Corel Breaking In to Microsoft’s Office Suite

Michael Cowpland, the championship-tennis-playing, Lamborghini-driving chief executive of Ottawa, Canada-based software developer Corel Corp., is taking a poke at Microsoft Corp.’s soft underbelly.

After acquiring WordPerfect from Novell at a bargain-basement price in January, Cowpland packaged it with Corel’s other offerings, including a spreadsheet, an information manager and other office software and began selling the whole suite for just $99.

In the last three months, Corel has taken about half the retail market for such suites, matching or beating the entrenched market leader in that category, Microsoft Office. Corel also has a jump on Microsoft in building Internet capabilities into its products, and last week announced a new office suite written in Java, the Internet’s unofficial programming language.

If Corel’s attack hits its target, it could hurt. Jesse Berst, editorial director at ZDNet, an Internet technology news service, says Microsoft gets more than 50% of its revenue from Office alone. “It’s the cash cow that’s funding all the other extravagances” such as Microsoft Network, he adds.

Microsoft doesn’t seem overly concerned. Corel has yet to make inroads into the corporate market, which accounts for 80% of office suite sales, says Robert Bach, a Microsoft marketing vice president. And next month, Microsoft will demonstrate Office 97, a significant upgrade of Microsoft’s office suite that includes the ability to create Web documents.