Computer Associates International Ltd last week called a press meeting to promote its new financial modelling software product, which has lost its exclamation mark at the end and gained a CA at the front end to become CA-Compete. Compete! was the key product acquired when the Garden City, New York software supermarket bought most of the assets of ManageWare Inc (CI No 1,600), and to talk about its new strategy for the venerable SuperCalc spreadsheet package, which is now 80% cheaper. The company has decided to set a precedent with CA-Compete, which runs under Windows 3.0 on IBM-compatible personal computers, and will in time be adding Windows capabilities to all of its personal computer packages – these products account for 20% of Computer Associates’ $1,300-a-iear business. CA-Compete is out now, from the company’s UK sales outlets, priced at a daunting UKP3,000 per user. Meanwhile, SuperCalc5 for MS-DOS has shipped 15,000 copies since its price was slashed to UKP80 from UKP400 in November (CI No 1,565). But poor Computer Associates is feeling got-at by the UK press – the company insists that it dropped SuperCalc’s price purely for the benefit of its users, and can’t understand the press cynicism. The company does admit, though, that it hopes to stamp out piracy of SuperCalc with the drastic reduction in price. Three new third party add-in programs are now available for SuperCalc5 – CalcPrint, CalcFinance and Interactive Data Access. Deltasoft Ltd’s CalcPrint is a laser printing add-in for use with Hewlett-Packard Co Laserjet-compatible laser printers, costing UKP40; CalcFinance, also from Deltasoft, is a financial calculation tool which costs UKP300; and Sure Systems Inc’s Interactive Data Access 2.1 enables real-time access to Informix Software Inc, Oracle Corp and Ingres Corp relational databases, and costs UKP630 for the minimum of eight personal computer users. SuperCalc Version 5.1 details of which are still withheld – is sceduled to start shipping in June, and existing SuperCalc5 users will be able to upgrade for UKP25, while new customers will pay the full price, unchanged at UKP80. SuperCalc for Windows should be out sometime later this year. One further promotion for SuperCalc5 is a new upgrade path for non-SuperCalc customers – users of competitive products can now upgrade to SuperCalc5 for a one-off price of UKP45.
