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Technology Stocks : Corel Corp. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark A. Forte who wrote (4179)	1/1/1998 3:20:00 PM
From: Leo Mitkievicz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 9798

Mark & Mark May I bring it to your attention that there just a few <ggg> teensie tiny almost invisible additional costs <vbg> involved beyond the cost of pressing the disk. 1) WP8 represents a cumulative 100+ man/years of labor. A company that makes this kind of outlay has to be able to get a decent ROI. 2) Like it or not we've got to pay Cowpland until we drum him out of there. And all of the other administrative, investor relations, advertising, secretarial, janitorial etc. staff 3) And do you think the programmers supply their own machines and tools? Or pay themselves while they write the latest versions? To say nothing of taxes, and profits and minor little things like that. Sure Netscape "gives" away Navigator and MS Internet Explorer is sorta free, and Computer Associates gained a little market share for its tax program 3 or so years ago. Under the right circumstances its a good marketing ploy. However I can see nothing to indicate that this would be an appropriate strategy for Corel and WordPerfect. Whoa now. If Corel had some handy-dandy little minor program laying around gathering dust I'd be real pleased to see them sell it dirt cheap as a promotion. Then they could sit back and wait for upgrade money to come in. But the Suite is a different story. Maybe they should do that WP lite version carrying file compatibility with the Suite and targeted vs Works, and/or debug and bring back WordStar for Windows, which had the potential to be a pretty good little beginners word processor. Look how wildly popular Linux is. And (in at least some versions) it is given away free. Yet there do exist implementations of UNIX that seem to be finding profits in good markets. Making something very cheap or free does not guarantee it will gain in popularity. More often it will just lower the perceived value of the product. Regards, Leo