Corel's Secrets Out of the Box
December 1994
At a financial analysts' meeting on September 28th, Michael Cowpland spilled the beans, mentioning some of Corel's planned products for next year. The products aren't yet fully positioned, priced, or (of course) finished, but since word of them has leaked to the press, Corel has sent us a heads up which we thought worth passing on.
The first piece really isn't news. You can't be surprised to hear that at its next annual get together on June 1, 1995 (now a user conference as well as an art contest), Corel will roll out CorelDraw 6, an upgraded version of its high-end graphics and desktop publishing product, with even more enhancements to Ventura Publisher, its CD's, and its presentation software. You've grown to expect Corel to grow heftier and more powerful every year.
The surprise is that Corel has decided to become the first specialty application vendor to try to compete in the Suite market with a CD Office Suite with a strong graphics bias. The Corel Suite will be a Windows 95 product (they'd better pray that Microsoft ships by then), with strong integration to the new Windows 95 shell and some exploitation of the new intra-application threads (like multi-tasking inside your application). It will be available only on CD. Of course vendors like Corel have to recalculate their revenue plan for every delay in Windows 95.
The Corel Suite will include:
(1) A Windows Word Processor, which is based on a non-exclusive license of Word Star Version 2 for Windows, and which includes extensive desktop publishing layout features.
(2) A Spreadsheet which is an upgrade from the data manager charting function in CorelDraw 5 and is now being enhanced and maintained for Corel by a team of outside programmers.
(3) An Illustration-level graphics package, extracted from CorelDraw, kind of Corel for users, with all the goodies left in, but without the need to handle professional graphics arts chores like Pantone color matching and color separation to make it cluttered and confusing.
(4) Flow 3.0, an upgrade to Corel's recently released and already much-in-demand Flow 2.0 diagramming software.
(5) Presentation, Corel's presentation creation and show management software, "somewhere between PowerPoint and Astound," they say.
(6) Some utilities, such as a contact manager.
(7) A one-way viewer, permitting a Corel Suite user to export his finished work to any user, complete with the ability to view the results, regardless of whether or not the message recipient is similarly equipped.
We'd say this is a suite for a particular purpose -- creating and publishing graphics, compound documents, and presentations -- certainly a major part of office work, but not all that goes on. More to the point, offices are standardizing on one of the Big Three's Suites (Microsoft, Lotus, or Novell/WordPerfect), with issues like word processing, ease of all applications as an integrated set, and integration with electronic mail all big issues -- Corel offers none of these, since it's unlikely that a corporate user will toss out Microsoft Word, WordPerfect or Lotus Ami for a WordStar clone.
On the other hand, at the right price, and with the right compatibility to the standard Office Suites, this might be the best presentation and graphics platform the world has ever seen for professional users -- everything integrated together. It will all depend on:
• The functionality offered by Corel in the suite.
• The ease of use within each application and across the applications.
• The level of integration within the Corel Suite (interface and other)
• Compatibility with major desktop and data environments
• Pricing -- since this is unlikely to be the sole environment for most users, but rather an additional purchase
And, of course, it will need to run within a standard Windows 95 desktop environment (-486 with 8Mb), but we'd guess Corel knows that.
We are staying tuned for the next bulletin from Ottawa; we'll pass it along. Corel has been a powerhouse in the graphics market by giving us more than we ever dreamed of. Maybe they can figure out one more way to do it and have another smash hit as the market evolves from single products to suites.
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