The intersting thing about Corel is that they dropped, with little fanfare, what could have been their MS Office killer. For a brief while, Corel offered "Application Server" pricing for Corel Office Suite 8. You basically paid less than $2000 (US) for an application server license, installed the software on a single server, and were legal for as many people that you could run off of that server. They even ran full page ads in several of the trade tabloids comparing the 3 year cost of ownership of their suite vs. MS Office/Select pricing. I think the numbers for 1,500 users over three years, with support were several million dollars for Microsoft and 97% less for Corel.
About two months ago, Corel dropped this pricing model. Maybe they couldn't make any money priced that way, but it sure could have grabbed some market share.
I also think that Corel has had (and still has) a serious lead in volume of product sold at retail. Of course, this is a misleading figure since just about every PC sold today comes with some version of MS Office or Works pre-installed. So who would ever have to buy MS Office retail?
WordPerfect has been huge among lawyers from day one. They also have maintained true backward compatibility and haven't changed the file format (unlike the Word97 save as Word 6 and watch your file size increase exponentially debacle). I don't see them disappearing, but they need to get the Java version of the product right on the next attempt to really differentiate themselves.
-Michael |
