Between them, HP and Dell account for about 30% of the worldwide PC OEM market as tracked by IDC for Q2/2002 and reported by News.Com here.

These are huge wins for Corel (a Canadian company) and they raise the bar for PC OEMs to bung in a full office productivity suite with PCs. IBM, Fujitsu-Siemens, NEC, Gateway, Micron, Acer, et al will have to take notice and adjust their applications software bundling tactics.

WordPerfect was once arguably the best professional word processing application for the PC in the mid-80's and even later, but they fell behind in the face of Microsoft's hyper-competitive tactics in most business markets -- except in legal circles where WordPerfect remains a significant player. Many US Courts still require WordPerfect for soft copies (though some use PDF too, now) and lots of law offices still use it routinely -- many legal secretaries and attorneys still swear by WordPerfect for its keyboarding speed and formatting transparency.

One imagines that Corel offered HP and Dell a great deal on their fully feathered office productivity suite -- at a low price comparable to the tariff for the Microsoft Works bundle of crippled office applications. If so, it's no wonder the big boys switched, and it might be a trend.

The Slashdot free-for-all discussing this surprising development is here.µ