Is this suite taken?
Gone are the days when all your applications came from differentvendors. Now, they all sit together in one suite - and not always toocosily. Chris Long tells the story.
One indication of how long you have been in the computer industry is the way you react to the statement: 'You could have the operating system and your wordprocessor on one 360Kb floppy disk'.
If your response is disbelief (or 'what is a 360Kb floppy?'), then you are new here. If it is 'yeah, I remember that' then you are officially an old-timer, and if you have just come to on the floor of your office, you are obviously too excitable to work in the computer business and need to see a doctor.
These days people just don't seem to want to buy single applications.
Generally speaking, the idea that you could get a wordprocessor onto one disk, with or without the operating system, is madness itself. Nowadays, if a customer wants to buy a wordprocessor it is as likely as not that you will also sell them a database, a spreadsheet, a presentations program and a tiresome office organiser program that sits on the screen and gets in the way.
THE BLOAT RACE
This is the office suite, which has become the trendy way to buy your main office applications. The term software bloat may not have been invented for the latest generation of office sites, but it's certainly a cap that fits. For example, a full install of Corel's WordPerfect Suite 8 takes upwards of 400Mb.
The idea of software suites is nothing new. Mainframe and mini users have always bought suites of software to run things like payroll and personnel systems. In the mid-eighties, the PC market had a couple of programs that 'did a lot of things': that is, they covered the ground of the traditional standalone wordprocessor, spreadsheet and database. One such program was SmartSuite (not to be confused with the Lotus program). This had application modules you either bought separately or all at once, and a number of users did both.
WHO SHARES WINS
But it didn't take long for people to work out that while each program performed all the tasks such as wordprocessing, creating spreadsheets and databases. WordPerfect was better at wordprocessing, dBase III Plus was better at databases and Lotus 1-2-3 excelled at spreadsheets. What the office suites did do was share data between their applications - crudely, compared with today's programs, but at least it was a start.
As individual applications from mainstream developers became more powerful and feature-laden, the fad for the 'no-name' suite abated. But the idea was obviously a good one and it didn't take the market too long to work out how to proceed.
Of course, it wasn't an automatic move to produce office programs. Most of the companies in the game didn't have a complete range of applications, which meant that only Microsoft could really provide a suite of applications under Windows. Lotus (before it was bought by IBM) had a spreadsheet.
In fact, it had two-and-a-half spreadsheet programs - Improv, 1-2-3 and Symphony - but it had no database or wordprocessor (unless you counted Manuscript, which few did).
Part of the equation came with WordPerfect. It did fine in the mid 80s, less well in the late 80s, and from 1990 onwards it was downright awful.
WordPerfect had developed a database and a spreadsheet (anyone remember DataPerfect and PlanPerfect?) but the rest of the world didn't believe it and refused to buy. This, combined with the fact that WordPerfect evidently hadn't got the hang of producing a Windows wordprocessor, led to Novell's buyout of the company.
Alas, Novell proved to be just as incompetent in application development as WordPerfect, if not worse, so it bought in Borland's main applications - the Paradox database (originally from Ansa Software) and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet. It got about as far as putting them all on one CD-Rom and then had a rush of blood to its corporate head and sold them lock stock and developers to Corel.
By this point, Lotus had bought in the Approach database from Approach Software and grabbed Ami Pro from Samna, and it looked like it could be a contender. Meanwhile, it will come as no surprise that Microsoft was industriously working away behind closed doors.
SUITE TALKING
The early attempts at office software were simple bundling exercises where companies sold standard applications in one box - which, because of the quaint idea back then of supplying manuals with software, was very large indeed.
After packaging all the applications in one box, the next step was getting them to talk to each other when they were loaded on the computer. This proved a lot easier to describe than to do.
In the meantime, a fad for cut-down office packages known as works programs came and went. These bundles were aimed at new users. Sometimes they would be no more than code resurrected from ageing or dead applications, welded together behind a new front end. The channel was flooded with them, but one or two people got their feet wet as users decided they wanted the real applications rather than the copies.
Now that the office market is comfortably established, users are tending to buy office suites rather than single applications. In the US, the office software market was worth nearly $11 million last August.
It isn't particularly surprising, then, that people are seeing their opportunity in this burgeoning market. Claris, for example, has done a sterling job of moving into the office market by the simple addition of the word Office to the name of its Works product. In the US, the vendor sells two products - ClarisWorks 5 and ClarisWorks Office. Over in the UK it's just ClarisWorks Office.
But while there most certainly is a difference between the two programs, it isn't in the applications - the difference comes in the 'productivity boosting' software bundled with it. Which sounds very much like this is a works program with ideas above its station. Is it?
Charles Kennard, recently appointed UK country manager at Claris, takes the idea on board. 'I guess ultimately the customer will have to make the decision,' he says. 'Essentially, the ClarisWorks product has all the features you'd expect in an integrated package. As well as a Web development tool, Claris Homepage, there is also internet capability.'
WORKISH DELIGHT
All the same, the product appears to have something to do with the works market simply because it has 'Works' in its name. Kennard insists that ClarisWorks is different. He says it was always considered better than other works programs and Claris is just building on that.
He illustrates this point by citing an experiment that Claris conducted.
'About a year ago we called the product Small Office in Italy and Australia, and it sold incredibly well. The feature set didn't change - it was just the association in peoples' minds.'
So there you have it, the power of marketing.
Despite the addition of the word Office, Claris has hit on an interesting sales pitch for its product that may (or, of course, may not) interest the market - size. Despite sounding like a recommendation from a marketing think-tank, Kennard seems to think it will work. 'The installation of ClarisWorks Office takes up less space than, for example, Microsoft Office,' he says.
He is immune to the suggestion that this is expected since it is a Works program. 'My view is that the way in which people are working is changing,' he says. 'Whether you choose to label this market small business or something else, there are now a lot of people who I would define as mobile workers, and I would position this product at the laptop user, for whom space is an issue.'
A relative newcomer which definitely isn't playing the size card is Corel.
The vendor's WordPerfect Suite 8 is getting good reviews in the US. But Microsoft owns the market, so why bother?
'We believe we are offering a viable solution,' says Neera Panchmatia, communications manager at Corel UK. 'Not only a viable solution, but a solution that people want to hear about. They are interested to know that there is an alternative and that they aren't obligated to buy a Microsoft product.'
Given that Microsoft still has at least 80 per cent of the market, the users may be interested. But not that interested.
Panchmatia is stoic. 'What we have to do is concentrate on areas of the market where people are already using WordPerfect,' she explains. This means concentrating on government departments and the legal profession, which between them make up over 65 per cent of its users.
BUNFIGHT AT OK COREL
Panchmatia says that current WordPerfect for Dos users are moving to Windows 95 with the Corel suite and saving on training and data conversion costs. And, given the fact that there are about 25 million WordPerfect users out there, this isn't a bad way of going about it.
It also explains why the package is branded WordPerfect Suite 8. 'The professional edition of version seven was called Corel Office Professional,' says Panchmatia. 'And moving on to version eight, the product is now called Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 Professional. We are definitely leveraging the WordPerfect branding recognition.'
The other problem Corel is facing at the moment is the lack of a serious UK presence (it is currently based in Canada). Panchmatia insists that the company will have a UK office established soon. Some of its sales staff are already based in Reading and she hopes the new premises will be up and running before the end of the year.
Lotus doesn't need to build a presence in the UK, but it still needs a jolly good excuse to justify going up against Microsoft. Pam Mills, UK desktop product manager at Lotus, has a go at providing one.
'We have a huge installed base of products and large organisations using them. We believe that there is a lot of money out there. And if we didn't think it, we wouldn't be there.'
That goes without saying. But with Microsoft dominating the market, how is Lotus going to snatch away some market share? 'We will continue to advertise and do more awareness boosting so that people will know our products,' says Mills. Microsoft will no doubt be quaking in its collective shoes.
So what of Microsoft? David Bennie, product marketing manager for Office at Microsoft, is almost embarrassed by the vendor's position. Almost.
'Basically, we have increased our market share this year - something we are quite surprised at since we planned to be static,' says Bennie in a vague apology.
'We have had some stiff competition, new versions of Corel software, Corel dropping its price, and Lotus has been running its products through OEMs everywhere. We started the year with 82 per cent of the market and now Romtec has us down as having 86 per cent.'
It is a credit to Bennie's training that he sounds neither smug nor conceited, and he even manages to get something that sounds like surprise into his voice too.
OFFICE AND A GENTLEMAN
This is even more surprising given that Microsoft has had to get out Service Release 1 (SR 1) for Office 97, which has something like 8Mb of fixes. Doesn't this suggest Office 97 was a bit of a mess?
'I certainly wouldn't say it was a mess,' is the rather unsurprising reply from Bennie. 'The main problem was with the File, Save As command in Word,' he adds.
Microsoft, interestingly, appears to have forgotten the other problems that came with Office 97. For example, when used with Symantec's Norton Navigator for Windows 95, the software had a tendency to hang the PC and it could only be restarted after it had been powered off.
A WORD IN THE HAND
Microsoft generously owned up to the problem article in its Knowledge Base system.
'Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products listed (which was Office 97),' says a representative. Symantec released an update that switched off the parts of Navigator which were causing the upset, and it was around the same time that the Knowledge Base article seemed to disappear. Surely this suggests more than a simple problem with Word?
Bennie is not fazed. 'The main reason we created the release was for the File formats in Word, and there was also an issue with Outlook and Exchange - they were the key reasons why we did it,' he says. 'Obviously, we took the opportunity to fix some other known issues at the same time.' These and any other issues took 8Mb of fixes to sort out.
All the same, Microsoft has somehow won through and, if Corel's recent financial results are anything to go by, will continue to win through despite it launching an extraordinarily under-done release of Office 97 earlier this year.
The next releases are in the labs at the moment. Microsoft is guardedly talking about a natural language technology, Corel is talking about a Java implementation of its WordPerfect Suite and Lotus is talking about bigger and better programs. But unless there is a very big change in the market, Microsoft will continue to own it for a while yet.
Thus it would seem that the more things change the more they stay the same.
PLEASE STEP INTO MY OFFICE - THOSE SUITES IN FULL
COREL HAS TWO OFFICE SUITE PACKAGES ON THE MARKET FOR THE WINDOWS 95 AND NT 4 ENVIRONMENT - COREL WORDPERFECT SUITE 8 AND COREL WORDPERFECT SUITE 8 PROFESSIONAL:
Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 Corel WordPerfect 8 Corel QuattroPro 8 Corel Presentations 8 CorelCentral Corel PhotoHouse (image editing) Envoy 7 Viewer Bitstream Font Navigator Software Developer's Kit (SDK)
Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 Professional Corel WordPerfect 8 Corel Quattro Pro 8 Corel Presentations 8 CorelCentral Corel Paradox 8 Corel Time Line (project management) Corel Web.Site Builder 8 Deluxe 1998 Grolier Multimedia
Encyclopedia Envoy 7 Viewer and Printer Driver Software Developer's Kit (SDK) Bitstream Font Navigator
OF ALL THE OFFICE PACKAGES, MICROSOFT'S COMES IN THE MOST VERSIONS:
Standard Edition Word 97 Excel 97 PowerPoint Outlook 97
Office 97 Professional Word 97 Excel 97 PowerPoint Outlook 97 Access 97
Office 97 Small Business Edition Word 97
Excel 97 Outlook 97 Publisher 97 AutoRoute Express Small Business Financial Manager
Developer Edition
Full Office Professional Edition plus Access Runtime
Microsoft Replication Manager
Royalty-free Runtime Licences
Microsoft Graph 5
Source Code Control
Integration
Setup Wizard
ActiveX Controls
Visual Basic Programmers'
Guide
Building Applications With Microsoft Access
Office Model Object Reference
Guide
Valuable References including
Microsoft Developer Network and
Mastering Microsoft Office Development Preview
Sample Code and White Papers
Home Essentials 98 Works 4.5 Money 98 Encarta World Atlas 98 Entertainment Pack Puzzle Collection Word 97
LOTUS HAS JUST THE ONE FOR WINDOWS 95 (IT ALSO HAS A SIMILAR VERSION FOR WINDOWS 3.X)
Lotus SmartSuite 97 (currently shipping with IBM's SimplySpeaking dictation system) Word Pro Approach Organiser 1-2-3 Freelance
AND CLARIS HAS A SORT OF 'OFFICE LITE' ClarisWorks Office ClarisWorks 5 (an all-in-one program that integrates word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and database) Jain Business Basics HomePage Lite Internet Connection.