IE9... Will It Suck?

[A Black Falcon]

Word Perfect!!?!??! Son, did you just emerge from the 80's? That program started with windows 3.1.. And died a horrible death about 5 years ago..

Huh? Windows 3.1? Actually, WordPerfect was at its most popular in DOS, not Windows... Wordperfect 5.1 was the best word processor of its day, and was the best DOS word processor ever. The Windows versions are just as good or better, MS just crushed it with their marketing machine I think. The first version we owned was WP5.1 for DOS. And while Word (always a far, far worse program) won, unfortunately, WP is still a fine word processor still being made. The newest version I have is just Wordperfect 12, which is from 2004, but there are newer versions, of course, and it would be nice to upgrade, WP12 doesn't have OpenOffice file support, and I'd like it if I could open OO files in WP, because I do have some OpenOffice files. I mean, sure I could save them as Word documents in OO and then open those Word (97-03 or whatever .doc) documents in WP and do it that way, but just being able to directly open the files would be better.

I used WP5 for DOS, 6.something for Windows, 10, 12... WP 6 for Windows 3.1 is a better word processor than any version of Word I've ever used. That was just an amazing word processor, I used it for years and years as my main word processor. I then used Word for maybe a year, because its lack of long filename support was getting annoying, but then I got WP10, and all was better again. WP 10 and 12 are pretty similar really, but both are fantastic. X5, from what I can see, looks like it's what WP always is, an incremental improvement built on the base of what Windows Wordperfect has always been, which is exactly what people like me who know it so well would want.

But no, to correct you, WP is still very much current. I may not have the newest version, WP X5, which just released this year, but I'd like to. It's even got PDF editing, that would be pretty cool to have, and as I said the version I'm using, 12, is getting a little old. It'd be nice to upgrade. :)

WordPerfect is such a great program, I think that if more people actually tried it they'd see how good it is. Word's only successful because everyone uses it, not because it's actually good.

As for popularity, I think that WP's popularity has been pretty much the same for the better part of fifteen years now -- it has its market, but Microsoft has the majority. I'm sure OpenOffice has hurt them a little too, but the same for Microsoft, and I'd bet that WP's popularity is pretty much about what it's been for a long time now. I've seen nothing to suggest anything different. Corel's not as big a company as they used to be, but it seems to be doing fine now.