Corel’s Richard Carriere recently sat down with BetaNews to discuss the hype around alternative office suites and the future of WordPerfect. Carriere says the market is ready for an MS Office alternative, that Microsoft doesn’t innovate, and OpenOffice.org and the OpenDocument format aren’t yet viable.
Really, this was not a genuine interview. It was just a little propaganda talk from the side of WordPerfect. ODF isn’t viable, but hey, we support PDF! R-right.
For me they’re pretty good. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a good product, and it is now standard compliant. Way to go!
i hate the errors OO.org gives when itry to run other formats and the installer sucks..
that’s about it and then ill use it as default
These guys are proud of being 2nd to Microsoft Office, with up to 80% of the little crumbs that Office leaves to all other commercial office suites, and spread FUD about OpenOffice.org. Really really sad …
“If tomorrow HP, Dell or Sony started shipping their machines with OpenOffice, who would answer the support calls? The economics would not make sense.”
How convenient to forget that there’s a supported version of OOo, and it’s called StarOffice.
“In that sense, I would say OpenOffice is not a serious alternative that is used in the market today. It’s used in the labs, and we have copies just like any other company that’s watching what’s out there, but it’s not used by real people or by real businesses.”
Yeah, like thousand of other people I’m feeling less “real” now. As far as I know, WordPerfect is the “unreal” choice here, as I’ve not heard of it in years. How about working a little more on your product and spreading less lies around?
rehdon
I genuinely like WordPerfect. I really do. It is much better than the office suite, imo. Simple, clean and easy to use.
snoopy
WordPerfect officially just bit the pooch and slammed one of the last nails into their own coffin. They have a massive userbase. By implementing support for OpenDocument, they would immediately become the #1 ODF supporter, and they would be a major competitor to StarOffice. Instead, they are complete pansies, content to be #2.
Now there will be three big formats for editable text: MS Office, MS Office 12, and OpenDocument. There is no room for the legacy Word Perfect formats. They missed the boat completely on being early adopters and early front runners.
I am really rooting for SO and OO.o, and I hope that one day, Corel looks back at this moment and says “We should’ve put our money on that bet!”
RC: Well, I think that is what’s happening. If you have a problem with a printer driver or anything, whom are you going to call? You could go on the Internet and contact some community of engineering students who develop drivers in their dorm room. I’m sure people who are really, really tech savvy have always done these things, and that’s fine. But for the average customer you’re much better off paying a reasonable price to a well-established software vendor that develops a high quality product that would provide you support.
Yeah, like wait till the next version and we’ll fix the driver problem if we feel like it.
No thanks, I’ll use an OS-app knowing I’ve got half a chance at fixing it myself or getting someone more cluey than me to fix it for everyone – Which I might add will probably happen before the next version of MS/Corel Office!
“In that sense, I would say OpenOffice is not a serious alternative that is used in the market today. It’s used in the labs, and we have copies just like any other company that’s watching what’s out there, but it’s not used by real people or by real businesses.”
That’s great. I used StarOffice 5.2 *at Corel* back in 1999 when I worked as a co-op student. I wrote a substantial report with it. I guess I didn’t count as a real person.
At the time, Sun had acquired StarDivision and was talking about releasing SO as OpenSource. Someone on my team brought this up in a meeting and the Corel managers dismissed SO as nothing more than a toy compared to WordPerfect Office.
In the six years that have passed, OpenOffice.org has evolved in leaps and bounds while Corel is still hanging on to the their reveal codes and precious .wpd format. It’s a shame, really. They had some excellent people there who were keen on real change.
starting with version 5.1 on DOS. However, the need to exchange files with clients forced me to adopt Office. I prefer WP but have to use Office. File format dictates this, not features. Therefore, I highly support ODF and humbly request that Corel take the lead on supporting this critical format so as to have a lead in when it inevitably becomes the standard everyone has to have. When tha playing field is leveled via ODF, then let the real innovators come forward.
I thought they were gone already since I’ve never heard about them around here for quite sometime. I still remember the days of DOS which I believe WordPerfect rules, ahead of MS Word. During my early employment days, we use no other than Corel Draw for our graphic presentation but unluckily, the arrogant that they have just killing themselves.
If they take the same strategy as StarOffice did by supporting OSS previously, I believe they might have made a fortune now. But sadly they choose to compete with MS in MS field, meaning that they are choosing their silent doomsday….
You raise an interesting point: does OpenOffice make any money?
It doesn’t, yet I’ve never seen Star Office anywhere in the spotlight untill Open Office evangelism popped up everywhere. It’s something to consider.
WordPerfect supporting the same formats as Open Office would indeed mean competing on features alone, which is something that should be in Corel’s interest, Open Office has the lack of price, but when people want support, they need to consider SO vs WP. If they both support ODF, then the cheapest, the one with best support, the one with best features will win. They can’t win against OOo on price anyway.
During my early employment days, we use no other than Corel Draw for our graphic presentation but unluckily, the arrogant that they have just killing themselves.
Going to school for media design, I’ve met a few people who still swear by CorelDraw. I remember finding a tutorial for making 3d-ish dog tags using CorelDraw – the principles were generic enough that I was able to apply it to Illustrator, but I was surprised that it took quite a few more steps to do it.
Corel raises the interesting point that it takes a couple of years before people start upgrading their software. So lets say they make an awesome Word Perfect with native ODF support and it’s a huge success. The problem is that when those people go to upgrade, they look at the price tag of Word Perfect, then they look at the price tag of OpenOffice.org (NOT staroffice…), and go “hm, they are both completely interchangable and use the same document format… why buy something when I can get something interchangable for free?”.
I think that is what they are concerned about.
>> “I think that is what they are concerned about.”
I think you may be right. Corel is hanging on by a thread. They have Paint Shop Pro, Painter, and Word Perfect.
One second-hand application, one *third* hand, and WordPerfect – an application who’s time has come and gone.
Their market is shrinking. The more people get in with Apple, Linux, or Microsoft, the fewer customers they have.
People used PSP because Photoshop is too expensive, they use Corel Draw because Illustrator is too expensive & “Professional”, and they use Painter because *NOTHING* compares.
They need to do more than add in support for a particular document format if they want to survive – they need to get out of the friggin’ Bargain Bin.
You can buy WordPerfect Office right next to “Deer Hunter X-Treem”.
They should take advantage of the few years it takes to make it through an upgrade cycle and freshen up their codebase. Forget all about following Office’s footsteps since the entire model will be changing with Vista, and focus more on the Apple-y way of doing things. Break these gigantic, over complicated programs down into something a little more modular, and sell the components for what they do now.
Bring people to the website to buy add-ons: “Add Painter X features to your basic Word Perfect install for $59” “Get PDF and ODF output features for your Corel-family products for $15.99 – Download now!”
Get WordPerfect out of the WordPerfect days. Lotus is basically history, Corel could be next.
I think that is what they are concerned about.
Then they would be stupid. Vendor lock-in does NOT cut it anymore. That is why MS Office as-is is on a long and painful exit. Because the only future people will accept (outside the US for sure, inside the US….eventually) is open file formats.
Corel has the chance to the the #1 office suite using OD. Unfortunately, they are going to hand that title over to Sun.
If you believe you have the best product, then why not support the format? The answer, by logic, is because the think that the cost of their software outweighs the value. Otherwise they’d just on it and know that they are WORTH the money over OpenOffice.org.
“Vendor lock-in does NOT cut it anymore. ”
It’s easy to say that and I tend to agree with you in the long run…but Microsoft is making money hand over fist right now because they have their customers locked in to their formats. If I were a Corel guy who’s had my sights set on competing like the king of the hill for so long it’d be hard for me to see things differently, and it’d be even harder to figure out how to make money out of a services based solution (sans copius advertising).
While you may be right, certainly you would expect Corel to see the same trend we do and not expect that anyone, realistically, is will to trade in DOC for WPF due to vendor lock in. If their motivation for change is actually vendor lock in, anything but OD is a poor choice at this point, doncha think?
“you would expect Corel to see the same trend we do and not expect that anyone, realistically, is will to trade in DOC for WPF due to vendor lock in.”
They’re trying to say in this article that they support Microsoft office’s .doc format and PDF, and aren’t really plugging for WPF. They’re essentially saying “You’re already tied to Microsoft, use us instead because we’re very compatible and can export to pdf at a lower price”. With the implication that they are more compatible with Microsoft than the competition.
If you think about it, it is probably easier for them to make money knocking off MS office than it is for them to try to compete as the best ODF client. I am sure they see the change to an open format as inevitable, but if it’s easier to make money in the current system, there’s no reason to help the change along. So why support .odf when nobody uses it yet? That is what it seems they’re trying to get across to me.
What is Word Perfect?
via the Mass. decision they were basically handed a huge opportunity and they are choosing a “wait and see” approach. Any half brained manager would have been sitting down with the procurement people from the Mass government pitching their product already (with ODF support already added in) In my opinion, WP has the chance to be THE big winner here, not SO, not OO, but WP. But to listen to these managers talk, they don’t even stand a chance. This is a real shame.
In case anybody is wondering, the main customer base for WordPerfect is the law office.
Because they were quick to create custom macros and tools for formatting legal briefs and documents, WordPerfect continues to be the default choice of law firms for document processing. But even that is fading. And that’s hardly enough to hang a business on.
But the Belgian justice department is going to standardise on ODF, and other government-funded organisations and other countries will probably follow, so Corel better add support for it to WordPerfect if they don’t want to lose their main niche market…
Huh, do you have a source for that ? I didn’t hear anything about it (yes I am a Belgian.)
“Because they were quick to create custom macros and tools for formatting legal briefs and documents, WordPerfect continues to be the default choice of law firms for document processing.”
And for exactly this same reason many companies are going to have a hard time getting away from MS Office.
In some cases it would not only be tough to change, it would be more trouble and expense than it’s worth, even when the competing product is free.
I use OpenOffice for proposals, cost estimate spreadsheets and various other business activities. The PDF option is great, since I can save it and everyone I deal with can view it.
IMO: Corel didn’t ask too many people who use OpenOffice for real work.
I used to use WordPerfect, but that was years ago.
I know that many of you bash these guys for having opinions about Open Source software, but I for one would like to credit them for giving a good interview.
Of course they will speak from a standpoint where they emphasize themselves rather than a competitor, otherwise I think they should be fired.
Besides, they had a more realistic view on the Massachussets issue than I’ve seen anywhere else. They have simply not decided, just pointed in a direction, then media hype just runs away and says “Open Office, they’ll go open office Yippie Yowsi”… This sounded more down to earth.
Also noting about the München affair, I think they were bang on. I read all these things about my own country switching to open source because it costs 0? Fact is, it’s not that simple, it’s expensive to switch (and even more expensive if you use IBM). I’m not a bit surprised they blew their budget.
I also share their viewpoint on the market. I’m not sure OOo is a competitor to Corel. I am sure it’s good for alternatives to getting media attention as to making the market bigger for alternatives (such as Corel).
Frankly I think many of the things they said is what analytics like Gartner should be the ones saying instead of mumbling about hype aspects…
On the Corel’s site, the official system requirements for running WordPerfect list ONLY Windows as an operating system. Linux is of course way too hard to support for them.
And they wonder why people talk about OpenOffice?
IMO the key word is PORTABILITY. And the second key word is OPENNESS.
Corel received money from MS in the past to stop all linux development and the port of its products to linux. May be MS is still dictating what Corel can do.
Corel is stupid being content with its #2 position. People who use pirated copies of MS Office will never change to anything “compatible” and proprietary. Business only follow these addicted people. Only a radical advantage like Opendocument can break the chicken-and-egg effect.
Die Corel ! You sold your soul to MS devil ! You are only a zombie now, being mantained alive by MS money.
Opendocument support on WordPerfect don’t imply that it couldn’t import MS Office proprietary formats. There are no logic relation to explain this.
Corel is made in vegetative life because MS can use this to show it has competitors in Office market.
I really hate to write this. But I agree – OO needs Word macro compatibilty. There are quite a few Word “forms” where I work that require the macros to run or the formatting gets messed up. At least that’s what the people creating them say. As it is now, since they are required documents for Human Resources (Personnel) which are used by pretty much all employees, we aren’t able to use anything but Word for these. Until that changes we are stuck with Word. But I can picture that happening eventually.
That should have said, “I can picture that changing eventually.”
I doubt WP is number two. When visiting customers I havn’t seen anybody using WP for years. Open/StarOffice is starting to take off though. My guess is that OOo/SO is at least ten times more comman in the marketplace than WP.
Not supporting OpenDocument anytime soon is like signing their own death sentence. Just think of it, what product would you chose. The free one that uses a standardized document format approved by many governments in the world, or an expensive one that only can be used to exchange documents to and from law firms.
As for people that have more money to spend than sense, will they spend it on an Office suit that they probably havn’t heard of if they are under 25, or would they go for one that is used by at least 80% of the market.
This was probably Corels last chance on this, and they blew it.
Word Perfect remains easy to use. It has gofy litle features that non geeks love. “make it fit” comes to mind.
Also, try printing an envelope by selecing an entry in your address bok. With OO.org it involves stuff like setting up databases and using mail merge. How freaking hard can it be to let uers select an entry in an address book and print out an envelope with the corresponding address? Yet only WP seems able to offer this in a way regular users can comprehend.
OO.org, Koffice devs, please spend some time with someone who uses and loves WP, could give you some ideas.
What I means in my posting is that Corel make mistake by abandoning the OSS segment during the time which good office application much needed. If they concentrate on this segment, they might have became the main player and might have sell a lot and StarOffice (OpenOffice) willl not be as important as now. StarOffice are very lag during that time but now it have improve a lot and usable. To OSS users like me there are no more need to buy commercial office suite since we can use the free OO for our daily office works. For Windows, MS Office are excellence enough so why must anyone buy Corel Suite?
Just like Linux destroyed the Unix vendors and not Microsoft, just like Firefox destroyed Opera and not IE, OOo might destroy WP.
In Australia, magazines would bundle WP for Linux on cover disks with Red Hat 6.o circa 1999… It relied on Wine but it was still good, the first really useable wordprocessor for Linux (Applixware does not count!)
They also tried to port Painter with less than successful results.
Had they been bold enough to open source it at that time, they could have dominated the emerging Linux market. This was after Netscape, another company beaten by Microsoft, opened the code for their browser. WP could have been where Sun is with Star Office, with the backing of more years of experience developing Office software, an established name and reputation and more mature product.
The moment was missed and now they have lost everything.