I live within 10 minutes walking distance from the old WordPerfect campus. I visited them several times with laptop in hand to demonstrate serious deficiencies in their then active Windows offering. By that time, many of their programmers and support people had been fired (some my close friends) and most offices were empty with the lights off. Meeting with a top level support person and a programmer manager, their response to me was that not enough people were reporting the problems I clearly demonstrated to move that bug to the top of the fix list. That was well over 10 years ago.

Since that time, Novell sold the WordPerfect products to Corel except for Groupwise, which was the only WordPerfect product they were really interested in. While Novell owned WordPerfect, they did almost nothing with developing anything for the product. Corel has improved on WordPerfect but HAS NEVER ADDRESSED the problems I brought to them years ago and which problems persist. More recently, Corel published WordPerfect 10 which broke the font handling engine in WP11, WP12, and WP13(X3) which worked properly in WP9. (I have to have both WP9 to get my work done and WPLatest loaded on my computer to access the latest features). They acknowledge the problem having discussed the font handling problem with them using phone, FAX and e-mail. They refuse to fix the problem or even commit to ever addressing the problem.

I continue to be a WordPerfect user. I also use MS Word. MS Word cannot hold a candle to WordPerfect for the sophisticated user. If one wants to write simple letters or reports, WordPad is fine enough and is totally free from Microsoft. That is the great Microsoft secret. Word has great deficiencies and significant design mistakes. WordPerfect is without equal even with all its flaws.

WordPerfect really only needs to do two things: 1. Fix the existing and long standing problems and 2. Publish the Linux version of WordPerfect that has already been done for many years and is just sitting on the shelf. One can only guess why Corel has not chosen to distribute the Linux version. Perhaps the fact that Microsoft at one time pumped millions into Corel at one of their hard times may have something to do with it. Perhaps the fact that a San Francisco venture capitalist with Microsoft ties has bought all outstanding shares the entire Corel company for under $100 million with the intent of reissuing the stock may have something to do with the non-Linux distribution as well.

One could conclude that Microsoft wants enough of WordPerfect around so that complaints of monopolistic practices are mitigated. Whatever, WordPerfect is an obvious killer application for Linux but is apparently not going to see the light of day.