Earth to Corel: open your Office, or give it up
THE OFFICE is moving to the web or so the pundits proclaim. While it's true that Google's web-based productivity suite Google Docs is a lifesaver don't count out traditional office suites.
Yes, Google Docs works great and centralises document management and makes you knock your head against the wall when your country's fibre link to the " cloud" is cut by aliens. But in our view both types of productivity software have a purpose and complement one another nicely. It's "me too", Windows-only, commercial and proprietary MS Office copycat suites like Corel's Wordperfect Office which increasingly look like chickens running around without heads. In fact, I can think of no other big candidate in that category than Corel's Suite that fits that description. So let's change the allegory to a singular chicken.
In other words, it's dead, but it just hasn't realised it yet. First, consider Microsoft's Office suite and its market share. Now consider Corel's commercial Microsoft Office wannabe, selling for $399 in the Professional version and $115 for the 'Home and Student' version. For readers in Blighty, the standard version will cost you around £276 inc VAT from Corel UK.
Now let's compare both. Microsoft Office runs in Windows. Corel's Wordperfect Office runs in Windows. Microsoft's suite is the standard and everyone knows it. People know how it works (or pretend to know how it works then just ask anyone else in the office when they get stuck).
Now compare that to Corel's proposition. Both are expensive. One is the de-facto standard. The other requires re-training. What's the edge, the advantage for Corel? Better features? A cleaner screen in Wordperfect?. That's a hard, hard sell for corporate types and anyone who's cost-conscious.
Now compare Corel's Wordperfect Office to Sun's inexpensive and commercially supported StarOffice or its open source sibling: OpenOffice.org. Now the latter runs on most modern OSs out there, Linux, Windows, Unix, and soon Mac OS X (get the beta released a couple weeks ago here). Corel's doesn't. and since OpenOffice.org is based on community-supported, open source code you avoid vendor lock-in, and you can help debug it, if you so wish.
So let's recap: StarOffice and OpenOffice are compatible, run in almost every popular OS out there, and are very inexpensive or free, respectively. So, just considering those few factors, both SO and OO offer several key differentiating and compelling features. Again, what are Wordperfect Office's advantages? "You can use your ancient Wordperfect 5.0 keyboard macros"? *BZZZT* Boring! Sorry, not good enough.
OpenOffice.org and StarOffice are succeeding by imitating Mozilla's recipe for success with its Firefox browser. Both are open, both are free - as in no cos t-, both are community-supported (and commercially-supported, in the case of StarOffice). And both provide the ways and means for users to code creative, useful extensions, available both as open source code or even as closed code under a commercial licence, depending on what the developer wants.
In a nutshell, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org give users freedom. Both run on almost every modern popular OS the user might choose to run. Corel's Wordperfect Office? "Windows!", "as expensive as Microsoft's Office", "no freedom, same kind of vendor lock-in, only with a different owner at the end of the dog collar".
In short: Wordperfect Office has a niche, and will continue to have one. It won't get very far into the 21st century if Corel doesn't open its code. They could sell support and an enhanced version, just like Sun does with StarOffice - and it embraces mutiple operating systems - as the OS is increasingly irrelevant, as Linux-based tablets and Ubuntu pre-loaded Dell machines show.
I don't see Corel's Office Suite ever getting away from the small niche market corner it painted itself into, unless it gives users outside its fan base a compelling advantage in comparison with open source based solutions.
Now, in my defence and before the Wordperfect Jihad attacks poor Editor Paul Hales demanding my bald head on a silver platter, let me say that I loved Quattro Pro 5.0 for DOS. It ran circles around any other spreadsheet, specially under OS/2's virtual DOS machines. I even tried Wordperfect for OS/2 an ugly port a couple of times before finally selling my soul to Lotus' Word Pro 96.
But all that is ancient industry. That was in the dark ages, before OpenOffice, when software only came in cardboard boxes and was expensive and proprietary, just like Corel's Wordperfect Office.µ
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Wordperfect for Windows (at one point) got a few things 'right' - as the last popular 'embedded codes' word processor (versus Word's 'paragraph objects' approach) it could often be more straightforward to deal with. The legal shortcuts are mostly candy but useful for that extremely document-heavy industry, and label editing (for one-off mailing labels and such) still happens to work better than in OO.o.

Unfortunately, while this could make it a lovable piece of software, older versions have fallen down on stability (try working with large documents, or in some cases removing 'rogue codes' without resort to a hex editor) and remain Windows-only.

Open-sourcing might (or might not) address the stability and portability issues. Giving more attention to export to/from ODF (no idea if this is present in the latest version) would probably put more eyeballs on quirks of internal representation and solve those annoyances, and unlike OO.o, WordPerfect does already have a 'show codes' UI, which could be extended to allow better troubleshooting of 'buggy' documents in either format.
Microsoft is great. They create products that end up killing the compeition, often forcing them to open source and give away their products because they can't compete. Now hopefully we'll see Corel give up the ghost too.
...Granted, M$ blew everyone out of the water in the Office space...WordPefect and others were mature, excellent products when Word first came out (as was Quattro Pro when Excel came out, etc.), and although there was no compelling benefit of Word over WordPerfect at the time (indeed, WP was much better than Word then), M$ ramrodded the market and took over anyway. SOP.

WP and Quattro Pro, and the rest of the WP Office suite, do everything that 99.999% of the world's PC users want/need to do, just as easily as M$ Office, and without any re-training. Which is to say, 99.999% of the world's PC users don't actually use much functionality at all as provided by their office suites. The basics are braindead-easy in all suites, except the maddening Office 2007 that can't be used by anyone, as far as I can tell.

While you probably have the official retail prices spot-on for WP Office, I am compelled to point out that you can buy OEM versions of the product for anywhere from $9 to maybe $30 for current and recent versions. Not that 99.999% of the world would notice the difference between WP Office 11 and WP Office X3 anyway, so go for the $9 version.

At that price, WP Office is a no-brainer. It's a high-quality product with vastly more functionality than you're ever going to use. Really, it's only competition is the free stuff - and while the free stuff may be good enough, I'd suggest spending the $9 and get the full benefit of the retail-quality WP Office.
I think the only thing keeping Corel alive is its legacy users. When our agency decided to upgrade from Wordperfect to Word we had a group of about 2000 (Lawyers) of our 20,000 users who were absolutely adament about remaining with Wordperfect. They forces through a waiver and actually upgraded the version of wordperfect for themselves as well. So they are basically cut off from the rest of the agency. Not to bash lawyers but in my computer support years the lawyers are the one group which are absolutely the most resistant to computer upgrades, changes and such. Dunno why that is.
... it's called NeoOffice and it's been around for years, and IT IS SIMPLY GREAT! And free, GPL'd, compatible with whatever format you might want to throw at it, you name it: http://www.neooffice.org/
Salud!
Adri
The current available Free Office Suite for OS X (Native) that supports ODF format is Neo Office. It is based off Open Office.
According to my mother who is a secretary and other people she works with that spend most of the day creating documents and have had to use all three products, Wordperfect is still the best word processor out there, next Word and last Openoffice as far as useful features and interface is concerned.

That of course doesn't change the fact that it is hardly used anymore because for 90% of people out there any version is "good enough", and Word is the standard right now.
Have you ever tried the new Wordperfect? I don't think so, since you don't mention its exclusive feature: it closes itself without requiring user intervention!

Yeah, that's right, just at that exact moment when you're so focused in your work, in an almost nirvana-like state of mind, it just vanishes! You'll be gladly back to your beloved desktop screen, and you can breathe again. It's like it detects that if you worked for one more minute, you'd be too stressed to keep up with the quality of your work.

And not only that. It also uses some very intelligent AI algorithms to determine that all the work you just did is utter crap, and it automatically doesn't save it for you. Yeah, it then spares disk space and prevents fragmentation of your file system. Fantastic.

I'm sure that it would be selling like hot cakes without having to face Microsoft's anticompetitive tactics. And we would be exchanging our WPDs instead of DOCs.
Why do people feel entitled to demand companies give their assets away for free? Open source software is 2nd rate, cloneware that will ultimately destroy the commercial software market and all the innovations associated it.
Reveal codes. It's all about reveal codes. Why MS does not allow this feature in Word has always puzzled me. Reveal codes in WP has saved many a document created in Word. People come to me and say the formatting keeps jumping around. I open in WP, do reveal codes, delete the unnecessary formatting and voila. Also I think just about every legal firm (at least in Australia) is locked into WP. But I guess that's a niche. Long live WP. Keep up the good work Corel
Absolutely...open it up or possibly perish! Or is it too late? Share the source code and watch it flourish. Guaranteed.
I still use Corel Office, have done ever since WordPerfect 5.1 and will continue to do so in the forseeable future.
I don't care whether Corel Office is open source or not. I don't care if it costs money. I am dissapointed that it is not cross platform.
Corel tried once, and they only survived after Microsoft bailed them out.
A great shame really. Open Office sucked back then, and it still does, although with a fast CPU and improvements somewhat less so. Just because it's free and cross platform doesn't make it great software. Microsoft Office sucked then, and does even more now, with a few useful tidbits tacked on that are actually improved.
The best thing for Corel would be if someone like Google bought them. After Corel's last fateful experiment with Linux I can't see it too keen to try again, but that is exactly what it needs to do, free or otherwise.
In a strange irony, while Windows users are blessed with a choice of several commercial or free office suites, Linux users are cursed with the near monopoly of one suite, albeit free.
I've watched and waited and hoped with K-office, and one day it might be able to challenge Sun's tyranny on the open source desktop, but not yet, and its not really cross platform.
Web apps are fine, but only if you've got connectivity - one of the reasons I hate MS Office 2007 so much is its so internet centric, if you don't happen to have access to a broadband connection, it be a real frustration to use.
With some decent investment behind them, Corel going cross platform could really make the desktop more interesting, and the choice of operating system a whole lot less important.
I was amazed that nobody recalled the murky clouds associated with the Microsoft "bail out" of Corel. It practically screamed that the condition of payment was that Corel put a bullet in further WPOffice for *nix development.

My old WPOffice <still> outperforms Office 2007 (though it's buggy on XP) and I used the *nix version quite happily back in the day. Open & Star Office may have come a long way, but WPOffice was the real threat for Microsoft - and by putting it in a lock-box, they eliminated the threat.

If you want more gritty details, this is a good reference: http://linuxmafia.com/wpfaq/introduction.html
As long as Corel is making some money from WordPerfect why would they change anything? Revenues from office suites will likely decline for everyone... there just isn't as much money to be made on software where the bulk of the existing features were released 10+ years ago because everyone can increasingly provide their equivalents. Corel still has a viable option for the company that wants to pay for office software (for support or other benefit they see) but not pay as much as they would on MS Office. Open sourcing Corel WordPerfect would only make their revenue go away faster. Corel doesn't care about install base as much as they care about revenue. Would companies rush to pay Corel more for support on an open sourced Corel WordPerfect Office than they pay them now? Corel should open source WordPerfect the day they are getting out of the WordPerfect business. I would expect the useful code would likely be moved to OpenOffice rather than having two projects.