[rant] The road to Windows 3.0 was one paved with reasons to never load the damned thing. Windows was slow. Wordstar was moving into version 5.0 blazingly fast on my AT. Why bog everything down with a graphical user interface when I could actually get things done with tools that work?

Two products lured me into Windows before 3.0 was even available: Samna's Ami Pro and Corel Draw. Besides the Mac, Ami was the first to produce a printed document that actually resembled the onscreen images. It has since been pounded into the virtual ground by superior Microsoft Word, but Corel Draw created and still owns the vector graphic design market.

For a science major, vector graphics design are extremely comforting. All the objects drawn on a page are represented by mathematical equations -- none of that pixel based messiness. This makes the objects extremely easy to grow, shrink, or stretch, thereby giving the designer a high degree of flexibility without loss of resolution. Corel embraced Windows early which meant worrying less about the GUI and enabled focus to be on interaction with vector graphics. To date, no one has wrestled that market from Corel. And, that success appears to have gone to their heads.

In early 1996, Corel purchased Word Perfect from Novell for a cool $186 million; of which only $11 million was cash. A sweet deal, considering Novell purchased Word Perfect for $1 billion. This instantly created a new contestant in the Office Wars, a battle everyone felt that Microsoft had already won. Guess again. The upgrade price for WordPerfect Suite for Windows 95 is a meager $99 compared to Microsoft's $219 for Office. Bold moves like this have given Corel a leading share of the desktop suite market. And Corel keeps on going.

Apparently, Corel believes that they can do anything. The company already owned Venture Publisher, a page layout program, when it recently purchased the source rights to Borland's Paradox for Windows. Add to that a Java implementation of their Office suite, a series of video games, and rumors of a hand-held computing device And you've got a company that thinks it�s Microsoft.

So where is the money coming from? Corel lost $3.2 million in the third quarter of 1996. It helps that Corel CEO Michael Cowpland runs a lean organization, he doesn't even have a secretary, but he's going after Microsoft's cash cow -- Office represents about half of Microsoft's profit. The phrase "price war" hasn't even been mentioned and there is already talk that Corel has put itself in debt with its current Office push.

The epitaph on Corel�s Corporate tombstone may read: "Microsoft doesn't often lose."