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Dr. J., Go buy Suite 8 tomorrow and tell me that speed and efficiency are not an important factor in consumer (corporate or retail) decision making. WP 8 does load faster than Word 97, although by a small margin. But the faster screen redraws are noticeable and nice. The shutdown is instantaneous. On a Pentium 133, if you exit WP8, and reload it while it is still in cache, it reloads in 2 seconds. I'm impatient enough to despise any delays, considering the processing power of today's hardware.
So far, WP 8 is the best word processor ever. Word 97 (not Office 97) is a fine product in and of itself, but Corel has managed to add a lot of "nice touches" by simplifying the menu options and formatting. The only thing I dislike is that Corel chose to copy the Word 97 layout for the main interface. I personally like WP 7's layout better. However, every other feature, and I spent several hours going over it yesterday, is on par if not better than Word 97. No hype here. Try it yourself. In fact, I hate to say it, but the two word processors are almost "unisex." There's very little distinction overall. If I were a part of Corel management, I would push for greater distinction.
As far as the Suite 8 "roll out" is concerned, I'm disappointed with the packaging because it is nearly identical to Suite 7, and I feel the packaging could be more professional. However, I think that program performance will increase corporate and instituional sales.
The problems with Office 97, for me, are not the main component programs. It's the memory intensive, disk swapping, and lack of efficiency, spawned by Outlook, the "pig" of the suite. (Dvorak coined it a pig.) While Outlook is intended to be the thread to hold the integration together between the suite software, e-mail, and the internet, the slowness is a disaster, hence Dvorak's call to Microsoft for a complete rewrite. This is an important issue to Corel. If CorelCentral is not a major improvement over Outlook in efficiency, the Suite sales may not take off as expected. I hope Corel hits a "home-run" with its PIM. If the speed is there, the corporate sales will be there too.
I almost can't believe your comment about computing speed. I have a small fortune invested in hardware and software over the past 15 years chasing the faster, better, and cheaper RAINBOW.
Up, Up, & Away! (The balloon is looking prettier to me.)
Scott
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