Novell, WP

[James Knott]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 11/17/05, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 08:26:10PM -0500, William Park wrote:
>>> I still don't understand why they sold WordPerfect.  They could've
>>> ported that to Linux, and everybody would be talking about Novell's WP
>>> instead of Sun's OO.  In fact, Novell could have owned GUI desktop on
>>> Linux.
>> In my opinion WP never survived the transition to a GUI.  The 5.x
>> versions for windows were awful, the 6.x series in general were awful,
>> and the 7.x series (once Corel took over) were only slightly better.
>> The 4.x versions for Amiga were not exactly successful either and the
>> users there looked at the text program in a window and wondered why
>> someone wanted over $500 for that, when for under $200 they could buy a
>> nice WYSIWYG word processor, although one with a lot less lawyer
>> features than wordperfect (although not being lawyers, most users didn't
>> care about the missing features, and prefered the features they gained
>> and actually used).
> 
> I think you're right, there.
> 
> I was never particularly keen on WP; its means of operations never
> agreed with me, as I had learned LaTeX instead.

Back in the DOS days, I used PC-Write at home and Wordstar 2000 at work,
though I occasionally had to use WP.  I never cared for it.  Didn't
think much of Word either.  On my home computer, after switching to
OS/2, I used to use Describe, which was a very nice word processor,
verging on desktop publisher.

Nowadays, I use OpenOffice at home and work, even though my work
computer came loaded with both MS Office and Lotus Smart Suite.  I've
been asked a few times, how I managed to produce PDFs.  ;-)
I've convinced one co-worker to switch to OO.

I also recently installed OO on a friends computer, though she already
has Word and Word Perfect.  She hasn't used it enough yet, to offer an
opinion though.  She definitely prefers WP to Word

Another friend installed OO.  He also has both Word and WP, and doesn't
like Word.

Incidentally, one thing I do, is keep a directory on my home computer
containing Windows versions of OO, Mozilla and Java.  I'll then make a
CD of that folder and give it to someone who shows some interest in
moving away from MS software.
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