By COLIN LUCK
Once upon a time there was a word processor that was universally used around all business and most homes for its ease of use and the rich features that it offered to its users. It was called WordPerfect. Now this program developed over many years through various versions until it reached the version 5 status ( still a DOS version) which was universally accepted as the STANDARD for word processors. All other word processors were measured against WordPerfect and comparisons where always held up as to just how close the alternatives came to WordPerfects current features. [The first Windows version, 5.2, was released in 1992].
Then Microsoft released their first version of Office which was an integrated suite of Office Applications that had a similar look across all the range. Prior to this all of the then current Office applications where provided by different suppliers and all had a different look and feel and it was hard if not impossible to transfer data between these applications.
Microsoft in an industry leading manner released Office and this allowed the user to import data across various applications and this was the first of the major advances in office suite applications. This was after Windows 3.1 was released and WordPerfect saw its market dominance rapidly diminish -- not because the Microsoft alternative was vastly superior but because it was now possible to share data across various office programs which WordPerfect could not match as at the time they only offered the Word Processor and did not have any other applications that they could integrate with their word processor to offer the same flexibility as the Microsoft Office Suite.
Microsoft had been doing the same thing with all its different Office applications being developed by different sections, and while they all wore the Microsoft Badge they looked and worked totally differently.
In an effort to stay competitive with Microsoft several other makers got together and attempted to integrate their products so they could offer the same capabilities as Microsofts Office Suite. This continued for a couple of years but never amounted to anything as it proved very difficult to integrate these products into a package that had the same features as the Office Suite from Microsoft while all these products stayed in different companies hands, as the various companies attempted to have their individual products have dominance over all the others and there was no way to get the same level of integration that was offered by Microsoft.
Each of these individual products had been the industry standards and still commanded a respectable market share but their market dominance was declining. Then Novell came on the scene and managed to buy all the Industry Standards and then set about integrating these into an Office package to offer serious competition to the Microsoft product. Novell Perfect Office was released in 1994, the same year as MS Office 4.2 (the last version designed for Windows 3.1), but slightly later than MS Office.
However Novell, thinking that they had all the Industry Standards in house and having managed to integrate these to at least the same level as Microsoft had already done, then thought that Industry would beat a path to their door demanding their product, and did not attempt to advertise their product in any serious way. They just went along thinking that things would pick up and improve soon which of course didnt happen, particularly as Microsoft was offering a lot of support for their product as well as constantly advertising it.
Even back in those times they were allowing people who used a Microsoft product at work to take it home and install it on their home computer so they could learn to use it for work. This allowed many people to use a legal copy of Microsoft Office without having to pay for it, and they could produce the same quality of documents at home as they could at work. Microsofts aim was to increase the use and knowledge of their product in the peoples eyes, and at the same time try to stave off any competition from Novell.
The company bosses thought this was a marvellous idea as they got their staff trained without having to pay for the privilege and the staff where only too happy to do this as it saved them money.
Novell stumbled along for several years and then sold off the entire product range to Corel, which at the time had the Industry Leader Graphics Software Program. [It is rumoured that Novell, having paid $850 million to acquire WordPerfect, sold it to Corel for a mere $50 million]. Corel set about rewriting the entire package and re-released the WordPerfect Office Program as Version 8 in two versions: one being the Standard version and the other being the Professional version. This was a similar structure to Microsoft with competing products and (Corel) WordPerfect Office had vastly superior features and maybe could have succeeded if it had of been properly promoted as a real alternative to the Microsoft Product.
But Corel, having the leading graphics package, wasnt in the habit of having to really advertise any of their products -- they thought that people would realise that they had a vastly superior program and try to beat their doors down in an attempt to buy their Office Product, just as was currently happening with their very successful Corel Draw Package.
But there where no obvious advantages of buying the Corel Suite and there where several reasons not to. Because Corel didnt offer their product in an OEM form like Microsoft did, it was not possible to buy a new computer with Corel Office loaded without paying far more than what you could buy the Microsoft product for.
The Corel product continued to lose market share and in an attempt to increase their sales Corel set about rewriting the entire package again and integrated the entire suite far more tightly so that it was far easier to share data between applications and at the same time offer better tools for everyday use.
Hence the Corel WordPerfect Office Suite offered far better applications with better tools but again not with an OEM version, so the Corel product cost about 3 times as much as the Microsoft version as an OEM installation. However as a full retail version their prices where comparable. This occurred at about the same time as the economy hit hard times, so it only proved far more difficult to sell the Corel product and Microsoft gained Market Dominance and continued to have this position even though they didnt offer the same level of easy user tools and as tight an integration as the Corel Product.
In an effort to reverse this situation Corel worked out a deal with the makers of Dragons Naturally Speaking to supply the Professional version of the Dragon program with the WordPerfect Office Professional version. Now normally this alone would have brought WordPerfect back into the big game but again the economy played a nasty trick with a severe downturn, and so this product never actually took off. This was a pity as it was the only Office Package that had all the major applications in it as well as a Voice Recognition Program very tightly integrated into it, so that you could do away with most of the necessary keyboard commands and just speak into a microphone to get your data to appear on the screen.
Corel continued to develop this product but unfortunately because of lack of sales the Dragons Naturally Speaking was dropped from the package and Corel continued to rewrite the software and integrate the programs even more tightly until they came out with the current version called Corel WordPerfect Office 2002.
There are no massive new changes made to this current Suite. They have just integrated the whole suite of programs into a more tightly packaged unit while still maintaining all the features like automatically inserting capital letters after full stops, and having the Make it fit feature which allows you to shrink down or expand a page or document that just goes over the page by a few lines, while still maintaining the formatting that you originally chose.
They have also pioneered the drag and drop feature for all page borders so it remains very easy to resize the printed area of a page all these features and numerous others still make it an easier product to use than the Microsoft Office alternative. The one big and correct boast that Corel has with all its products is that they ship more fonts than you can possibly use and to this end they ship well over 1,200 fonts that are installable, and far more than the Windows Operating system can actually handle.
So they have a core set of fonts as default install with the ability to install any other fonts that you may require. Typical of all Corel products these fonts are then made available across all other Windows applications, unlike the Microsoft Office program where the fonts that are installed with it are only available in Microsoft Office.
Corel WordPerfect was also the first package to incorporate a display of what any font actually looked like before you chose it so you always had a very good idea of how a document would actually look when you applied font changes to it, unlike the then Microsoft Office where you had to change the fonts to see how you document would actually look.
This is one of the many things that Microsoft has copied from the Corel Suite and it appears that while the Corel WordPerfect Office leads the advances, on the next version Microsoft incorporates any changes that they can into the next version of their product once Corel has produced it.
So Corel WordPerfect still leads the field at the moment, but its main claim to fame for the mainstream PC user is that it drives Microsoft to continually improve their existing product so that at the moment all Microsoft Office users are reaping the benefits of Corels development program. It was shortly after this time that Corel did a deal with Dell Computers to supply WordPerfect with all new Dell Computers and this started to happen in mid to late 2002.
Just as it looked as if Corel might actually have a winner on its hands they started negotiations to sell off their core products, which included both WordPerfect Office and Corel Draw, for a far lower amount that what they actually paid for the WordPerfect Office Suite just like Novell did all those years ago. At the moment these negotiations are ongoing.
WORDPERFECT WEBSITE
