development is heavily influenced by the needs of one particular market which Corel is well-established in and wants to stay well-established in.

Unlike MS, Corel is maintaining a stranglehold on that particular market not by underhanded tactics, but by releasing a product that is clearly superior for that particular niche.

I would not be surprised if in addition to the fact that OO has only recently become viable in general, OO may be wholly unsuitable for lawyers just as MS Office still is.