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In the late 90's Corel experimented with the GNU/Linux operating system, developing their own distribution known as Corel Linux and porting their WordPerfect word processor to it. It survived from version 7 to version 9, but in August of 2001 the entire GNU/Linux project was cancelled at Corel and assets sold, thereby ending Corel Linux and WordPerfect Office for Linux. At the time WordPerfect was easily the most popular proprietary application for GNU/Linux, and the hole that it left opened the door for many people to switch to OpenOffice, StarOffice, AbiWord, KWord, TextMaker and others. Now with new leadership, Corel has come back with a proof-of-concept GNU/Linux rework of WordPerfect 8; this review will examine this proof-of-concept software as well as the new WP Office 12 for Windows to see just where Corel is headed with their office software.

It was the promise of WordPerfect for Linux that got me to switch away from Windows in the first place, about a year and a half ago. Being an avid writer I was a die-hard fan of WordPerfect 10 (2002) and I didn't really want to switch if I couldn't use it anymore. Unfortunately after I completed the switch to GNU/Linux I was unable to locate any Linux-related resources on Corel's site -- they'd taken it all down. News came of Corel's money problems and rumor had it that a $135 million stock purchase (about 20% of the company) by Microsoft Corporation had kept Corel afloat with the understanding that they would terminate their GNU/Linux business. I don't know if the latter was true, but given the situation and the reputation of one of the parties involved I would say that it's at least likely.

Not long after, Microsoft sold their shares to Vector Capital at a 90% loss. More recently Vector moved to buy the rest of the outstanding shares of Corel, thereby turning it into a privately held company again. Overall this is a very positive move because it prevents underhanded manipulation by outside companies like Microsoft (again), but oddly there were some who resisted the buyout. It's hard to tell what went on behind the scenes, but the results are obvious and quite encouraging: there is a renewed interest in GNU/Linux porting and now there's a new version of the superior WP Office for Windows.

It's All About Microsoft

One thing that has definitely changed is the market focus of the WP product line. Corel has already realized their niche markets (legal and government), and WP 10 and 11 seemed to pander specifically to them without regard for the competition. Good for lawyers and governments, but not necessarily so good for people who want to do other things.

It's been a little over two years since WordPerfect 11 was announced and released, but I never had the chance to review it because there was some mysterious reluctance to sending out review copies of the software at the time of my request. No surprise that there was virtually no press on WordPerfect 11 except for legal and government-related print publications. That tunnel-vision focus is gone and has now broadened to include small and medium-sized businesses and cost-conscious consumers looking for a cheaper solution to MS Office; specifically Corel's press and marketing materials for WP Office 12 tirelessly compare their new products to the new Microsoft Office System 2003. As far as comparing the entire suites is concerned, WordPerfect Office easily wins that duel considering the high price, anticlimactic feature set and mediocre reliability of MS Office System 2003 and the general superiority of WordPerfect as a word processor. Quattro Pro and WordPerfect are far more adaptable and customizable than Excel and Word are, and the tools and guides built into the suite are much more powerful and capable. Business users will appreciate the more flexible licensing that Corel allows, even if it isn't anywhere near ideal.

The License

This deal is so sweet for Vector that it is barely legal. $124M is nothing for a company with annual revenues of $127M and 70M in cash. This is also the most illogical time to sell the company. The market is in the toilet, Corel shares are at an all-time low, Corel has plenty of cash in the bank, Corel has new product lines that have not been given time to prove themselves, etc. The whole thing looks very poorly thought out.

Nobody is forcing anything. Vector is simply making a tender offer.

And when a company goes private it doesn't disappear from "public life." Its ownership merely changes hands.

What makes you think that this carefully orchestrated takeover attempt is really voluntary?

If Netscape sued MS and received $800M over what was essentially a no-revenue market to start with, wonder what a company which held over 50% retail marketshare in the massively profitable Office suites market only couple of year before the Netscape suit could sue them for? In Corel's case the shareholders have long been asking for such a suit to materialize while the management is completely in Microsoft's pocket. Guess how to solve such a dilemma? Get rid of the shareholders of course!

In this case if Vector and MS win and they're allowed to take Corel under you can bet that for all purposes the company will truly disappear from public life.

I appreciate their work on WINE but other than that, good riddance, you danced with the devil and now you have to pay the price. Let this be a lesson to anybody would thinks MS is their white knight.

If there's a lesson here it's one where the management of a public company can be threatened and bribed to do Microsoft's bidding in order to keep their jobs a little longer while everybody else loses. Mr. G. W. Bush should be real proud of his appointee John Ashcroft's laissez-fair approach to antitrust violations.

It is exactly because of these opportunities that MS donated their venture capital friends the stock that enabled them to launch this hostile takeover. If MS had done the disposal directly themselves it might have been a little too obvious and even embarrassing to their friends at the US government.

Corel Rescue and MS Connection

Maybe your schadenfreude is aimed at the wrong people. If Corel Rescue fails the only people laughing will be at M$ and their cronies.

Corel Rescue and MS Connection

Maybe your schadenfreude is aimed at the wrong people. If Corel Rescue fails the only people laughing will be at M$ and their cronies.

Good to see that they lost their shirts on their Corel stock. Maybe that's why they never handed out dividends. Pricks.

MS lost, what, $120M when they dumped their Corel stock, but by dumping it to their venture capital friends they're making sure that Corel will never again erode the profitability or marketshare of another MS product, ever. They also stopped all the Linux projects at Corel to their tracks and so forth so this little interlude probably earned them BILLIONS instead. But why worry, this is alright as long as no American company is being taken under by a foreign monopoly.

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

Naturally, McKinsey also happens to have a long-standing and very intimate business relationship with Microsoft as consultants to their strategic planning. It should therefore be noted that Robert Uhlaner, the McKinsey executive partner who had been working as a consultant to Microsoft and who had "led the West Coast Corporate Finance & Strategy practice, supporting the firm's technology clients on strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), alliances, and premerger planning", was given a top executive position at Microsoft in February 2003, in which his aim is to "increase strategic alignment between the Microsoft's finance and business groups". That pretty well sums up what happened to Corel between the Microsoft investment and disinvestment, in just 2½ years! Questions arise as to what involvement Mr. Uhlaner had, officially or unofficially, with the Microsoft-supportive strategic advice given to Corel in late 2000 and early 2001, or with Vector's friendly and private purchasing of the Corel shares Microsoft held, which happened almost immediately after his arrival to Microsoft.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx t

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

Naturally, McKinsey also happens to have a long-standing and very intimate business relationship with Microsoft as consultants to their strategic planning. It should therefore be noted that Robert Uhlaner, the McKinsey executive partner who had been working as a consultant to Microsoft and who had "led the West Coast Corporate Finance & Strategy practice, supporting the firm's technology clients on strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), alliances, and premerger planning", was given a top executive position at Microsoft in February 2003, in which his aim is to "increase strategic alignment between the Microsoft's finance and business groups". That pretty well sums up what happened to Corel between the Microsoft investment and disinvestment, in just 2½ years! Questions arise as to what involvement Mr. Uhlaner had, officially or unofficially, with the Microsoft-supportive strategic advice given to Corel in late 2000 and early 2001, or with Vector's friendly and private purchasing of the Corel shares Microsoft held, which happened almost immediately after his arrival to Microsoft.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx t

I think you mean Michael Cowpland - who, interestingly enough, has voiced an opion and considers the Vector buyout offer "pathetic".

Corel shareholders fight suspicious takeover deal

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx to merge their technologies into the project codenamed Deepwhite. Great idea but with somewhat misguided execution.

In 2002 Corel managed to strike a few high-profile albeit limited OEM preload deals with the likes of Dell, HP and Sony. While Corel received little in terms of revenue from those deals, even that limited success must have come as a shock for Microsoft. "How dare those ingrate nobodies invade our holy turf!" could have been the likely reaction at Redmond. With the anti-trust spotlight under a friendly operator it was time for the final strike, and how better add insult to injury than by not just taking Corel out but actually keeping the corpse within the family!

In December 2002 the Paul Allen financed Vector Group, managed by a fo

Corel shareholders fight suspicious takeover deal

Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.

It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.

From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx to merge their technologies into the project codenamed Deepwhite. Great idea but with somewhat misguided execution.

In 2002 Corel managed to strike a few high-profile albeit limited OEM preload deals with the likes of Dell, HP and Sony. While Corel received little in terms of revenue from those deals, even that limited success must have come as a shock for Microsoft. "How dare those ingrate nobodies invade our holy turf!" could have been the likely reaction at Redmond. With the anti-trust spotlight under a friendly operator it was time for the final strike, and how better add insult to injury than by not just taking Corel out but actually keeping the corpse within the family!

In December 2002 the Paul Allen financed Vector Group, managed by a fo