Orem, Utah Ð As part of a move to concentrate resources on a common code base, WordPerfect Corporation has told its NEXTSTEP customers that it will halt future development of WordPerfect for NEXTSTEP.
The company said it will issue in January a new release of WordPerfect for NEXTSTEP 1.0.1, which will fix bugs and improve support for internationalization. It also said that it will continue to sell and support the product, which runs on Intel and Motorola NEXTSTEP systems, until January 1995.
It will, however, discontinue work on a NEXTSTEP version of WordPerfect 6.0, its current release for DOS, Windows, Macintosh, and other platforms.
"WordPerfect has enjoyed a good relationship with NeXT. However, the bottom line is revenue and resources. After a full evaluation, we concluded that we could not justify continued development," said Nathan Hatch, product marketing manager for WordPerfect.
"We are naturally disappointed by WordPerfect's decision, but we have applications such as Pages and WriteUp (see "Two writes, one wrong") that will support the WordPerfect file format and provide customers with native word processing on NEXTSTEP," said Julie Saffren, NeXT's manager of developer relations.
In phasing out of the NEXTSTEP market, WordPerfect joins the list of cross-platform software developers, including Lotus and Adobe, who have reversed their early commitment to NeXT.
"This is a blow to cross-platform information sharing under NEXTSTEP. What it does is make SoftPC that much more significant," said Jeff Kwam, associate director of information technology for Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) in Chicago.
Besides its NEXTSTEP systems, SBC manages a variety of other personal-computer and workstation environments. WordPerfect is the standard word processor on all platforms in use at SBC, Kwam said.