March 14, 2005

Corel WordPerfect - It Just Keeps On Coming

Corel WordPerfect, long ago lost its lead and major relevance in the business marketplace. HOWEVER, as a former long time Corel user I was VERY happy to hear that Corel signed a 50,000 seat, 5 year, $13 million deal with the Department of Justice.

The DOJ inked the deal for two reasons 1) Corel has continued to expand its list of features 2) Corel's licensing is so much cheaper than Microsoft's.

David Coursey writes WordPerfect Office 12 has expanded features to serve the legal community and government, where the product still has a significant number of users. It is also very file-compatible with Microsoft Office and even offers command emulation and the ability to write Microsoft file formats by default, for greater compatibility.

In its marketing, Corel takes much the same approach as does Suave, the hair-care products company, whose slogan used to be, "Suave does what theirs does, for a lot less." For many users, WordPerfect Office is both fully file-compatible and has all of the Microsoft Office functionality they require, without the Redmond price tag.

The deal is also seen by some as answering the question as to whether there remain any hard feelings at the Justice Department following its long-running legal skirmish with Microsoft. It looks to me like there are at least 13 million of them, and they will go on for years.

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