Do you need to use WinZip? Well, you've got to pay the price!!

It looks like the good times can't last forever - and the acquisition of WinZip by Corel will set a new era of compression technology.

During many years, WinZip has been a recognized standard of file compression and its users were not forced to pay for enjoying the benefits of this program (you could pay for it if you wished to). But as Corel has taken WinZip's reigns, from now on it will be mandatory to pay a fee to use the program. According to non official sources, the cost of the new WinZip 10.0 will be of $19.95 USD, and if you wish to get the package containing WinZip Self Extractor and Companion for Outlook, it will cost you about $45.95 USD.
Is this a wise move by Corel? I think that buying WinZip Computing was wise indeed, and maybe demanding a payment for its usage is a clever step as well, but for how long? Anything can happen, and it's possible that .rar files will become more popular from now on, making WinRar a hard and free competitor for .zip files. After all, Corel is a company that distinguishes itself for its wrong management strategies and mistakes, so we'll have to wait and see what's next in WinZip's struggle against WinRar and similar programs.