 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group The Perfectionist Ray Beatty raybea@melbpc.org.au |
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The WordPerfect User Group is a bunch of dedicated, hard-core users. They make up a very different composition from what you find at the Melb PC. For a start, at least 70% of the attendees are women, thoroughly professional word processor users. No wimpy rodents for them - these are real touch-typists who would finish copy-typing War and Peace before you had waded through reading the introduction. They've been using WordPerfect for years to produce their companies' newsletters, catalogues, technical manuals, scientific manuscripts - you name it. And in their company or department each is the de-facto IT expert.
Not So Perfect
Well, a few weeks ago we sat in the Practical Training computer lab discussing WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows and the talk rapidly degenerated into a WordPerfect bitch session.
The program is too slow; TextArt and Draw take too long to invoke; the manual has gaps; having to use the mouse is a pain in the tail; the damn thing keeps crashing; so many of your cherished macros don't convert - and most importantly, it's getting harder to resist the boss's desire to switch to MS Word because he's under the influence of the relentless Microsoft marketing machine, and he doesn't know anything about computers anyway.
Hearing all this brought about a great sense of deja vu. You would have heard this same conversation five years ago when WordPerfect 5.0 was launched. Now that was a real horror of a program - crashing every time you tried to spell check, hanging if you tried print preview, being generally erratic in its behaviour and responses. It was simply too ambitious and too under-cooked for release, but they brought it out because - as usual - pressure from Word had become unbearable.
It was about a year later that WordPerfect 5.1 came out, and bingo! here was the perfect word processor. No bad habits, solid as a rock, fast as a bullet, with a wonderfully simple macro facility that positively encouraged you to write macros because you could do it in seconds. This was the program that 5.0 was meant to be, had it not been prematurely delivered.
Well the symptoms I see now are awfully familiar. To be fair, WPW 6.0 is a remarkable program in its sweep and ambition. It has gone into territory where no word processor has successfully trodden before. And the faults are nowhere near as bad as those of 5.0. But as always, when 99% of a program works brilliantly and then the last 1% crashes your machine, it's that last cut you remember.
I've learned to set my automatic backup to two minutes and do the bulk of the typing in draft mode. In the Users meeting there were dark murmurs that Microsoft had left some crucial facts unexplained to WordPerfect, and this was the cause of the slow speeds and frequent General Protection Faults. But then we figured, with their combined programming muscle in Utah, WordPerfect should be able to reverse engineer Windows and figure out where Word gets its speed from. Besides, as the bulletin board tag lines will tell you, everything slows down for Windows.
Supposedly, there is an interim release in the wind (6.0a) which will fix most of the problems. This has been expected since before Christmas and has now taken on cargo cult dimensions. The last notice I read said it would come out in the first quarter of 1994, which means their maths has also gone awry. It may even appear between me writing this piece and its publication. I just hope WordPerfect deliver soon and this time they've got everything right. In the meantime - well what more can I say except, this column was written with WordPerfect 5.1?
The End Of The Free Lunch
It was inevitable that WordPerfect's legendary standard of support would eventually become such a financial burden that they'd have to start charging for it, especially in these days of high competition and low margins. The new system started at the beginning of April, softened by some fancy titles.
Classic Support is what you get for free. You no longer get a live human, instead there's the WordPerfect BBS; plus a dial-in service called "SpaceWorks" which allows you to search WP's data base; "Faxback" where you can select from a range of faxes on the most frequently asked questions; and a service where you can report suspected bugs.
Silver Support is similar to what we're currently used to. Now we'll get it free for the first three months from buying an application or upgrade, after that it will cost $250 a year. Or you can pay by the incident (not necessarily per call) at $30 each. Gold Support is designed for corporations at $10,000 a year for two contact people. Platinum Support is more of the same but with 24-hour, 7-day support for four contacts at $25,000.
The Horse's Mouth
Members were able to express their dissatisfaction at the May monthly meeting when Bruce Lakin, the new General Manager of WordPerfect Pacific came to Melbourne to address the Group. He was refreshingly relaxed and candid for a chief executive. He readily admitted that 6.0 was released prematurely with too many bugs, and he's hoping like hell that 6.0a will stop his phones ringing off the wall. He's sorry about the end of free support, but someone has to pay for the 45 support people sitting in his office and there isn't the margin in software to cover those costs any more.
The good news is that since the merger with Novell, we'll be seeing more sophisticated networking with the well-polished WordPerfect Office being used as a front end for Novell networks. The new company will also have Quattro Pro and a million Paradox site licenses. What this means is that the popular suites like Borland Office (which was last month's major raffle prize) will be able to offer more flexibility - you won't have to take only the four programs in the box, but could chop and change according to your real needs.
The bad news is that WordPerfect will probably, eventually become just a brand name in the Novell stable - Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastion did a share swap which gave them 15% of Novell, but they have lost control.
But here in Australia things are looking bright. Bruce Lakin joined us after the meeting and ventured into Stalactites restaurant to join us for the venerable Waffle SIG. To his credit, he looked relaxed as he absorbed our democratic ways, with the honourable Pres expounding the merits of Coonawarra Reds in his barristerial baritone, while across the table "Dirty" Dave Mitchell cheerfully opened beer bottles with his teeth.
They both had wins: Pres coaxed the WPP boss to give us a WordPerfect site license and several copies of the program for our training rooms; while Dave, after declaring that he had never used commercial word processors but enjoyed games, was given one of WordPerfect's new games software releases.
The company built its reputation on listening to its user base; being helpful and supportive; always being willing to go that extra mile. If it is to survive the big shake-ups to come it will need to maintain this agility.
So far, the signs are that it will.
Reprinted from the June 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
