HP's shift underscores a race among consumer PC makers to cut costs from their software budgets. Currently, Pavilion PCs come with a choice of the full version of Office XP or Microsoft's stripped-down consumer alternative, Works.Ĭorel is discussing possible expansion of the deal with HP, said Steve Houck, executive vice president of strategic relations for Corel, including options for adding WordPerfect to the Presario line of consumer PCs that Hewlett-Packard picked up in the Compaq Computer acquisition. The Productivity Pack is a "productivity suite," similar to Microsoft's Office, that includes the WordPerfect word processing application and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet program. Under the deal, all Pavilion desktop PCs will ship with Corel's WordPerfect Productivity Pack starting next month. HP is currently the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world and commands more than half the U.S. The deal, announced Monday, marks a significant win for the scrappy Canadian software maker. Hewlett-Packard is booting Microsoft Office software from its Pavilion line of consumer PCs in favor of software from Corel, as more PC makers consider cheaper Microsoft alternatives. Corel has experimented with touting the suite for network computers and as a Java alternative. Novell then sold the program to Corel in 1996. As an independent company, WordPerfect competed against Microsoft for years before being bought by Novell in the mid-90s. WordPerfect is also a familiar Microsoft antagonist. "It's happened with Apple, it's happened with other people."
"Microsoft takes up so much space, you're going to compete at the same time as you cooperate with them," Houck said. Houck said there's nothing contradictory about Corel competing vigorously with Microsoft, despite Microsoft's $135 million investment in Corel, which gave Microsoft a 24.6 percent nonvoting interest in the company.
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