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Ventura needs to be more than just an excellent piece of software. It needs to be more than just equal to or better than its competition. It needs to win back former users and win over non-users. Its custodians need to work twice as hard to overcome the five-year malaise the program endured.
In other words, Corels job is only half-done. It has restored the software to levels worthy of prominence, and now it needs to recapture that prominence. Now that Corel has made Ventura worth saving, here is what the company needs to do in order to save it:
- Define its niche: Ventura lives in a phantom zone between the enormous graphic appeal of CorelDRAW and the huge but vacuous shadow of WordPerfect. It might be the new reality on Carling Ave that WordPerfect is the top dog, but it neednt be a black hole, sucking everything else into it. Before it can effectively market Ventura, Corel must recognize those publishing projects that only Ventura can handle. To bill WordPerfect as the do-everything application is insulting to both camps of users.
- Go to Market! And once defined, Corel needs to market Ventura as it hasnt so far. Again, the top priority with Corels leadership is to revitalize WordPerfect, not Ventura. DRAW can weather this lopsidedness for a few quarters; Ventura cannot. Corel cannot subscribe to the theory that if its team builds it, they will come. They wont.
On this front, I have some good news to report. In May, Corel agreed to place an advertisement for Ventura 7.0 into a 100,000-piece mailing going out to DRAW users. With so many DRAW users turning to PageMaker and Xpress for their DTP needs, Corel can look to its own family for potential Ventura users.
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