HP Drops Microsoft Word in Favor of WordPerfect 726
nexex points to this Financial Times article, which says that HP has dropped Microsoft Word from the software lineup in the personal computers it sells to customers. From the article: "The move follows a decision last week by Dell Computer, the number two PC maker, to replace Microsoft software. Both companies said they would offer WordPerfect productivity software from Corel of Canada instead of Microsoft's Works, a scaled-down version of its top-selling Office software." Nexex writes:"I think it should be noted, MS Works does include the full version of Word."
WORKS DOES NOT INCLUDE WORD (Score:-1, Informative)
Works: Doesn't Necessarily Contain Word(?) (Score:2, Informative)
Here are some links from newegg that seem to indicate as much:
Works, Standard [newegg.com]
Works Suite [newegg.com]
~geogeek
YES IT DOES (Score:2, Informative)
WP was the standard... (Score:4, Informative)
Word is MS's crown jewel, but Word got where it is today buy stealing users from WP.
Wordperfect is *still* used in the Legal Industry far more than MS office. When I worked at the NYS DEC a few years ago, I didn't have word on my shiney Dell PC--I had wordperfect, and so did everyone else in all of EnCon.
Though it's a mind-boggling hack, Wordperfect and MS Word can and do talk to each other. In fact, having the two of them duke it out might be just the thing that OO needs to get some real work done on it, and get to be a usable beast...
MS Works Suite (Score:5, Informative)
Back when I worked for Best Buy a year ago, this was a big advantage of buying a sony computer. They included the full works suite. Many (read: HP / Compaq) only included the MS Works Word Processor, MS Works Spreadsheet, etc.
MS Works Word Processor is a very stripped version of MS Word. It has no spell check, no auto format, and is missing many key functions of Word. As far as I could tell, it's existance was only to whet people's tastebuds to get them to buy office, because after using Word, trying to use "MS Works Word Processor" is a joke.
~Will
Re:Real cost (Score:5, Informative)
Re:REVEAL CODES IS GOOD (Score:3, Informative)
Victory... NOT! (Score:2, Informative)
This is like cussing at Arab terrorists while you're standing at a gas pump.
Re:shrug (Score:3, Informative)
Have you ever considered Gobe [gobe.com]? It rocked on BeOS, and now its available on the Windows platform. And if you don't want to trust their marketing, then here's [arstechnica.com] a review from Ars Technica. And if you still want to complain, go use vi or emacs or even notepad.
Amigori
Re:Bad decision (non standard software) (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.octave.org/
Re:wow, MS is brilliant (Score:2, Informative)
Bzzzzt! Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for playing.
Re:Why does no one ever mention AbiWord? (Score:2, Informative)
For tables see:
http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/merg eCells.png
Martin Sevior
AbiWord Developer
Re:wow, MS is brilliant (Score:3, Informative)
There is a way you can create PDFs from *any* program, and with all free software too:
Adobe's free PostScript printer driver [adobe.com] to output to PS
Then GhostScript and GhostView [wisc.edu] to quickly convert the PS to PDF format.
This is not true. (Score:5, Informative)
"The legal profession still relies on it - your lawyer uses WordPerfect and most legal forms are available in that format."
This is absolutely not true.
Now, you may definitely argue that a larger proportion of the legal community relies on WordPerfect than does the general office community. However, the legal profession itself does not rely on WordPerfect.
My father is a lawyer. I set up his law firm's computers. I've known many other lawyers and set up their law firm's networks. What you said was true 3-5 years ago, but most of them have now switched to Word.
And as for legal forms being in WordPerfect format, with the hundreds of legal forms I have had to use, they have been in one of three formats:
a) Hard Copy (as in, a piece of paper that you have to use a typewriter to type on)
or, more often,
b) PDF
or
c) a proprietary format that has to be used with a $5,000-$50,000 piece of crappy software.
ALL of the government forms that a law firm needs are in PDF. Most of the other things that lawyers used to get in hard copy (for instance, the legal books that you see in their offices) are now available for a subscription fee via sites like FindLaw.com [findlaw.com]. About 50% of the forms that come through a lawyer's office are hard copy, 40% are PDF, and 10% are proprietary, and honestly, I haven't seen a WordPerfect law document in years. Most of the hard copy ones are saved directly to either Microsoft Word or PDF via Acrobat, so the number of hard copy forms will continue to decrease.
From reading your post, it sounds like you haven't encountered WordPerfect in a couple of years, either, and are basing your opinions on what you saw a few years ago. The Internet is becoming quite integral to any lawyer these days, and as such, the number of non-Word proprietary formats for documents is decreasing rapidly (especially since there was a huge government initiative to convert everything to PDF.) Thus, your post was accurate as of a few years ago, but is no longer the case.
Re:WP is flat out better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is there something missing? (Score:2, Informative)
WP's uses... (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft has put a lot of money into funding schools (especially smallish schools) under the condition that they'll offer classes primarily requiring MS Word for their document format. I used to be the Assistant I.T. Manager for one of those small schools and I was the one who constantly got harassed by MS salespeople making such offers. (It should be noted that the school folded under the pressure of MS's marketing less than three weeks after I left, and I really can't wholly blame them. They needed the funding badly.)
MS has been trying for years to make Word the de facto standard for Word processing, especially in younger people. That you say what you did the way they did means that they're slowly succeeding... damn it.
Sony VAIO's comes with word perfect (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Microsoft Works vs. WordPerfect Office pricing? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course Corel is charging less for PerfectOffice than MS Works. Otherwise why switch?
That's the beauty of the whole situation. The computer industry has finally got to the point where the hardware OEMs have no choice but to start cutting costs in the one area where prices have refused to drop, software. HP and Dell have historically been too scared of Microsoft to switch to the less expensive software vendors, but now these companies don't really have much of a choice. The fight between Dell and HPaq has gotten so fierce that they no longer care what Microsoft does. Besides, if Microsoft pushes too hard both of these companies might become interested in really ramping up their Linux efforts.
Re:WP is flat out better (Score:2, Informative)
You can do most things in Word with the keyboard, and can create macros and remap things to your whim. You aren't FORCED to use the mouse, but the mouse is there for you to use if you are fluent with it, and to "discover" things via menus and right-clicks, etc.
Also:
by doing things it wasn't asked to do (and of course, cannot be undone)
More utter lies. You can turn off any auto-assisting feature you don't like, and you can always undo any automatically applied formatting. ALWAYS. And the XP version has gotten even better about this, by not getting in your way so much by default.
And if typing speed is really a problem (you must have a slow computer), you can always type in draft mode, instead of page view mode. Much faster. And I doubt you could out-type it.
Re:Victory... NOT! (Score:2, Informative)
1.) Microsoft bought Corel stock, a lot of it, proping them up right before they caved in
2.) Corel suddenly cuts it's entire Linux program, both it's port of Word Perfect and Corel Draw for linux, and it's Debian-based linux distro
3.) Microsoft either got worried it looked bad, or realized how badly Corel was still hemmoraging money, DUMPS Corel stock.
Microsoft no longer owns Corel stock.
Re:Why not Open/StarOffice? (Score:3, Informative)
Partly. Partly it's inertia - a result of the fact that law firms usually have a tremendous investment in standardized templates for legal documents, and have no particular desire to reinvent the wheel by switching to Word. And partly there are solid technical reasons why legal firms stick with WP, like the amusing collisions between MS Word and Rule 32 [kentlaw.edu], which is admittedly not so funny if you've been burned by Word's misbehavior.
And there are a host of reasons similar to that - see this article [llrx.com] for a long laundry list of common complaints about Word from legal users...
Re:Profit Margins (Score:3, Informative)
Of course not. My rule of thumb is to knock off enough MHz from the CPU you think would be cool to have, to cover the cost of doubling (or more) the amount of RAM. For common tasks, this makes a huge difference in performance. That's the advice I give to everybody who makes the mistake of asking me, and then they look at me funny.
I wonder if this is some screwy cost-saving measure?
Gee, I have no idea! But I have a gut feeling that it is.
Your point is valid - I forgot about the stupid amounts of RAM manufacturers ship their low-cost machines with.
Re:Upgrade Costs (Score:2, Informative)
the only added functionality I needed was the ability to work under the operating system I had bought to fix the Microsoft glitch of not recognizing AMD processors in Win95 that were faster than 300MHz.
Umm.... Microsoft did release a patch for this problem [microsoft.com].
Typical slashdot missed point. (Score:1, Informative)
In this case, Word (which wasn't mentioned in the article at all) is in the Title of the article.
Let me just clarify something. According to the article, HP is going with Corel WordPerfect instead of Microsoft Works (not Works Suite which includes Microsoft Word) for their HOME systems.
It's a different market. Personally, I don't use any Office suite at home. As I work on one at work (some software company in Washington), I don't feel inclined to be constantly reminded of my work at home.
You're missing "negative revenue" (Score:2, Informative)
More than one item (*cough*xbox*cough*) in your list may be a loss leader, or just seem to act like one.
so then... (Score:1, Informative)
are you still using an ancient sh because bash's (or zsh's, etc) command history and tab completion will ruin you as a sysadmin?
What Full Version? (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no it doesn't. Works Suite 2002 does. MS Works 6.0, however, does not. Works Suite 2002 is a new and different program (I think it's designed to replace Office - Small Business Edition). MS Works, which is a fraction of the cost of Works Suite 2002, has always included scaled down word processor and spreadsheet - it's only recently that those two applets have started res. Trust me - I've been using Works since version 2.0 in the DOS days. It never has, and never will, include a full version of Word.
Wordperfect vs OpenOffice (Score:2, Informative)
I try to avoid Corel (Score:3, Informative)
With that said, I'm glad to see Microsoft take one in the shorts, however small. Hmm, that works on two levels.
I agree with the multitudes who point out that OpenOffice might be a better choice, but then again, maybe they were thinking about liability.