Corel Sells GraphicCorp Division

Zalgon 26 McGee writes: "Corel has announced the sale of their GraphicCorp division to Hemera, according to a report on CBC News Online. Is this just another step in Corel's death spiral? A way to hide assets from creditors? Or some of the bold leadership Corel needs to find their way again?" Weren't we asking the same questions last week?

Comments

my uninformed opinion

[penguin_nipple]

Cash strapped and confused as Corel may seem, this move would appear to me to be a consolidation and focusing of Corel's main products (those being WordPerfect Office Suite et al.)

In fact, having a former life in the photographic industry, I could never figure out what Corel was doing in the stock photographic / images business anyhow. The quality of their libraries were fairly well below the industry normals in addition to some fairly draconian and muddled contract agreements.

In particular, there was an instance where a former employer of mine used some Corel stock images for their catalog. The photographer who actually took the shots summarily attempted to sue my former employer. When Corel was contacted, we learned that certain images in the library were still property of the original artist.

This caused us some deal of confusion since this is not the not the norm for stock photographic images.

This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel), its about time they started dumping their ancillary business and focusing on software development, rather than services like stock imagery.

Re:What is really significant for Corel this week.

[Arker]

Honestly, I don't think StarOffice will have that much of an effect, GPL or no GPL. As others have pointed out, it's an absolutely enourmous codebase, and while Open Source has a great track record on projects suited to it (such as the kernel itself) you only need to check out Mozilla for proof that there are some projects it isn't as well suited to, and it is no panacea. StarOffice looks a lot more like Mozilla than Linux to me. At best I expect that if StarOffice is GPLd it will be a boost to projects like AbiWord that will be able to cull it for useful snippets.

Quattro is of course not affected by the Borland merger falling through, but you know that by now. Quattro and WP itself are IMOP far superior products to the M$ competitors, that have been beaten rather badly solely as a consequence of M$ marketing clout resting on control of the OS. Their strategy of trying to produce an end-user friendly linux distro and convert Windows users to Linux (knowing full well that their products simply by virtue of being commercial are unacceptable to a good chunk of existing linux users, and that the people that could be customers are not going to be that eager to change operating systems) is a ballsy move, and I am honestly a little disappointed you seem to want to give them short shrift. Win or lose, they're fighting the good fight against Redmond, and you have to admire that.

I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble getting WP working, but the earlier version that I have here works just fine, I can't help thinking this must be a problem particular to your installation. Admittedly I don't use it that often (I'm a text editor type not a word processor type by inclination, and I also avoid using proprietary software when I can reasonably avoid it) but it is very handy for converting word documents, and adding formatting to text before printing it out, and I've certainly gone well over 4 pages in it. With my link I won't even attempt to download StarOffice, but I have had occasion to use it on another machine, and I must say I was singularly unimpressed. Big (enourmous actually) slow clunky and not at all in the same league as WP. Maybe the subset of hackers that really want an office suite will find it usable, but I don't see many secretaries finding it usable - or many financial officers wanting to write big checks for hardware upgrades to run it at an acceptable speed for that matter.

Finally, I want to say that the programs in the WP suite are far from Corels "unique advantages" - but I have to admit at the moment that statement may be fair. That's what they have on Linux right now. If they can survive a few more months we may see far bigger stuff ported though - things like CorelDraw, Painter, Bryce, and Ventura. WordPerfect is a toy compared to Ventura. The GIMP is great for basic graphics manipulation, but it's no Corel Painter. And I can't think of any Free Software that even attempts to be comparable to Bryce. Truly professional level painting, 3d modelling, and DTP programs are things that the hackers can and will live without, but they are also things that a great many offices cannot. These offices will therefore have no choice but to continue to run Windows or Macs if Corel goes down.

Given all that, I honestly don't see your position here. And I usually find myself agreeing with what you write.