Is that a crack I see in the fortress of Redmond? In late August, 2002, Microsoft lost one of the biggest customers for its Office suite of applications. Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, is going to yank Office from its Pavilion line of home computers. Office has been usurped by the WordPerfect suite, a longtime rival produced by Canadian software maker Corel. WordPerfect offers most of Office's features -- but for about $100 less, at least in the shrink-wrapped version.
It looks like Mac users aren't the only ones rebelling against the high price of Microsoft. Indeed, HP said price was the reason it was swapping Office for WordPerfect. And it won't be hard to implement, given Microsoft's recent antitrust concessions. HP can now actually replace Office with WordPerfect on the Windows start-menu bar on its Pavilion PCs.
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