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Corel Targets Students with Low Cost WordPerfect

By Nate Mook, BetaNews

June 10, 2004, 5:19 AM

Corel has taken WordPerfect back to school. WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition offers the full WordPerfect package to educational and non-profit organizations at a low cost. Keeping in mind the impact technology fees have on institutions with finite resources, Corel has relaxed product licensing requirements.

Launched in April, WordPerfect 12 is not glaringly dissimilar from Microsoft Office. The suite includes all of the components enshrined in customers' expectations of productivity suites: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and contact management.

To add a touch of familiarity to the unknown, Corel's new Workspace Manager enables users who are not accustomed to WordPerfect to adjust the user interface to create custom designs, or even clone the layout of the Microsoft toolbar and menu items.

Corel has included Microsoft Office file support and compatibility toolbars that are intended to reduce the complexity of working with documents authored in the rival suite. However, Corel has not constrained itself to Microsoft Office; WordPerfect users can publish documents in PDF, XML, Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file formats.

Priced at $99 USD, WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition undercuts Microsoft by $50 USD. Furthermore, Corel offers a clear upgrade path for students after graduation and its software can be installed on up to three separate machines.

"The product clearly is Corel's response to Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition," wrote Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox in his Microsoft Monitor Web log. "Microsoft launched the XP version in October 2001 for about $250 less than the same non-scholastic version. I view the Office version as a way of Microsoft reducing the product's cost to consumers without jeopardizing the higher businesses pricing."

Corel is not only competing against Microsoft, but with other vendors who are vying for the ten percent market share that does not belong to Redmond. Earlier this week, Sun Microsystems won a 2.5 million seat contract with the Ontario Ministry of Education for StarOffice 7 to service the Province's students.

Corel WordPerfect Office 12 Student and Teacher Edition is available now.

Add a Comment (14 Comments)

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By Kircle

posted Jun 10, 2004 - 5:46 PM

Price is still too high. It can't be anymore than $50 IMO. Personally, I think a $20 student edition would be better. Corel's in the odd position between feature overkill (MS Office) and cheapness overkill (OpenOffice.org). They need to differentiate themselves from the market, but price won't be effective for them since StarOffice/OpenOffice already has that squared off.

Score: 1

By ianlewis

posted Jun 11, 2004 - 11:49 AM

I was a Wordperfect fan all the way from 4.2, but I've finally given in and gone with MS Office 2003. Nothing has changed in WordPerfect since version 10 except for a few bug fixes. And it looks so out of date, too (silly, but it all contributes).

Score: 0

By jlgtex

posted Jun 14, 2004 - 7:29 AM

Me too. I have been using Wordperfect since the 5.1 Version. However, since Wperfect 9, I do not find any improvements in WP 10, 11 or 12. Presently, I downloaded a WP 12 Free trial and I have not found that I can do with WP 12 anything that I could not do with WP 9!

Score: 0

By jrepin

posted Jun 11, 2004 - 10:33 AM

I would buy it if there was no OpenOffice.org. But since there is OOo and it is there for free I need nothing else.

Score: 0

By donpacman

posted Jun 23, 2004 - 1:45 AM

OpenOffice.org is the way to go!
The IT guys are starting to use OOo at work now.

Score: 0

By wung

posted Jun 11, 2004 - 3:08 PM

i think $99 for 3 computers is not that bad of a price. I tried OO before and it doesn't port to MS Word all that well, not the best to write your resume with since the formatting will probably be different when viewed with MS Word.

Score: 0

By Kircle

posted Jun 11, 2004 - 6:03 PM

I don't think the average household has more than one computer at home, so their customers are paying for something the don't need. Also, I think people who use OOo a lot of times distribute their document as a PDF, which retains the exact layout.

Score: 1

By jrepin

posted Jun 12, 2004 - 9:51 AM

Yup I agree. I don't even have to export to DOC format anymore as we only use OOo. And if I have to export I export to PDF which is more portable then anything else.

Oh and we have 4 computers in our house and the poeple I know also have about 2 computers on average.

Score: 0

By Diamhair

posted Jun 12, 2004 - 9:23 AM

Just about everyone I know has more than one computer in their house... usually two. I have three.

Score: 0

By Kircle

posted Jun 13, 2004 - 8:23 PM

But then do you or your friends represent the average computer user? The fact that you're reading *beta*news tells me probably not. Last I heard (a year ago), half of all households in the US do not have a computer. And yes, I too was surprised when I ran across that number, but when you really think about it, should it have been a surprise?

Score: 0

By speedmeister

posted Jun 15, 2004 - 2:15 AM

Are you sure that you are talking about the United States? I don't know where you got that number but I really doubtful that your statement is accurate in the US. From what I can tell your statement hasn't been true in about 4 years.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2001
Census Bureau reports that as August 2000 51% of households had computers
http://www.census.gov/Pr.../www/2001/cb01-147.html

circa 2002
Jupiter research reports 69% of households had computers
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908456.html

March 18, 2004
Nielsen Net/Ratings
74.9% of households have acces to the internet.
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_040318.pdf

The methods these differnet surveys are using getting some different numbers but unless each one of these surveys are using a flawed method to gather their data it would see pretty obvious that the percent of households with computers in the US is a lot higher then 50%.

Score: 0

By Kircle

posted Jun 30, 2004 - 9:18 AM

Time does fly by, but thinking back it may have been in Fall of 2001 when I ran across those numbers, which I think your first link supports. Thanks for the numbers. It was very informative.

Score: 0

By wung

posted Jun 11, 2004 - 9:18 PM

i see what you mean . . . i never tried PDF, but maybe i should . . .

Score: 0

By Black-Wolf

posted Jun 14, 2004 - 7:12 PM

$20 for this software for student is too little..........

Besides, many students are willing to throw in a lot of money on something else, like MP3 player, PDA/Handheld, cellur phone and other craps.

The price is reasonable. None of the students should ever complain about it.

Score: 0

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