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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but Windows built-in ZIP support still blows a number of goats, which is why I use 7zip... and the latter is the real reason I'm gobsmacked that Winzip is still around. 7zip's not as pretty but it does support every archive format I've ever used or needed.

EDIT: Even more shocking: they own both WordPerfect and Quattro Pro both of which are, apparently, still around. Absolutely stunned.

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WordPerfect use to be favored my lawyers. This is a group that tends to stick to their tools. I dunno if their still using it but that's probably a pretty nice niche.

I recall reading that the reason it was (is) favored by lawyers was because WordPerfect did more accurate word counts in documents than Microsoft Word did. When lawyers submit briefs to some courts they have restrictions as to the maximum number of words contained in the document. Microsoft Word did things like count page numbers as words, thereby inflating the word count and reducing the number of actual words that could be in the document.

My dads office (attorney) uses it because they’ve used it since it was popular in the 80s. There’s not much reason to have them switch as long as WP continues to get support... it does everything they need.

I've seen WordPerfect on the shelf at a brick and mortar Fry's Electronics somewhat recently -- within the last year, I swear. I definitely did a double-take.

I installed WinZip on my PC a few years ago because it's the only archiver i'd found that let you view image thumbnails without extracting the whole ZIP, pretty cool feature.

A decade ago, one client at an old job required ZIPs be 256-bit AES WinZIP encrypted, which at the time meant WinZIP was the only option.

The employer was so cheap that they they didn't want to pay for WinZIP, so we'd wait n number of seconds before the file would zip. Then we'd wait n+1 seconds until it was an hour and a half wait.

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