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Corel Claims That The Worst Is Over
Navarre writes: "Looks like Cowpland is on spin control now. Our least favorite Linux representative is now claiming that all's well in the Ottawa-based Corel. The story is here. Supposedly $25 mill in the bank and stable. Funny, but I just heard more people here in Ottawa had been laid off. Go fig. I hope Cowpland's correct though, since I have a friend trying to get work there." Maybe one of these days I'll write a huge feature on why Corel's financial difficulties had nothing to do with their Open Source strategy.
I have to say that as regards Graphics & Illustration CorelDraw8 is second to none. I haven't used Freehand or Illustrator since I discovered Corel 3 and haven't looked back.
True, photopaint is a poor substitute for photoshop, but it's got quite a few nice features and with a little more effort on intuitive features it would win my vote.
Plus the pricing of corels products is excellent. As a student I think I can now buy their entire product line for a few hundred quid.
Also I wish they would get a move on with Linux versions because much as i like linux, personally I dont think it has enough application support to use as a Desktop OS, and corel do seem to be the only large vendor making inroads with this.
I really do feel sorry for corel and the position they are in, and i'm pissed the proposed Borland/Inprise merger fell through, because that would really have generated a company with all the market sectors to rival microsoft... and enough dominance to slowly break down microsofts 'standards'.
Whilst CorelLinux has a long way to go, what with a decent set of graphics and office apps from corel, decent RAD development tools from Borland & Gnu, decent Interface from kde/gnome, and windows binary compatibility from wine - we'd have everything to start attacking M$.
Corel can't market their way out of a paper bag. They've got ugly ads, ugly packaging and lowball pricing that undermines confidence in the product.
Add to that a product strategy that seems to involve implementing features nobody ever asked for because they have orphaned technologies lying around, while leaving gnawing feature gaps intact year after year.
They're a slowly sinking ship. Their brand is synonymous with rescued orphanware, with shovelware, and with high-end software that only amateurs buy. It's one thing to be a niche vendor. It's quite another when the only niches you dominate are for word processing software for law offices, and graphic designers who have no money.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm not heading out to buy Corel stock because they say that the worst is over. I think that if Corel wants to let everyone know that they're going to make it, they need to go out there and prove it.
kwsNI
They recently merged their CVS trees with the wine developers as well, and credit them in all of their Linux ports, which is extremely cool...
I've seen replies tout that in order for a company to get into "our" good graces, they will have to run to open source... in my opinion, that is total bullshit. Yes, it has been proven that an "open-source-centric" business model can work. The company that will survive however is the company that can adapt for example:
IBM scrambled to get Windows on their Netfinity servers, for those companies who insist they cant use anything else... but they are investigating, behind the scenes how to have these same servers compatible with other OSes, therefore whenever Microsoft cannot provide that foothold into the market, they get dropped like a hot sack of potatoes (now whether or not Microsoft will get to this point is another discussion).
Apple, in all its wisdom, realized that if they want to give everyone access to that one of a kind user experience they will have to make their major product (the MacOS) more general purpose, so they made the kernal (which has got a lot of people excited) open source, to bring in a fresh perspective. Of course, Steve would run Apple in the ground if Aqua were also totally so!
One thing we have to give Microsoft credit for, is when they realized they were behind, that something explosive was about to hit the scene that they didn't have, they ran to ensure that they would provide it first, regardless of whether or not they would have gotten to that point as soon. They adapted, and the companies that couldn't adapt with them ("ahem! Assume the kiss ass position!") got separated like chaff in the wind and suffered greatly.
Corel still has a few ropes to learn about who and what they want to please as well as how quickly to adapt. Hopefully they are on the right path. There are things I have like about WP that I wouldn't want to go away, but to be improved, it will be interesting if they listen.
Nuff Respec'
DeICQLady
7D3 CPE
Virtually every market Corel plays in is a market dominated by another company, relegating them to a poor number 2. Their platform strategy has also been very uneven.
For instance:
Corel WordPerfect Office: on Windows it competes with Microsoft Office. Unlike MS Office, Corel's product evolved from two separate companies' products (Borland Quattro and Paradox, WordPerfect) and really never had the advantage of good integration during the critical days before Microsoft locked up the suite market. Not to mention that they bought the WP Office product from Novell who had failed with it, and WordPerfect before that.
CorelDraw: It's probably their best stand-alone product, and the software they made their reputation with. But it's really tough nowadays to compete with Adobe and Macromedia (Illustrator and Freehand), not to mention that Corel's Mac support has been lacking (they alternate between neglect and religion), and the draw market is one where cross-platform compatibiliy and parity have always been critical.
Corel PhotoPaint: See CorelDraw. But it's Photoshop that croaks them there.
Corel Ventura Publisher: Another formerly market-leading product that waited too long to improve, got croaked, and then bought by Corel.
On Windows, Corel had a few good products, but got hurt by some QA issues (buggy releases of WordPerfect and CorelDraw in the past), and they specialize in marketing products that are all past their peaks. They killed off the cross-platform support of WordPerfect (one of WordPerfect's competitive strengths was that it ran on virtually every platform, now it runs on Windows and Linux - the Mac version and all the other platform versions are dead). They pinned all their hopes on a rapid transition to Linux, which has yet to happen. And they'll probably run out of cash before it happens.
Something else that's an issue in the death of a company is perception. People now see Corel as doomed - and their limited cash is forcing them out of events like PC Expo and MacWorld where they could at least try to make themselves look viable. Not to mention that their advertising has dried up, making it worse. I just hope somebody with a clue winds up with these products after Corel hits the FC hall of infamy. The only thing that might turn it around at this point is if Cowpland steps down and puts somebody in with tons of credibility in the industry. Novell got a few very good years with Eric Schmidt (though they're slipping back some now that Win2K is out of vapor), and Jobs saved Apple. I'm not sure who could bail out Corel, but it's sure not Cowpland and they're running out of time fast.
I give Corel until New Year's. Max.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
"A la Mozilla" hmmmm.... that great open source success story
Think about it, Corel would get a lot of kudos
You can't meet creditors' demands with "kudos". Creditors want cash, now. Even if this were a great long-term move, the long term doesn't matter much if you're dead in the short term. Giving up a source of cashflow could even be criminally negligent, given a bad court day.
from the open source community,
Who are notoriously bad customers. They want free software, free MP3z, free everything, and half of the bastards even use junkbuster to make sure that not one single penny of revenue will be squeezed out of them.
they could quickly have the best word processor for Linux
Well, I didn't want to mention Mozilla, but you brought it up .... despite what Eric Raymond says, development of a new word processor is neither necessarily fast nor necessarily "the best". What they'd get would be YA open source project, full of people with no experience in word processors busily reinventing the wheel.
and other (non MS) platforms and then they could start edging back in to the Windows market.
In the meantime, paying the wages with magic beans, or perhaps with wooden nickels? And the whole point of MS Office is that you can't "edge" into the market. People want compatibility between applications, and that means all or nothing.
The Open Source panacea is more like Laetrile than penicillin, I fear.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
It installed pretty much without a hitch on my Compaq Armada 1590DMT Pentium 166MMX 48megs laptop. However, initial experience has been somewhat disappointing. It's been much slower than Windows 95 (which really surprises me) and Word Perfect looks like MSWord97's bitch. Unless I got a stripped down version, WP sucks (lack of fonts, features, options). Hopefully, Star Office will be an improvement. Also, little things, like not being able to turn off "tapping" for the touchpad make this user's experience less satisfying.
It looks like I'm going to (reluctantly) continue using Windows as my primary OS. I HATE Windows, but when it isn't crashing, or slow, it does what I need my computer to do. Linux (Corel Linux, anyway), just doesn't seem quite ready. For someone who does no programming, isn't running a server, and doesn't need a multi-user environment, Linux feels "not quite ready for prime-time." I fully intend to learn more about Linux - try other distributions (recommendations?), watch it grow, but for now, I'm stuck using Windows. Damn.
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--Hey Doctor Jones! No time for love!
I'm constantly amazed at the number of posters on /. whose answer to everything is open sourcing something. I have nothing but respect for both open source and Free Software, but realism dictates that open sourcing one of the few applications that Corel actually manages to sell decent volume of, "wouldn't be prudent at this juncture."
The problem is, Corel isn't a Linux company. Tack on a "yet" to that last sentence if you believe, as many do, that Corel will be making Linux a topmost priority. Corel is a Windows applications company, and in the Windows world, the idea of open source or Free Software hasn't taken hold yet. Few in the Windows world, for instance, would pay for WordPerfect Office Suite if they could download it for free, while in the Linux world there are many people who would purchase their favorite distro in a boxed set even after they've downloaded it. Windows users are too used to having to pay ungodly high prices for every piece of software they own, to give much thought on how to compensate a company which has just given them something free. Software is still very much a commodity, a good to be purchased, to a typical Windows user--if you don't make him either go to the store and buy it, or enter a credit card # for a paid download, but instead let him freely download something, you're not going to get any money even if he uses it every day.
As for businesses, they wouldn't pay for a WordPerfect Office Suite which they could get for free, either. Unlike Linux companies as service companies, Corel wouldn't have any services to offer--office applications are pretty damned straightforward; there's little configuration to be done, and even a clueless newbie can figure out a word processing proggie in record time. In other words, Corel would have no source of revenue from WordPerfect Office, whereas now they have a small-compared-to-MS Office but still very tangible cashflow from it.
Netscape/Mozilla was another matter, entirely--there was essentially little choice but to open source the browser, since Microsoft was now giving one away for free and very, very few people were buying Netscape any more. Therefore it made economic sense to give away what you couldn't sell, anyway.
While it would be nice if Corel would open source WordPerfect, and it would benefit both the Linux community and all users in general (MS Office sales would start taking a huge dent, yay!), it wouldn't be in Corel's best interest to do it, and so there's zero chance of it happening unless Corel gets bought out by a *real* Linux company.
On a side note, I applaud Corel for their attempts to make a Linux distro easy enough for a Windows user to transition to, but they made things damned complicated in order to do it. I installed Corel Linux 1.0, and when I couldn't even get X to load in standard SVGA mode, I decided to just uninstall it. That worked, but left their customized version of LILO in the boot sector, the fancy graphical menu version Corel made, and it hung my machine when it realized that Linux was no longer there. I couldn't boot the damned thing at all, and no keystrokes in the world could bypass the thing. Finally I had to install Mandrake 6.1, whose own normal copy of LILO bypassed Corel's monstrosity, and then my system could boot again. Corel, be careful until you have more Linux experience...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*