WordPerfect Losing Ground to Microsoft

Jon Pepper

WordPerfect and PerfectOffice users are both relieved and apprehensive following recent changes at parent company Novell. With Novell's announcement that it sold its PerfectOffice products to Ottawa-based Corel, some users said they were confident that their favorite word processor or suite will continue to survive and compete with Microsoft and Lotus. But analysts say that Corel's new suites have an uphill battle in competing against suites from Microsoft and Lotus. Also, former WordPerfect users say the Corel announcement came too late--they've already switched.

In March, Corel announced it planned to release 16-bit Windows versions of the Corel WordPerfect suite and Corel Office Professional in April, with Windows 95 versions slated to ship in May and June, respectively. Corel WordPerfect (about $395) will include WordPerfect 6.1, Quattro Pro 6.0, Envoy, Netscape Navigator, Presentations 3.0, CorelFlow, Starfish Software's Sidekick and Dashboard, clip art, fonts, and a screen saver.

Corel Office Professional (about $695) will include the above programs, plus the InfoCentral information manager, the Paradox database, and a GroupWise client. The WordPerfect word processor's new features include Internet publishing tools that automatically convert documents to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format, a built-in address book (shared by other applications in the suite), and highlighting to support document collaboration.

Beta testers of the new suite were encouraged. "I think that the final product is going to be extremely powerful and will lead the industry in usability," comments Bruce Norton, the owner of Norton Innovation (Lititz, PA), a VAR and consultancy. But other users who've switched say that the Windows 95 version of WordPerfect arrived way too late.

John Tredennick, a litigation partner and CIO at Holland and Hart LLP, a Denver-based law firm that employs about 600 people in 10 offices, says the company started switching to Windows 95 last year and expects to convert completely. Tredennick says a number of factors convinced the firm to switch to Microsoft Office, including lack of a Mac offering from WordPerfect or Corel and the impressive market share of Office and its prevailing use by the firm's customers. "All things being equal, we'd rather be in the mainstream than a tributary," says Tredennick.

Analyst Nicole Miller, with International Data (Framingham, MA), estimates that Microsoft now has about 86 percent of the suite market, and while Miller says Corel/WordPerfect has a good chance of gaining the number-two spot from Lotus, that is about it. Says Miller: "Lotus and WordPerfect are really quibbling over about 15 percent of the market."