Feb. 21, 2011
I have written on my decision to abandon WordPerfect after 30 years. //www.garynorth.com/public/7667.cfm
WordPerfect has a tiny market share -- under 5% -- that rests mainly on its existing user base, which includes mainly lawyers and government offices. I watched the product go from the dominant player in a huge market to a barely known also-ran product that survives on the remnants of its once-dominant position. It is a classic case of management that did not know what to do to keep pace with changing technology.
The product has only one major advantage over Microsoft Word (dominant) and Open Office (free): its "reveal codes" function. You can see what code is fouling up your document.
Corel sells an office suite. Hardly anyone buys it.
What could Corel do to make this product line profitable? It could do what Microsoft could do but never has, and what Open Office, as freeware, cannot fund. It should move to video training along the lines of www.Lynda.com.
WordPerfect should use its flagship word processing product to move people to its office suite.
Its office suite would be the only one with full-scale instruction videos. Access to these would be by subscription only.
If I ran a small conventional business, I would want a way for new employees to use the suite. I would not want existing staffers to train the newcomer. It costs too much money in forfeited time.
The company should give away WordPerfect. It should also give away the training, but only to people who register for an opt-in newsletter. The newsletter would offer a WordPerfect tip of the week.
The videos would be hosted by Amazon S3. They would not be open to the public on YouTube. The company would allow some 2-minute videos on YouTube, but only as hooks to get them to download the product and sign up for complete training.
The weekly tip would promote the office suite, or Corel's other products, such as its video editing software, which would also sell training videos on a subscription basis. The rival video editing products do not offer really good training, although Sony Movie Studio's built-in training -- not videos -- is pretty good.
The strategy is to sell that which is unique: top-flight, step-by-step training videos that make a new user efficient rapidly. This would lower the learning curve.
Free software is never free. It's expensive in lost time and frustration. How many programs are really intuitive? Almost none.
By selling the video training, Corel could get a stream of income from a nearly dead product line.
WordPerfect's word processor needs no updates. It needs training videos.
Will Corel do this? Probably not. Why not? Because it would take what software firms do not have: a commitment to the users rather than a commitment to its staff of programmers, who care about "neat" code, not satisfied users.
Steve Jobs cares about users. That is why he is rich. There has been no other leader of a major software firm with this degree of commitment.
What I am proposing is to spend money on third party producers of really simple training screencasts. Lynda hires them. But she sells only training, not software. I suspect that she is very rich. I hope so. She deserves to be.
Software companies do not really care about users' desires. They see users as a source of costs: customer support. They do not see customer support as a source of revenue, let alone their main source of revenue.
They sell software. They should give away software and sell training. They should sell solutions, not software. But it is very difficult for producers of products to see this. They are obsessed with their products' specifications, not users' specifications.
I watched successive owners of WordPerfect ignore these principles. They never had a business model to deal with Microsoft. Then Open Office arrived, and WordPerfect Office became an after-thought. Managements just kept doing things the same old way. Nothing worked.
Corel should think as Gillette does: sell razors cheap; sell blades constantly. Corel should sell training, not software. This sells solutions.
This strategy is counter-intuitive for programmers.
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.