Corel has quietly dropped the word "Office" from the name of its suite of productivity apps based around WordPerfect. The new suite, due to ship at the end of May or beginning of June, will be called WordPerfect Suite 8 and will ship in standard and professional versions. Suite 8 includes WordPerfect 8, CorelCentral (a Sidekick-based PIM with email, address book, telephone and whiteboard conferencing, and a scheduler), Quattro Pro 8, Presentations 8, Netscape Navigator, and other utilities. The professional edition will also include Paradox 8, a website authoring tool, and time management software.
CorelCentral may not make the ship date because it is based on Netscape's Communicator, which will not be ready by then. Early purchasers will be get this component via mail or the Internet when it is ready. Corel is pricing the standard edition at $375 ($150 for upgrades). No pricing is available for the professional version yet, which is due in July.
The market for Office suites is pretty much a done deal: according to DataQuest's figures for 1996, Microsoft Office owns a commanding 87% of the suite market, while Corel's WordPerfect suite has a 6% share. Even Lotus, with 7%, is beating WordPerfect. Corel will attempt to raise their marketshare by allowing companies that purchase WordPerfect Suite this year to add additional licenses for the remainder of the year at no cost
