Corel WordPerfect Gets Some Justice

Back in the late 1980s when word processing on a PC became de rigeur and companies like Wang and Data General began the long slide to oblivion, WordPerfect Corporation was the market share leader. WP could do an awful lot of page layout once you learned the secret codes that control text and paragraph attributes. The alternative was using very tedious and unfriendly programs with a graphics user interface like PageMaker on an Intel 286 16MHz processor. But as Windows and Microsoft Word rolled out in ever-improving versions from Redmond, WordPerfect lost share in the 1990s and was eventually sold off to Corel Software in Canada.

One of the strong vertical markets for WordPerfect was legal, primarily because WordPerfect listened to lawyers and did things like line numbering pleadings and making legal document formatting easy.

So it is with some justice (pun intended) that WordPerfect wins a 50,000 seat order at the Big Lawyer, the U.S. Department of Justice -- which respects the first amendment rights of bloggers should they be reading this. Corel bid $40 a seat per year for 5 years, plus services and training to bring the contract value to $13M. At one-third the bid price of Microsoft, the accountants at Justice saw a good deal.

Peter S. Kastner