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What, no MSOffice? US DoJ re-equips with WordPerfect

Is Corel picking up on the soft targets or what?

Corel's winning streak continued today with the news the US Department of Justice has signed a three year deal with the company for WordPerfect software for its 55,000 staff. But before you ask, no, Windows is the platform - the software is WordPerfect Office 2000 Standard and Professional, rather than WordPerfect 8 for Linux. But we can still speculate about what might happen the next time the DoJ needs to do a wholesale platform upgrade. Look at it this way; if the DoJ had at this juncture decided to equip all of its staff with Microsoft Office 2000, we would have had something of a massive PR own goal for the outfit that's busting Microsoft, would we not? So you could say that it's a pretty soft target for Corel, which ought to have been a shoe-in even without the traditional preference of legal outfits for WordPerfect. The same sort of thing might of course happen the next time the DoJ needs to upgrade its PCs, but don't count on it. Its trial pitch was that Microsoft holds a monopoly of PC operating systems, and very little time was given to consideration of an apps monopoly, so if it finds itself buying Win2k a year or two down the line, well, it can always claim 'told you so,' and bitch about having no choice. ®

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