![]() An aggressive marketing campaign kicked into gear, and the heavily loaded Corel WordPerfect Suite 7.0 for Windows 95 was released to great fanfare in May of this year. In what PC Magazine called the most notable American export to Canada “since Doug Flutie went to play in the Canadian Football League,” the Ottawa-based graphics software firm purchased WordPerfect and its associated programs from Novell for the reputed fire-sale price of $185-million (U.S.), of which only $10-million was paid in cash.Ĭorel doubled in size overnight and was suddenly head-to-head with archrival Microsoft. When Novell announced in mid-1995 that it was no longer supporting the product, many wrote it off, consigning it to the dustbin of software history. Novell’s stewardship of WordPerfect was less than stellar, and the program continued to slip into also-ran status. WordPerfect was wounded and could no longer survive on its own, and it was soon purchased by networking giant Novell for a reputed $855-million (U.S.). By the time WordPerfect Corporation had worked the kinks out, Microsoft Word for Windows 6.0 had slipped down the middle to take an insurmountable lead. Version 6.0 for Windows was notoriously buggy, crashed constantly, and often brought whole corporate networks down with it. And then came Windows, WordPerfect’s transition to the world of graphical interfaces, where pointing and clicking was shaky at best. ![]() Venerable challengers like WordStar were lying bloody and broken on the ground, and upstarts like Microsoft Word couldn’t seem to achieve sufficient critical mass to become viable. There were a few competitive products out there, but their market share was minuscule. ![]() It was called WordPerfect, and by the time version 5.1 was released, it had become the de facto standard for DOS-based word processors. Once upon a time there was a software package that was so powerful and so ubiquitous, it was almost impossible to compete with it.
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