Corel lands suite punch
WordPerfect Office 2000 ships 10 days before Microsoft product
...As of last month, Corel's previous upgraded version of WordPerfect, Suite 8, ranked fourth behind three Microsoft Office product suites in U.S. retail sales, according to the latest report by Reston, Virginia-based PC Data, Inc. Microsoft sold 79,923 units of its software suites in the first three categories, compared with Corel, which sold 7,370 units.
PC Data figures also show that in the past 12 months, Corel has averaged between 20- to 25-per-cent retail market share for office software products. IBM's Lotus Development Corp. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has its own rival product, SmartSuite millennium edition, claimed about two per cent. Microsoft held the rest.
But don't expect Corel to engage in a David-versus-Goliath battle over numbers.
"What we realize is, the pie is very big," Mr. Tomei said. "We already have a big slice of that pie and it's time to foster our user base and upgrade them."
Some of that has already happened, he explained. Between 1997 and 1998, Corel's WordPerfect user base has increased by 10 per cent, or two million more WordPerfect users.
Corel's approach makes sense, said the editor-in-chief of Computerworld, a weekly newspaper for a corporate information-technology audience published by the International Data Group in Framingham, Massachusetts.
"Corel is going to go for making money in the market instead of going all hell-bent to beat Microsoft," said Paul Gillin. "No one is going to beat Microsoft at this point. That battle is over. Microsoft owns the office-suite market (and) could have chimpanzees developing the next version of Office and 85 per cent of people would still buy it."
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