The company launched a sales and marketing campaign early this year aimed at getting enterprise customers to switch to WordPerfect.Ĭorel's Burney said the effort is just picking up steam as frustration over new licensing terms for Microsoft Office has shown cracks in what everyone assumed was a one-company market. It's very hard to make a profit on that basis."Ĭorel has taken on a tougher challenge by trying to push WordPerfect to business customers. "The idea is to commoditize the office apps, drive the price close to zero. "If Corel's not giving away the next version, OpenOffice will," he said.
Such price-sensitive customers are also less likely to pay for upgrades, especially when free alternatives such as Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice package are available, Illuminata's Eunice said. To give those people very feature-rich, complex applications and expect them to figure it out-it's not going to make people real happy." "They're going to kids and the elderly and people with very limited experience with computing. "These are entry-level systems-systems primarily intended for newcomers to computing," he said. While the company won't reveal the price it's charging, company executives said during Corel's most recent earnings call not to expect a significant increase in revenue from PC makers, or original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
While these deals have won Corel widespread attention for cracking Microsoft's presumed monopoly in office software, they won't have any immediate payoff for the Canadian company, which is practically giving the software to PC makers for free. Yet Microsoft has become one of Corel's chief targets as competitor, largely owing to recent deals with PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard, Dell Computer and Gateway, which replaced Microsoft's Works package on low-end consumer PCs with a limited Corel package that includes WordPerfect and the Quattro spreadsheet program. The company's fortunes began to sag in the late 1990s, and Corel was on the verge of collapse two years ago when Microsoft revived it with a $135 million investment that gave Microsoft a minority, nonvoting share in the company.
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