Scott: Why don't you E-Mail your suggestions directly to Mike Cowpland and Don Sylvester? I sent them the following E-Mail a couple of days after Black Wednesday:
"As a consultant to a large number of major US law firms and their Fortune 500 clients for the past 20 years I am a long time user of WP software, and I am impressed with what Corel has been able to do in such a short time - the WP8 product is much better than MS Word (I use both since my legal clients use both). Novell's failure to capitalize on its virtual monopoly of network OS software and the 50%+ market share of WP when it bought WP Corp. in 1994 has to rank as one of the major marketing failures of all time, since they failed to convince their installed corporate user base that upgrading to WP/WIN 6.1 would provide them with any benefits. I truly hope that Corel does not emulate its predecessor in this regard.
As I'm sure you know, law firms are not interested in Java or any other cutting edge technology, they prefer tried and proven technologies - that's why most of my legal clients are still running WP5.1 in a DOS window (generally together with Lotus Notes) under WIN 3.1 or its equivalent network version on a mix of 386/486 hardware, and are only just beginning their upgrades to Pentium hardware and WIN NT. Since they have a strong interest in preserving their long term investment in WP software, document styles, macros, archived files, document management, etc., Corel still has the opportunity of keeping enough of its current corporate user base on the WP/WIN platform to provide a good revenue stream for future business development.
However, based on what I hear from my law firm clients and their MIS departments, the window of opportunity for Corel is going to close pretty rapidly as these firms and their corporate clients upgrade their hardware and software over the next 12-18 months and are forced to choose between Microsoft, Lotus, or Corel. If Corel cannot provide the on site technical support to these firms that Microsoft is apparently able to provide in order to achieve a smooth transition to all-Microsoft from the Novell/WP/Lotus Notes combination, then Microsoft will take over virtually all of this potential Corel business, as I know they have already done for one of my New York clients (one of the largest of the NY law firms). That will leave Corel with around 20% of the retail market, which is only 20% of the overall market for office suite software. 20% of a $4 billion market would provide a pretty good revenue stream for Corel, 4% of that same market is about what Corel is doing right now.
As a shareholder, I hope your corporate sales and technical support groups are up to the challenge of convincing existing corporate WP users that Corel will be around to support them for a long time, and that Corel is prepared to deploy the resources necessary to ensure that its corporate customers have a seamless interface and file interchangeability with their clients, whether they use WP, MS Word or some other word processing software.
I wish both of you and the rest of the Corel Corp. team the best of luck in this undertaking.
Sincerely, David E. Taylor, President, Taylor Associates Inc.
P.S. Please forward this to Mr. Sylvester since I do not have his E-Mail address."
Since I actually received a reply to this missive, somebody there is actually reading E-Mailed suggestions from shareholders, though whether it's the CEO himself or one of his assistants is debatable. In any event it's another way to get some ideas communicated to Corel management in addition to relying on someone at Corel reading the posts on this thread and passing them on.
David T. |
