This is a response to the first part of the word processor review recently featured on donationcoder.com. I have WordPerfect Office X3, OpenOffice.org 2.1, and MS Office 2003 all installed on my computer, and the article stirred up some of the opinions that have gradually come to settle in the depths of my mind. So here are my thoughts.
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Member since:2005-07-24
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At least I could say I tried which would be a lot more than Corel can say.
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You can't really blame Corel. They have a responsibility to their stockholders, and to the Citizens of The Planet Earth.
And they know that they will be allowed to survive, even flourish, after a fashion, as long as they do not compete too successfully with Redmond.
If it's money one is after, there is a fair amount of space available that lies between making good, and threatening Microsoft.
<cue audio="America The Beautiful.mid">
Microsoft is a Great Company. And it has made so many wonderful things possible.
It is the pinnacle of the American dream. And many a grandmother has pictures of her grandchildren that she would never have had if Microsoft had not invented The Internet.
Microsoft has revolutionized this world. Poor people have fud^Wfood that they would not have had otherwise.
They have fostered a better understanding between the generations, and between the peoples of the various countries of the world.
Can Complete World Peace be far away?
The possibilities are infinite.
But those possibilities will be unrealized if this Great Company is required to waste its resources competing with lesser companies, and is not allowed to focus upon the Innovation which is its forte.
Corel is simply doing their duty. To themselves. To their shareholders. And to *all* of us.
And perhaps, one day, to all who call the Milkyway Galaxy their home.
</cue style="fadeout">
The Vista adventure is just beginning...
Edited 2007-02-13 20:29
Member since:2007-01-18
Member since:2006-02-27
Member since:
2007-01-18
And I don't plan on changing anytime soon.
WordPerfect has had it's ups and downs and at the moment I think they are having an up. Corel doesn't handle WordPerfect right. They, like many, have given up on it.
A lot WordPerfect does need to be rewritten to support modern features like Unicode. It's not going to happen though. I personally don't care that much as it works great for all that I do and it's still a site better than OpenOffice in most areas.
Personally I would love to see Corel put some effort into making WordPerfect the best damn word processors money can buy, but I would love to see them do that to Quatro and Presentation. If it were up to me I would take all the knowledge gained from working on WordPerfect and start over from scratch recreating the second coming of WordPerfect Office Suite. I would fully support Unicode and ODF. I'd work toward making Quatro better than or at least as good as Excel. I would look to Keynotes as the goal for Presentation. And lastly I would either kill Paradox or turn it into a front end for other database engines like MS SQL Server, Postgre, MySQL, etc.
The other thing I would do is dump WordPerfect mail. It sucks. I would look at creating, licensing, or using a real challenger to Outlook.
I would also make it as platform agnostic as humanly possible. I might even go so far as to open source the whole damn thing. As a matter of fact I probably would.
Then again I'd probably just run the company into the poor house and end up turning WordPerfect into some bastardized child that was buggy and didn't work at all. At least I could say I tried which would be a lot more than Corel can say.