Corel Office Suite

edited February 2017 in Software
WW has one offering here:

https://winworldpc.com/product/corel-office

The description mentions Borland but leaves out the short stint when it was called "Novell Perfect Office".

Novell was bent over from the cash it carried on the books back in the heyday of PC to PC netowrking. They bought a lot of stuff, and one of their purchases was the Word Perfect Suite from Borland - who themselves jut a year earlier had been awash in cash, but the founders owner - Phillipe Kahn - let his wife run it into the ground. He in fact only purchased the Borland product lineup from a small tribe of Danes.

In 1995, Kahn last everything - through a messy, "inside job" divorce. He was 43.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2001/0709/128.html

And then Novell sued Microsoft for deliberately sabotaging their OS so it didn't run as well as Microsoft Office.

Which was true, but it didn't help that lawsuits are expensive and that the networking community was migrating to Winows NT and away from Novell because, among other things, applications like MS Office did set up easier and run better on NT

Each of the intermediate owners brought something to the product - Borland especially with Quattro Pro, and Novell with Groupwise.

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Comments

  • Thanks for pointing that out. I guess we don't have Novell's Perfect Office yet. Some of this is already mentioned under Borland Office: https://winworldpc.com/product/borland-office-20

    I recall researching that a bit a while back, but it was so darn convoluted.
  • To add to the confusion, "WordPerfect Office" was also the name of a high end scheduling/e-mail program from WordPerfect Corp in the the late 80s and very early 90s. Nothing to do with the word processor.

    https://books.google.com/books?id=dOj3N ... 22&f=false
  • If I ever knew about WP Office - I've long forgotten. So who actually put together the first integrated suite?


    The one thing about Novell is they had that same red/white color scheme across all their products. Those Netware boxes looked really sharp sitting on the store shelf. I/we sold them to people who didn't have a clue and probably never opened them.

    Personal Netware was all the rage.

    A curious aside: The first person Kahn's ex dated after the split? Bill Gates.

    I looked up Kahn today - he's worth 2 billion. Not too shabby for losing it all.
    EDIT: Another thing I have to throw in here: sometime after Corel got ahold of WP, and when everybody had a Java Suite offering - Corel released a complete version of WP Suite written in Java.

    And I got to say, many many people knew it was coming and it was like when LOTR was released.

    Java was going to change the world. Wasn't just Sun saying it either.

    And once it was installed - sit and wait. Looked good - kind of like when we migrated from Win 7 to Win 10. But you waited, and you waited some more. IIRC, Corel gave the code to the Linux boys and yes, that's when corel got out of Linux.I think it was that very product that sounded the death knell for Java as a replacement for traditional compliers.

    Symantec exited, IBM too.
  • Well what do ya know? I just found "Novell PerfectOffice 3.0" on a magazine Cover disk. That's how it goes - look for one thing, find another.

    Don't know if the serial found elsewhere will work on it.
  • Today I see that a CD-ROM of Novell Office with German and English Trial editions was upped here:

    https://archive.org/details/NovellPerfe ... sionGerman

    I looked at the directory for the English version. It has different file totals and sizes, I do not know what that means in practical terms.

    With the trial version I have is a readme that instructs one to use "TRUTRIAL" when asked for a serial.

    I have found the following serials for both the STD and PRO editions:

    Novell PerFect Office Pro v3.0 for Windows: s/n: 1PP30XW0019293

    Novell PerFect Office Std v3.0 for Windows: s/n: 1PO30XW0001011OZ
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