Ottawa Citizen Article - Microsoft VP braves Corel country.
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April 9, 1997
Microsoft VP braves Corel country
Showdown fizzles as rivals settle for private sniping
Joanne Chianello
The Ottawa Citizen
If Microsoft Corp. vice-president Jon Reingold's voice betrayed a case of nerves yesterday, it was hardly surprising as he made a rare public appearance on rival Corel Corp.'s home turf.
Speaking after an introduction that showered praise on Corel and its leader, Michael Cowpland, Mr. Reingold told the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Innovation Forum he considered the local software star "a really fine competitor that's keeping us on our toes."
But in an interview later, he left little doubt that Microsoft views the much-smaller Corel as an interesting development in the industry-hardly a major threat.
"Michael Cowpland's name comes up frequently, especially in my department," said Mr. Reingold, who heads the marketing for desktop applications at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
"But frankly, they (Corel) help highlight certain ideas for us. I think the ball's in our court here. If we do a good job of listening to our customers, everything else will take care of itself."
Those expecting a public showdown between the two companies yesterday were sorely disappointed. Mr. Cowpland breezed in, gave a half-hour presentation outlining the company's various products and technologies, and breezed out. He didn't even stay to listen to Mr. Reingold's presentation.
His Microsoft counterpart gave an outline on how the U.S. giant plans to meet customers' demands of more flexible software that costs less to maintain, followed by a dry demonstration.
Although the two executives didn't face off at the forum, they have plenty to say about the competition when they've stepped away from the podium.
Mr. Cowpland pointed out that Corel is the first to develop a major software application written totally in Java, the much-hyped Internet-friendly computer language. The Ottawa company last week released a test version of Office for Java, a suite or package of word processing, spreadsheet and other programs written in the new language. On numerous occasions-but not yesterday- Mr. Cowpland has said that Java, which can be understood by any computer system, will threaten Microsoft's dominance in the operating system and software fields.
Mr. Reingold, who finally had his chance to respond to Mr. Cowpland `s unceasing claims of superiority for Corel software, said that he has downloaded and looked at the Office for Java. He called it "an interesting proof of concept."
The Microsoft executive said that although he respected Corel for being able to develop such a major program in Java, he said that the new suite has far fewer features than the full-fledged version and is quite slow.
"You have to be pretty committed to being leading edge as a customer to use it on a day-to-day basis," Mr. Reingold said. "We are very enthusiastic about Java, but Internet technologies are still very immature. I think the Internet is an incredible phenomenon. The excitement in the industry is probably better than it has ever been. But people tend to overpromise what can be done."
Mr. Reingold took the opportunity to point out that sales of Microsoft's Office 97 suite were soaring. More than five million copies of the suite have sold, exceeding the company's own expectations. Even in the retail sector, which accounts for about 15 per cent of all office suite sales, Microsoft has surged ahead of Corel, which had captured more than 50 per cent of the off-the-shelf market in the summer.
"Corel has done a good job with WordPerfect, which had fallen off the map," admitted the Microsoft vice-president. "But we see them (Corel) in the retail channel almost exclusively."
Microsoft's office-suite sales are almost exclusively in the lucrative corporate sector, where is controls about 90 per cent of the market.
"It's hard for a corporate organization to go with Corel because there is this desire to go for a standard," said Mr. Reingold, "no matter what price you're willing to give your software away for."
ROD MACIVOR, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN / Corel Corp. president Michael Cowpland didn't even stick around for the presentation by Jon Reingold, vice-president of Microsoft Corp.
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