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Microsoft Buys into Corel
Geek Boy writes: "Yahoo is one of the many sites with the story that Microsoft has purchased 24 million non-voting shares of Corel!" So now Microsoft has Word, and a big stake in Word Perfect. Hedging your bets ain't bad, course what will this mean for the Corel Office for Linux suite? And while they are non-voting shares, this looks like a huge percentage of Corel.
on the upside... at least they bought a bad one :)
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
The official Corel announcement can be found here.
There already is a Windows emulator that doesn't run on Linux or Windows. It's called Odin, and it has surpassed Wine in functionality.
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And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
There's a missing from your sentence.
-Pete
well its 1/4 of their stock that they picked up for around 75 million. not bad considering that is what it's chairmain makes in one tick of his MSFT stock
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
You mean small shuck of Apple. I was/is less than 1% for total shares. Just some money to let people know that M$ wouldn't drop Office for the Mac.
WordPerfect 5.1 would make a pretty sweet text-mode editor.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Living in Ottawa, I am glad that someone has helped Corel out, since having Corel shutdown would be a bit painful to the local economy. I can only wonder what Microsoft wants with Corel, though.
Thoughts that occur to me are:
- Microsoft needs competition, and having WordPerfect go away would be very bad for their Anti-trust suit
- Microsoft wants a decent-quality suite of drawing products (Microsoft frequently seems to buy technology and re-work it over and over until it's just right... Mostly)
- They certainly couldn't want Wordperfect or the WordPerfect suite.. It hasn't been stable since 5.1 (The last WordPerfect Corporation version of WordPerfect).
- Corel Linux (Debian) is uninteresting to them. Microsoft could have bought or built their own Linux distribution, with full MS Office compatibility if they chose. They didn't chose to.
- Corel's hardware business is all but defunct -- they couldn't want that.
- I seem to recall that Corel sold off the Clip-Art division a while ago.
I tend to think item #1 is the real reason this transaction occured, with #2 a second.
Currently Corel ports their windows software and run it on top of WINE. Being strapped for cash they can't afford to add .Net and expand the WINE API. [ No, $135 Million isn't enough to do both, IMHO.]
The net effect is that Corel drifts away from putting their products on Linux and fades from WINE project. No lawsuit necessary.
Like the saying goes "money talks".
You can also look at it as a leverage in case of a break up. In a break it would be in the development/OS groups best interest to have more than one Office suite player in the market.
Like the Apple deal I think this is a "win/win" sort of investment. Since the stock is extremely depressed , if Corel is sucessful and (no matter what path they take to that success) Microsoft wins.
Then they wouldn't really be non-voting shares. It may seem like it, but you can't just do whatever you want with stocks 'n stuff.
-Pete
w/o voting stock, I am sure that non of that could happen...
Well, _D_ebian isn't exactly a struggling competitor by any standard. Besides, they have no legal issues to be settled nor proprietary treasures that could be locked away as everything is released as genuine Open Source.
MS appears to take some 18 months or so between alphabets so we still have a while to identify the next competitor to be staked.
Hmm, wasn't _E_azel planning an IPO in not-so-distant future?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
In other news, Microsoft's share price closed today at US$59.12, which is less than 50% of their peak of US$119.93. In other words, the Empire has been cut in half. Employee Option holders should be a little upset about this.
And yes, I know that site was a prank. And one that's worthy of checking out; it can't be long until M$ shuts it down...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The alternative is letting Corel die, which would be bad for everyone, especially Corel. Besides, this is just Microsoft starting to find there's not nearly as much money to be had in vending within the software market as there is in investing in the software market. They stopped innovating long ago (if they ever started), but they'll reap the rewards just as well. It happened to Apple, and it's happening to Corel, but look how far Apple has gotten (ignoring its nosedive last week).
An investment by Microsoft does add some legitimacy to a company most were considering to be on its death throes. This is a good move.
-- Anne Marie
The second most important thing about this is that Microsoft gets to control the "bouncing" of Borland Paradox, which appears to be the nearest thing that there is on Linux to a competitor to MS Access.
There are all sorts of other opportunities for "paranoid delusion," notably that this might diminish the ability of Corel to continue to support WINE efforts as a technology that was independent of Microsoft.
Which is distressing if you were planning to put your millions of dollars worth of development effort into cloning Win32 software over to Linux via libWINE, but that sounds rather paranoid-delusional. There are probably as many millions going into that as went into cloning Win16 software over to unix via Willows TWIN...
I think I'll go with "Control over WP's Next Disposition" as the most likely value of this to MSFT...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Non-voting shares.. and only 24 million. Not that big a deal really in terms of what Microsoft can do with those shares. The more interesting question is why.
Well, Corel's stock is getting a nice price bounce. It closed at 3-11/16 but is now trading at about 7-1/8 in after hours. Can't wait to see what happens when the market opens in the morning.
Makes me really happy I held on to my Corel shares even when Linux started falling out of favor with the market. Of course, I miss when Corel was up over 30.
World Beach List, my latest project.
This is very true. And perhaps more on the business side, Corel has another 24 million dollars to play with, considering the low supply of money.
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It's my belief that my big balls should be held every night.
Hmmm. So if I read correctly, ".NET" is going to allow any language to run anywhere. Presumably through an API. Presumably through a Windows API. Corel has experience hacking the Windows API -- they've had to do it to get their apps to run on Windows, let alone their involvement with WINE.
And who's desperate enough to do MS's bidding on Windows API hacking? Certainly not the core WINE folk... but Corel is!
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Who thinks that Corel's new 'strategic partner' in Redmond will let Corel proceed with any kind of effective deployment of Linux on the desktop? This stinks to heaven.
No, they won't outright cancel it, that would be too obvious. They'll just get a little - defocussed. Yeah. That's it. Defocus them.
We can kiss Corel goodbye as far as Linux goes, and that's one big victory for the evil empire. OK, who's going to step up to the plate now, with a new distro to go head-to-head with Microsoft? Oh yeah. Sun. OK, Scott, your turn... fire two.
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
We shouldn't need a major share buyout to get interoperatability between major apps. If Microsfot stuck to open standards, or published details of new API's in the first place we wouldn't have a problem.
The only comfort I draw from this is that they are non-voting shares.
Er, no.
CorelDraw is *the best* vector graphics illustration program on the market. Illustrator notwithstanding.
Corel Ventura is *the best* long document publishing software available. Framemaker not withstanding.
Paradox is *the best* desktop-class database available. Access97 isn't even in the running, lousy piece of expletive-deleted.
Photopaint is *in the top two* bitmap graphics illustration/art/manipulation programs available, despite it's weird interface. Photoshop notwithstanding.
WordPerfect is *in the top two* word processing/simple page layout programs available. And it does a decent job of SGML/XML. Word2000 notwithstanding.
Quattro is *in the top two* spreadsheet programs available. Excel notwithstanding.
Corel has an incredible product line... and an INCREDIBLE inability to market it! Plus, they shoot themselves in the foot every few releases by releasing unusably buggy shite.
They're *so* close to being great... but *so* damn bad at it!
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Woops! That should be 24 million shares, $135 million.
Apologies to BNL,
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Sorry if my "ahem" came across wrong. (bad confusing day). I was backing up what you had said, I didn't mean to imply something else.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Er, no. As a technical writer, I have extensive experience in both products.
WordPerfect is better. It's easier (but different) to use, and it is *far* easier to accomplish many things in WP: indexing, page layout, cross-referencing.
But Word is the defacto standard. Not because it is a better product, but because it was better marketed.
It's now at the point where Word has such dominance that one can't get away from it. It's like white cheddar versus that godawful orange-dyed chedder. It's not impossible to find real cheddar, but it's damn difficult!
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Here is a listing provided by Microsoft of Microsoft investments and acquisitions. It was last updated on 9/18/00 with the acquistion of Pacific Microsonics.
Hmmmmmm.
Corel Office Suite Java ==> Microsoft Office Suite in C# (C-Sharp).
It'd work, if they disguise the appearance of the products. They have very similar functionality. The Corel products would need to lose some functions (ie. "Reveal Codes") and gain some bugs (ie. "Losing track of captions and buggering the numbering"), but with a MSOffice toolbar and paper clip "assistant," I'll betcha it'd slip by most people...
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As someone who picks up stock in "dead stock" companies who still have okay products -- CORL, SGI, etc -- this is a big day for me. Time to start picking out a new ride...
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Now, did you really think that M$ dropped that suit out of the kindness of Bill's heart? (for the sake of argument, let's just say he had one)
Yes, you're exactly right. Microsoft's entire infatuation with XML has been in response to Java. They are trying to get the industry behind something that could get people away from this sick (from Microsoft's perspective) obsession with Java .class files and serialized object streams.
Yes, except that the most critical need for standardization (in Java and .NET both) are the
API's, not the language or the JVM. Microsoft
never truly cared about extending the JVM with
new bytecodes or adding syntactical sugar to the
language, they just wanted to dissipate Sun's
ability to define what class libraries software
would be written to.
Microsoft has no intention of standardizing that aspect of .NET any more than
they do of standardizing the Win32 API, and all
talk about the critical importance of standardization to the developer (and the horrid, horrid prospect of all programmer's being forced to use a single language) on the street
is all so much spin to try to cut Sun's legs
out from under them on control of API's.
Which, to be fair, is what Sun is pushing Java against Microsoft for. But let's not pretend that there is something magical about standardization of syntax when the stuff that software is actually built out of (classes) are not being standardized.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Is exactly the same "why" Bill gave those millions to Apple a while back.
"You see your honor, my client supports competition in the marketplace - they'd be losing money if these other companies went under. So in summary your honor, you can't split them up because they'd flood the market with all these shares and... oh - did I say that out loud?! In court?! (sound of running)"
Every share they own is another little hostage. Heh.
Yeah. It deserves the +5.
--fred
Bruce Perens never die. They are just casts to void
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Sometimes I wonder if Bill Gates pulls stunts like this just to amuse himself... then he sits back and watches as all the slashdotters come up with conspiracy theories.
Do you think that the guy Apple is suing for leaking pictures of the cube will be forced to buy apple shares ?
That would be painfull for him.
Cheers,
--fred
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No doubt this will get moderated into oblivion...
.NET is Microsoft's answer to Java. Before dismissing it out of hand, just because it originated from MS, keep this in mind:
All in all, it sounds like this is MS hedging their bets. Having a version of the .NET runtime available for *nix would mean that MS could start trying to lure shops using Java into the MS fold. If C#/.NET become formally standardized, given the number of open source developers out there, someone, somewhere, will do the hard work for them and make their environment available elsewhere (and everywhere...)
Meanwhile, while no *nix developer would think about corrupting their precious kernel to make .NET run any faster, MS has no such qualms. They will probably be tweaking Win2002 to get every last drop of performance from .NET, so they can point at Linux - and the open source supported versions of .NET - and say "See, you can even run your .NET solutions on these low-end systems; and when you're ready to step up to the big time, you can just move your apps over to a real enterprise OS..."
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Perhaps Bill Gates wants to ensure that Microsoft continues to have competition so to infer that a monopoly does not exist. Thus the reasoning to purchase non-voting shares.
Depending on the outcome of the court case and what they might determine/levie this could be viewed as a backup policy for Microsoft.
Then afterwards, after keeping corel somewhat fat, MS closes in for the kill.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
>"The two companies have also agreed to settle unspecified legal issues between them."
>
>Anybody happen to have an idea on just which legal issues they might be referring to?
Good question. It was asked by several reporters in the Q&A at the end of the conference call discussing the deal, with cheerfully evasive responses every time. It is worth a listen; at no time did Corel attempt to distance themselves from Linux, which would have been very easy to do at this point. Also, the embedded Real Audio player actually worked in Netscape 4.75 under Linux. Weird.
True enough. Heck, Microsoft brought us D0S, how could anyone possibly ever threaten such a l337 company?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Corel promised to support Microsoft's ".NET", whatever it really is. I have no idea how, and what will Corel do with its Linux software -- ".NET" is supposed to be tied to Windows.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm surprised not to find any mention of the fact that M$ killed off WordPerfect by bundling Word (a proprietary and arguably inferior product,) and is once again in jeopardy of having evidently engaged in successful anti-competitive behavior.
If Corel dies, M$ find itself in deeper water with the anti-trust case back on again. If they don't play nice, like invest big in Corel, there'll be a courtroom full of Ottawans who will gladly make the trek to heckle the M$ lawyers.
Remember how Word '97 couldn't read some files from earlier Word versions? If you wanted to read '97 files you had to update. Whether you wanted to or not or needed to or not.
This coming on the heels of having to update to the previous version of Word, not bcause you wanted to but because they were bundling enough copies with big enough clients that you ended up needing to switch because you couldn't read the files.
If I tried M$s sales tactics, I'd be in jail. And deservedly so.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
so now he ownes shares of redhat and corel, both people in the linux distro market
I GREATLY prefer WordPerfect because the data format is visible and similar to a script, with ordered "tags" a lot like HTML. Font change start in the wrong place? Just Reveal Codes, then cut and paste the tag where you want it. Word's idea of tags is a lot of silly tool tips that tell you very little about the actual underlying structure of the document and don't let you work with it.
In short, Mac:Linux::M$Word:WordPerfect; both sides have a pretty GUI, but only Linux/WordPerfect let you see and tweak the source. WordPerfect isn't Quark XPress, but it's light-years ahead of Word for precise and complex page-layout functions.
I sincerely hope this does not spell doom for WordPerfect, because it is a dramatically superior product to Word, at least for those willing to learn a few ropes. And it's a whole lot easier than LaTeX!
We can reduce ideas to bits and people to genes, but "can" does not imply "should".
If it's non voting stock that MS is buying,
then the title says it all.
Doesn't this mean that Microsoft is now paying other people to reverse engineer its own API? What a bizarre world we live in...
God Fucking Damnit
Microsoft is still going through the appeals process with the US government about their monopoly status. Corel, arguably one of Microsoft's largest competitors in both the Office Suite and PC Operating System markets, has been having Financial Troubles of late, resulting in the resignation of the CFO
It is in Microsoft's best interest to have Corel around, to be able to point fingers at
"See? We aren't a bad monopoly.. Look at Corel (who we own stock in), or Apple (who we own stock in)... There's no problem here"
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Colin Davis
M$ has done this before, Apple got quite bit of money from M$.
Why has M$ done this, any number of reasons. My personal hunch is that they wanted in on Linux, access to the coders at Corel and to the Wine project. Interestung to see which way they go, try and stifle WP and Wine or try and make them the best.
Do I see a pattern here? MS beats competition (_A_pple, _B_orland _C_orel etc.) to the ground before grabbing a stake in them, "settling legal issues" and leaving them on lifesupport so that everything looks fine and dandy to the gov't watchdogs. Was Corel's Office for Linux a real threat to MS, and what will become of Corel's Linux initiatives after this?
IIRC some state attorney-generals were planning (in '97, '98?) to sue MS for using the Windows monopoly to kill competitors to MS-Office, but that suit was put on a backburner when the DOJ managed to pull the AGs together for the browser/anti-trust case instead. Perhaps Corel didn't have the money to pursue that suit and settled for MS Airsupply instead. How sad, how MS.
Anyway, now I almost hope that Corel the MS-subsidiary would get out of the Linux space and leave the arena to companies and communities not owned by Microsoft.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
They also dropped $150 million on non voting Apple stock a few years back if I am not mistaken....
This was a rat's nest of under the table dealing.
Apple sold the stock, got some extra cash, and a guarentee of MS Word for the Mac.
Microsoft got the stock, use of patents, and IE as the default Mac browser.
The anti-trust case against them has nothing to do with whether there IS competition to Microsoft's products. It has to do with whether their business practices hindered competition and whether they used their monopoly status in one area, operating systems, to create a monopoly in another area, Browsers etc. IANAL and I'm far from being an expert in anti-trust law, but I do know that the issue has never been whether there IS competition, only whether they had hindered competition.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
MS needs competition on the .NET platform too. Without some competition their DoJ situation as well as public acceptance of .NET is at increased risk. Corel simply makes the next most competitive Office suite on Windows and MS needs it to be on .NET too.
/. have to have something to do with Linux? :)
.NET as a serious alternative to locally installed apps they also need stuff like a half decent drawing and painting programs. MS's own attempts at such programs haven't exactly been well received (understatement) - so who do they turn to?
.NETed.
IMHO, it has _nothing_ to do with Linux. (doesn't everything posted on
Okay, seriously, in order for MS to sell
Adobe? not a chance, it'll be a lond time before their heavy duty apps are
Corel's got the goods. Half decent programs marketed at consumers and seriously in need for some cash infusion and positive PR.
It was probably a no-brainer on both sides.
OFF TOPIC QUESTION:
Does anyone else think that Corel may be rethinking their Linux committment anyway? -- Their distro, rejected by core Linux users, and the OS on the whole still not ready for Mom & Pop systems - has left them with a costly investment that isn't showing any signs of making money in the near future.
Perhaps Eazl/Helix will have more success as the OS will have had more time to mature and begin to approach some semblence of (consumer-level)hardware compatability parity with Win9x by the time they debut their consumer oriented offerings. (usb, ieee1394, "soft" printers, DVD...)
--Aaron Greenberg
Looking at MS's Office suite of apps what is the one of the few areas that they don't really cover well .. graphics. I think Microsoft is planning on somehow integrating Corel Graphics into the Office suite to fight off the Photoshop's and Gimp's of the world. I think that Corel Graphics is much more important to Microsoft than any of the other incidental things they pickup .. wordperfect, Linux, WINE, etc.
I think what Microsoft is looking for is exactly what you said: to make other companies' products parts of their own. But I think you missed something very, very important.
Look back at Microsoft's history of "innovation." In other words, pretty much none. What they did is take ideas from competitors.
Do you see what I'm driving at? Without Corel, Microsoft has no real competition, and hence nowhere to take new ideas from. Without a constant stream of new ideas, they can't convince people to upgrade Microsoft Office every new release -- and so having Corel around is good for Microsoft's business, too.
Given that the United States Department of Justice and other US and Canadian government agencies (and the few remaining true diehard WordPerfect fans) have been helping keep Corel afloat, MS buying in is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider the facts; the former CEO has been investigated by the Toronto SEC as well as other former execs, near constant downsizing, reduced tech support for WordPerfect, negative press speculation, etc.... Some cashflow and a fresh CEO with some attitude may relight some fires in Corel's Ottawa kitchens. Ever since Corel bought the applications suite from Novell in the early 90's - things have been hard. CorelDraw is a good product, but you need more. Corel Linux bundled with the WordPerfect suite, CorelDraw suite and some good dev tools in an affordable mega-distro would be nice. If this can't be done, bring back WP5.1 -raw, plain, quick, and efficient. Now where is that damm spell check command?
Of course .. I meant Corel Draw not Corel Graphics ... (its been a long day)
Once they're split up, this oughta help "Office" Microsoft port their suite. :-)
MS helped bail out the mac a while ago, and nothing too destructive came of that. This does not mean anything for Corel, really. They don't have to listen to a non-voting member.
Only 25% Which would still make them one of the largest shareholders, if not the largest, but also not anywhere near the majority.
Maybe Corel turned the same screws that apple did? Otherwise, why would MSFT invest in them? Not just because Corel distributes Linux and has an office suite. Corel's a nobody in the Linux market, and Sun and Applixware also have office suites tht cost a lot less than Corel's while having the same amount of respect.
Seriously. There're plenty of other ways for them to get themselves into a "linux company" without drawing so much attention to themselves for doing so... I think Corel was going to bring up another lawsuit, myself...
n addition, both companies have agreed to settle outstanding legal issues.
Microsoft wants nothing of Corel... They just don't want to end up in court against yet another pissed off competitor...
I finally got to see this damn site at work under NT...it crashed both Netscape and IE on my Mac G3. Coincidence? Chance? Or could it be....Satan?
--.\\-H--
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
A smart move? A move this big is a major strategy play.
The NASDAQ listing shows Corel's Market Capitalization at $270.9 (US) when the announcement was made.
My first reaction was that this was begging for DoJ action: 24M shares * $5.65 = $135.6M or just over 50% of Corel: voting or non-voting, MS would become the majority profitmaker in Corel. Moreover, they can really hurt the other shareholders by selling ("MS does not feel that Corel policy is consistent with its own interests, and feels it would be better foa all in volved to divest its shares.") Slowly dumping *that* many shares could keep the price down long enough to make shareholders, financiers, and others lose faith (just one of the many ways that a big chunk of nonvoting stock turns into clout)
Fortunately, the press release was in CDN$ ($5.65 is close to the closing price on the Toronto exchange, and Corel *is* Canadian, after all), If that was existing stock, MS would own 1/3 of the 73.6M outstanding shares - but I doubt Corel has 24M shares in a closet somewhere, and they probably wouldn't give it all up at once if they did
CNET reported that the actual figure was 24.6%, suggesting the 24M were newly issued shared. Does Canadian law let a company issue a huge chunk of stock like that without shareholder action - or does this deal need to be approved?
This much new stock would dilute the ownership of all existing stockholders quite a bit, which might upset existing shareholders.
The pundits (and management) might have been worried about Corel, but shareholders can flee a stock fairly easily. There's certainly as much reason for optimism as at any time in the last 2 years, except during the failed Inprise merger.
I think most shareholders are in a stock because they are optimistic about it -- and now their ownership of the company has been cut by a quarter
(if you owned 1% of the company before, you, now own 3/4%, and the $.27/share profit in their 1999 10K405 filing with the SEC becomes $.20/share)
DISCLAIMER: I am not a corporate raider.
"But, it is well known, what strikes the capricious mind of the poet is not always what affects the mass of readers." -
Without Corel Linux, M$ probably would never have "invested". So, was Corel Linux a bold move that brought huge sales into a dying company or a slick move to get cash from M$ for a dying company? (like like apple)
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
I don't know why this was moderated as "insightful". Interesting, perhaps, but this is pretty much pure conspiratory speculation.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
They would have encouraged Cowpland to stay on as CEO and just let the company lay like a floundering tuna.
I doubt Microsoft cares too much about WordPerfect, it hasn't been a very popular product since before Windows.
Honestly, I don't see what Microsoft see's in Corel. Why would you bail out a company you intended to crush when they were doing such a good job at imploding by themselves?
The only thing I see is the CorelDraw and other creative apps.
Staroffice seriously sucks so that's not much of a problem.
No, MSFT doesn't want to be the only realistic office suite left standing right now in the midst of a "monopoly" litigation. And the 135G is pretty small potatos for MS.
Down the line, MSFT can let Corel just slip away or, who knows, Word for Linux?
Guessing: non-free Wine. Meaning only Corel can sell, meaning (possibly) no other distro can run it.
Then what would it run on? Windows? A Windows emulator on Windows? What's that? A whino?
Nope, WOW (Windows On Windows). Check an NT box for "wowexec" some time.
It is quite simple, Microsoft has put many of the major companies in the software industry out of business. Others have consolidated. If the names Apple, Borland, Corel, Netscape, Novel, Lotus, etc all dissapear off store shelves...how many other big software companies can YOU name? Oracle, IBM, Sun, Adobe, ...? The software playing field would start looking rather sparse of players! If you can buy any of your competition using one days interest off cash on hand, who would can you point to as a viable threat then?
AC - (DOSWord) had (brace yourself for this!) Menus that you could actually see to make your selections. At that same point in history, saving a file in WordPerfect meant hitting (control)(alt)(left-flipper)f8, all with no visual feedback whatsoever. ... The only way that WordPerfect was better was that they offered unlimited free support to registered customers (who needed all that support. They slowly built up a cadre of stuffy-middleclass-women who were 'WordPerfect gurus' and who were severely threatened when Windows and easy-to-use alternatives to WordPerfect
The design goal of WordPerfect was to maximize the space on your 80x24 screen for text editing. Of course that mean that none of your precious real-estate was wasted with namby-pampy things like a user interface.
Compare this to excellent programs like Word 4.0 for the Mac, which was fully feature-complete, you could create a table without a PhD from Utah, and ran just great on a 1MB machine.
But, I totally agree with your sentiments about WordPerfect. "Word Processing" used to be some expert, in-demand skill. That's a bad situation unless you happened to be one of the WordPerfect F-key gurus. Nowdays, even PHBs manage to *type their own memos* , get this, *on a computer*. Microsoft Word is a big reason for that happening.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
OK, let's see what Microsoft is:
1. Microsoft bought QDOS for $50k or so, repackaged it as MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM.
2. The GUI is a rip off Apple's interface.
3. Their browser, built on the original Mosaic code, was introduced as a rip of Netscape's wares.
4. The dot-trap is a double-rip off Sun: first, in a theoretically portable language, and second, in serving applications over a network.
Anyone want to IDP Windows?
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Gore? Loopy?
Actualy, if they do a test, GWB probably has enough crack in him to make Gore test positive too.
It might not be *best* but it certainly is shaping up to be the most stable.
I hate to say that. I really do. My heart is with Mozilla. But damn if NS4.x isn't a crashy thing that crashes a lot in Windoze. And it's not very stable under either MacOS or Linux.
I don't trust ActiveX, so I still use Netscape. But IE is way more stable. Hey, if this deal means IE for Linux, so be it. NS is crashy, and the alternatives don't render as well as either of the two.
It's Ms. Geek, not MS Geek, btw...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
They're just trying to prop-up a competitior when they seem likely to fall, so they don't seem like a monopoly. It's the exact same thing they did with Apple when they were in a similar bind.
-Karl
Novell is obviously sinking (and it sucks I've invested a lot of time and money on the CNA, with the idea of going CNE). M$ could dump some money into Novell soon to keep them alive.
But on the other hand, they may not have to (from a DOJ standpoint) because Linux, not Novell, is their chief competition in the server market.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
It is much what than Netscape?
Geeky.org
The first possibility is that this is MSFT's way of buying W2K support, just as they hold $125 million in preferred shares of Borland/Inprise (INPR), yet Borland cranks out tons of stuff for Linux regardless.
The second possibility is that this is MSFT's way of ensuring that Corel does not improve the WordPerfect ability to import W2K.
The third possibility (hey, if George Bush can say half a trillion for deficit reduction is a trillion, I can say two is three) is that this is MSFT's way of ensuring that they can say that there is a Linux distro that supports MSFT's extensions (or pollution) of standards such as Kerberos and so on. This is the killer, the other two are non-events.
[note - I own MSFT shares, but not Corel shares]
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Close, I think. Wine has been plugging away at a moving target for many years, and is still nowhere near ready for prime time. My guess is M$ wants Corel's Wine developers so they can engineer a Wine-like product that really works, though perhaps proprietary. That would be a huge insurance policy against the success of Linux.
they may not have voting stock, but that is a serious conflict of interest. what could MS possibly be interested in in buying Corel stock?
With 24 million non-voting shares, M$ can still tell Corel to "drop Linux and go .NET or else we shall *sell* the shares at a *very* low price", thus causing Corel to totally crash.
Considering Corel hasn't been doing too well, financially speaking, for quite a while I wouldn't be too surprised is M$ was using this kind of tactics to crush a potential competitor in the OS+office apps market.
Call me paranoid, but it sounds "logical" to me. M$ can't do anything else because they have their tentacles tied with a nice antitrust procecution, but they have plenty of money to lose for such games.
I mean, Corel is the only software company that offers a full package without anything from M$, and still have a pretty good reputation when it comes to office apps (much better than StarOffice). And people (the administrative kind) who only use their PCs for word processing, speadsheet and net stuff basically don't give a rat's ass regarding the OS it's running on, since most of them don't know what it is.
What do you guys think?
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That is alot of cash that Corel has to work with now.
Based on the number of hares currently outstanding, the common shares issuable upon conversion of the preferred shares would represent approximately 24.6 per cent of the outstanding Corel common shares after the conversion. http://www3.corel.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTCo ntentServer?GXHC_gx_session_id_FutureTen seContentServer=62dd1ffab834691b&pagename=Corel/Pr essRelease/Details&id=CC100K15H90
taco should indicate his position whenever he comments on a stock. He at least used to own CORL.
Heise has a article online at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/cp-03.10.00-00 0/.
I'll try to translate the key points: .NET iniative
- Microsoft buys 25% of Corel for 135 Millionen US-Dollar
- These shares are non-voting but can be converted(?) into voting shares. (Yeah, crappy english...)
- Corel will make software for the
- Corel will drop some legal threats against Microsoft.
daniel
I just realized something. Corel had a Java version of their office suite out there years ago. PCs were too slow and the Java VMs were still crude but now you should be able to get acceptable performance out of a web browser.
M$ is doing it again. Buying out (or helping out and getting cross licences from the guy with the Vaseline on his butt,) an old competitor for their other IP and turning around and calling it their own invention.
Same crap they've pulled since QDOS.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Perhaps so, but I've been somewhat disappointed with CorelDRAW 9 for Linux. Compared to CorelDRAW 3 (the only other version I've used extensively), it's far more fully featured, but the user interface is awful. It now takes several times longer to accomplish the same tasks. I guess the Windows version has the same flaws, though. Overall performance is OK, but not great, probably due to rushing it to market rather than getting WINE working right, and there are still niggling little bugs. As you say, they're so close, but just keep getting it wrong.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Considering that the shares have been
sitting between $3 and $6 I would see it
as little gamble that might pay off.
Take a peek at the shares to see if they
go up. If they do Microsoft will be
making millions and if not they help
Corel go down the toilet.
Considering that those millions are a drop
in the bucket for Microsoft, it's a win win
situation for the evil empire.
And I bought the Linux version of WordPerfect
soon to be a Microsoft product (SHIT!!!!)
BTW I disagree that Corel will be rethinking their Linux strategy. They made all their money back in the first week of sales. PCData said Corel had 23% of Linux retail sales in Jul. Corel has also been a very popular download at CNet and TUCOWS. True that last quarter's earnings showed only $1.2 million in Linux sales but this was due to the rebates used to clear the channel of the older version to make way for ver 1.2. Originally they were only going to put it out as a free download but as a retail product only released last Nov they have made $12 mil in sales which is not too bad considering it is only a sideline product.
Corel is planning an enterprise version along with Rebel and Graph on which will have higher margins. WP 10-Linux will be native to Linux which should make the critics happy. I think Corel can make money with Linux but it will take time. At least now they have the resources to make it work.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
This is a VERY similar deal to the one MS cut with Borland/Inprise about a year and a half ago. Borland's legal claims were actually pretty strong (especially for unfair hiring practices: MS crippled whole teams by throwing multimillion-dollar offers at dozens of key developers), but Microsoft also took a fairly large (10%) stake in Inprise. This was the huge boost in that company's bankroll that enabled them to get back on their feet and become the competitive company that they are today. The deal included all the same "Borland agrees to support MS's API of the hour" stuff as well. Note that Borland started the Kylix project (Linux port of Delphi and C++Builder) only AFTER receiving this Microsoft infusion, so I think the conspiracy theorists should just relax. There are, however, much more compelling antitrust reasons for this deal. If WordPerfect Office completely disappeared (which was pretty unlikely, but not 100% impossible), there would be a whole new line of antitrust inquiries against future versions of Office. Their move to a subscription model could be seen as classic monopolistic behavior (now that they're locked in, we won't even have to come up with upgrades anymore). The real threat to Corel's Linux strategy is the fact that they're not making a lot of money from it (Corel Draw for Linux, anyone?). --JRZ
If this were the case, why does MS have such a vastly greater marketshare than WordPerfect. This isn't the same Windows monopoly: people are actually going to purchase Office over WordPerfect.
As an example, I had a brief parttime job at a computer store over one summer. WordPerfect and Office came out with new editions at roughly the same time. I saw people completely walk past the huge ad display set up for WordPerfect (which sat in the middle of the aisle) and walk straight to Office. They didn't have to buy Word. They wanted to.
The point is, most people don't find WordPerfect better than Word. The people who do normally have been using it for years and have it stuck in their organizations (I find IT divisions have a real hard time removing WordPerfect completely from their company networks. The program and things like Netware gradually get intertwined). Most others, however, find Word superior.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
It's not Linux that Microsoft is looking at keeping around. It's the WordPerfect Office Suite. It's one of the last ones out there that has any following at all. And if it goes away, you're right, the DOJ will be screaming "Break-em-up" within seconds.
http://yahoo. cne t.com/news/0-1003-200-2917375.html?pt.yfin.cat_fin .txt.ne
Some choice snippets from the article:
"In turn, the two companies will work together on developing and testing products for Microsoft's .Net effort, which lets customers "rent" software over the Internet. Microsoft.Net will also encompass cell phones and handhelds computers."
Rather unsettling, eh?
"The two companies have also agreed to settle unspecified legal issues between them."
Anybody happen to have an idea on just which legal issues they might be referring to?
""They didn't want Apple to go away as a major competitor and they probably don't want Corel to go away right away, especially when things are on appeal," Enderle said. The deal may also give Microsoft access to in-house technology at Corel, including some Linux technology."
MS Linux? ::shivers::
From what I hear, CORL is not in the best shape financially. So, perhaps, MSFT sees this as a (cheap?) way to own a good bit of CORL's assets when the Chapter 11 happens. Plus, if they're shareholders, they have preference over other parties trying to bid for CORL's assets.
Perhaps they go for the apps, to kill the competition. But that doesn't seem to make sense from the monopoly point of view.
Perhaps they go for the OS? What plans to follow? To get a brand name, then fork Linux? Try to jump-start fragmentation a la Unix?
Microsoft has never tried to use their investment with Apple as leverage, and they won't with Corel, either. It's not the threat (we now own 1/4 of your company!) it's the carrot. "Play well with us, and we'll give you more money, outright, than most companies make in a year." And if they'll give their mortal enemies that much cash, think of what they'll do for their friends....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Hmmmmm. M$ buys dividend paying shares but can't vote.... what could they do to 'encourage' Corel to turn larger profits (and pay higher dividends).... The jaded, the consipiracy theorists, and the realistic will probably all have similar answers... [hint: the trail (of $$) goes TOWARD Redmond.]
"(In order to use .NET you have to run Win2K servers)"
Bzzzzt! Wrong answer.
But we have some lovely parting gifts for you at the receptionists desk.
.Net is many things, but one major aspect of it is cross-platform interoperability through SOAP and other mechanisms.
It really amazes me the number of people who are so blinded by their hatred for Microsoft that they are unwilling or rather unable to admit when the company has a really good idea.
1) This is about 1/4 of corels' outstanding shares.
2) This is NON-VOTING. They have *NO* say in what corel does, period.
3) It IS a good investment. Corel stock is low; linux might be big; and microsoft IS a business.
4) Competition, or perceived competition, is GOOD for Microsoft.
What's wrong with making an investment? This is non-voting stock; purely an investment> That's all it CAN be.
These are 'prefferred' shares, right?
Are they not convertible to 'common' shares, under certain terms? Perhaps those terms hinge on performance of corel?
MS doesn't want to be seen as a monopoly.
If they are the biggest, best office suite by a huge margin, they are certainly closer to being seen as a monopoly.
The same exact thing happend when they bought shares in Apple a while back.
Microsoft will help it's competition just enough to help it'self!!!
It is very bad when you are the only huge, 800lb gorilla and you've crushed all the other monkeys in your cage. If so, they send the zoo keeper after you pretty quickly!
--
Mecworks BLOG
What did MS get out of this? IE on Mac desktops everywhere and MORE importantly the validation of Apple Inc in the eyes of consumers. This meant that Apple could continue to offer it's products in the same exact stores as MS does. MS makes IE standard (which it is even on Macs), and maintains the view that MS is not alone.
Move forward to Oct 00. MS invests in Corel. Why? Easy, MS NEEDS Linux and more speficially, Corel, which makes an Office suit which it BUNDLES with a Linux, to continue to exist. If Corel die and it's Office Suite divested, it adds to the arguement that MS needs to be broken up. If Corel thives and lives in the consumer space, just as Apple has, MS can point to them and say, "Hey, they bundle Office, and a share of the desktop space...".
MS investment in Apple justified Apple in the consumer world at a time when they were down. MS investment in Corel will do the same.
They can't let Corel die. It's makes bad business sense.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Sources have informed us that Yahoo! is one of the many sites with the story that the evil oppressors have purchased 24 bazillion non-voting (but when you have that many, you have a vote anyway) shares of Corel, the creators of the buggiest art software ever created by man or monkey! So now Micro$oft has Word (as well as Def, and Fly) and a big stake in that second-place word processor, whatever it's called. Hedging your bets ain't bad, even when totally unnecessary, 'course what will this mean for the corel office for linux suite that no one got excited about back when it was just wordperfect on linux? And while they are supposedly non-voting shares, this looks like a huge percentage of... What were those guys called, anyway?
I'd be on thin ice to speculate on what Microsoft was thinking here. First of all, I have two neurons to rub together and get a spark. Ha ha, just a little joke, folks. We all know that there really are some brilliant people at Microsoft -- And no, this is not patronization. Even Billy Boy is pretty damned sharp, even if in no other way than knowing who to listen to.
Microsoft has a big piece of Apple, too, right? Perhaps not as big as this, and Apple is somewhat more successful than Corel, which has been taking a very odd and bumpy roller coaster ride as long as I can remember. Then there's the weird offshoots (like Corel Computer) which seem to totally miss the point in the same way that corel does. I remember when Corel brought out the netwinder. There's a press release from June of 1998 which has the following tidbits:
Even then it was easily possible to build a PC with the same capabilities for less money; The only good thing about the netwinder is that it's smaller. All you needed was 32mb of ram, some crappy IDE disk, and an ATI video card with video input. It didn't have a floppy drive, or a CD-Rom drive, et cetera.
So what the hell is Microsoft thinking? I can see only one real possibility I'm willing to speculate toward, which is that they're planning to get into the graphics market, and this is just their way of making it more attractive for Corel to sell them big chunks of Corel Draw.
This is a rare opportunity for Microsoft programmers to actually make code better. How often does a chance like that come along?
I can just see it now:
"Microsoft CorelDRAW" or "Microsoft Corel WordPerfect".
Better yet: "Microsoft WordPerfect for Linux."
and therefore: "Microsoft Linux OS"
You're one of the real Bruce Perens.
Yeah, and that implicit cast from the integer Bruce Perens makes me kind of uncomfortable, too.
real BrucePerens = 3872;
Bingo Foo
---
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
They have a list of MS' spending spree over the years. (look under 'departments')
AC comments get piped to
Hasn't there been some speculation that MS might want to move some operations into Canada?
Well, Corel is, of course, a Canadian company.
Maybe this allegiance will allow MS to see what it's like.
If you startup Windows ME+2(2002) and it plays "Oh Canada" instead of some grandiose geek fanfare, you'll know my hunch is correct.
Strict obedience to the law is the key to liberty.
In case you didn't see it in the Corel announcement, 24 million shares work out to about 25% of the outstanding shares of common stock. I'm not sure what percentage Corel owns, but that is a very hefty sum.
Nate
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
IMHO, I think is interesting that few days ago I was reading about Corel CEO saying his error expecting about 10 or 15 times more $$ selling Corel Linux; and now I read about this kind of M$ "partecipation" in Corel. So now we have just another move of M$. I think Gates is laughing first because of all those "financial" operations (Apple and Corel are just two examples) and then because of all those divisions and "fights" in Linux world. I like to choose but I dislike mess: please stop Gnome against KDE, Sawfish against Enlightenment, and so on .. And don't forget about 30 or more distributions (I found also an Abit Linux !). Remember "Divide et Impera". Just my 2 cents.
WordPerfect is the only Word Processor left that has a decent foothold on the market. People that use it simply don't wan't to change to that MS Word program that's only good for writing letters to grandma. So what better way to beat it than their old tactic of taking over the company, and cutting it off? Sure, hundreds of businesses rely on it daily, including MS's own lawyers, & they'll be forced to "upgrade" to Word. But hey, it's innovation. Deal with it. .
~Bout Time for another tea party.®~
It may be non-voting now, but it is convertible. I think that usually takes the form of a time-bomb or a balloon payment.
Does anyone know the particulars of how Microsoft can convert their stock to voting stock? Also, at current valuation, what percentage of Corel have they acquired?
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Corel, GPL WordPerfect now.
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
What will happen to us now that Microsoft has acccess to the source code for Linux?
--
This is not my sandwich.
It's gonna happen, i'm scared. MSlinux.org
Oh goody. Finally a distribution of Linux that's pre-destined to be more pissed on than Red Hat.
It's good not to run the underdog anymore.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
2000-10-02 22:07:11 Corel forms alliance with Microsoft (articles,corel) (rejected)
Thx taco.
My take is that this is potenially very good, and also potentially bad, but most likely good.
.NET initiative (as stated).
.NET, because it looks like another way to make proprietary MS technologies
.NET you have to run Win2K servers). On the other hand, there just may be a possibity that MS will actually play fair and open up .NET (not too likely). Probably the best we can hope for is that MS will be only partially successfull, and .NET will be one of several choices for application servers.
Why does MS want to invest in Corel?
1. To prop up its
2. To keep a competitor in business, to blunt the monopoly charges.
3. To make money, since Corel shares are likely to go up.
I am suspcious about
defacto standards, with which they can leverage Win2000 deployment, and shut out competitors in the server space. (In order to use
I wonder what else Corel is getting out of this. Could it be that MS will be more forthcomming in
providing information about Windows APIs so Corel apps will be able to run better on Windows?
Perhaps even, they will allow Corel to migrate some technologies to Linux (I'm a dreamer!). One of the reasons why WPO2000 is not feature-complete on Linux (in my limited understanding) is because
MS will not allow certain DLLs to be shipped with programs that run on Wine.
Only time will tell. This is interesting though!
John Craig
If MS is broken up, I am willing to bet that the
Corel shares will go to the OS part of MS. That
way they will might still be able to exert
a great deal of influence on the Office Suite
market. With Corel's puny market share in the Office App market, it might look like a
minor investment now. But I think it would be very good for M$ in the post break up years.
Then we could have two competing Office Suites
with significant developer strength. Office and
MS - Corel Wordperfect Suite.
As much as I stand for the flaming of Microsoft, supposedly, the Word format IS supposedly available on their web site. But I've heard it's documented lamely enough as to be completely unusable, but I guess this is how the Star Office people got the information they needed to implement it.
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Got Rhinos?
Maybe they have realised that Corel could become a tough competitor in the future because of their totally different strategy, that eventually could become succesful.
So... decided long time ago that it is better to buy the competitors rather than to fight them, and since they have enough money that's what they are doing.
And they wonder why some call it monopoly...
This is exactly my opinion too ! the hole thing sounds rather phony !
Presidential debates?
I hope they do some fucking drug-testing there!
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
just like Apple dropped Netscape after the MS "investment". I just can't wait to see the Bill's big mug on a video screen at the Corel shareholders meeting.
No, that's not true. WordPerfect had its followers (I know), and I guess so did Quattro. None of those cared about the rest of the "office package", and Corel didn't do much to keep the apps up-to-date, so it had to go down. But it was never a pure "anti-microsoft" thingy.
--
--
It's my belief that my big balls should be held every night.
If they want "Windows everywhere," and they will get called upon to support desktop applications on WINE, they could want to ensure that WINE is in fact able to run.
This is embrace, extend and extinguish: if Office 2002 runs out-of-the-box on Linux+WINE, trouble free, and your company has sold its soul to Office subscriptions anyway, why fight the headaches of StarOffice or other half-compatible solutions?
[
Microsoft's move to buy and partner up with Corel may very well be a sound investment on Microsoft's part. Corel has a history of generating major upswings in their stock price whenever there is hype around them. And Microsoft sure knows how to create hype. Corel's stock is also at a major low right now, so they are a bargin for M$.
This move seems to me quite like the move Microsoft pulled with investing $150 million in Apple a few years back when they weren't doing so well.
That's SEC www.sec.gov - click on EDGAR
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I wonder if part of the agreement might be Corel agrees to not sue M$ for anti-trust damages. Potentially, this could be a bad deal for Corel in that case. Then again, a trial could have dragged on for years, and Corel needs cash now. When and if they ever won, they might have been out of business already. Just an idea. . .
Corel (Like it or not) is a Linux company.. (Spoken Line-nuks BTW not the Torvolian Len-icks as it should be)
:)
:)
The problem with Corel is well still "Mass product" I should say they are "Herbert" (Taken from the Star Trek eppisode where space "Hippys" go off to find eden.. probably a pre-Trek refrence to something I myself am not familure)
Anyway.. so they kinda are the Linux counterpart to Microsoft.. stiff... and umm "Herbert"
Anyway... They can not survive with Microsoft Windows.. They've got no choice but to sell "Line-uks" software..
They will be like Hotmail to Microsoft... Hotmail (Becouse of the way Hotmail is set up) will not easly move from BSD to Windows... It can be done but ohh painful... The service isn't effected it's just the code is all BSD hardcoded and non-portable to something as alien as Windows.
Corels software is still Windows but eventually they'll need to code Linux and backport to Windows.. if they support Windows at all.
Microsoft probably dosn't have the arm to force them to go 100% Windows but if they did Corel would sink..
Corels software basicly compeates head to head with Microsoft software and on Windows that spells death.. on Linux that spells life...
The synister twist... Microsoft may eventually need to help Corel support Linux in order for Corel to survive and Microsoft get a return on investment...
One good thing about "Herbert"s is they talk the same language.. If Corel needs something from Microsoft they'll find the correct channels to go through.. any unusual efforts Corel will just do it becouse that is the procedure.. They don't care..
Ok to try to give you an idea of the logic...
Most geeks occasionally catch themselfs in thinking "Why dosn't he just fix the code?" and of course you go "Du he's a user he can't code he dosn't know how".
Now for a "Herbert" jumpping through hoops is easy.. they do it all the time. So for them filling out form 265a in triplicate.. eat the first two and send in the third with a blank sheat of paper and add a postit saying "I am the eggman" isn't asking for much at all becouse they can do it in 30 seconds.
So where as we might not find the secret back door and give the proper hand shake to get form 265a Corel would... Get Microsofts own enegnears to write an open source "Windows Runtime" for Linux (In short thats what Wine is.. Microsoft made one for Dos years ago.. brain dead easy sence it was just Windows stripped down).
Or better yet... just include a Unix compatability kit into Windows.. then Corel can just write Linux software and recompile on Windows (and Solarus, BSD etc)
On the other hand.. if Microsoft just gets Corel to go pure Windows.. get ready for but Ms-FUD and the counter FUD..
Ms-Fud: See Linux isn't ready for the big market Corel had to come back to us
Counter Fud: Oh yeah I see that... look how much better Corel is doing now that they are selling to the Windows market (as Corels stocks plumet.. Corels products don't sell.. Corel basicly enters a "COMA" stage).
I doupt Microsoft would try it thow... but if they did Corel is in the unique position of dying if they dump Linux
I don't actually exist.
EOM
Does anyone else wonder if this could be a prelude towards MS's penetration into Linux?
If you think about it, MS will test the linux waters with an office suite and if it gets enough attention (notice I left out good or bad?) that corporate penguin Taco uses won't be so funny anymore.
BOSTON SUCKS!
Great, another step towards Microsoft integration of another product into its own. Slashdot's icon for Microsoft of Bill Gates is truly justified..
Wouldn't the good folks at Corel be the perfect bunch of programmers to to successfully pull off a port of MSOffice to Linux?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Corel should now file for bankruptcy and take that nice M$ money and start a Linux (only) Office Suite company. And for kickers, call it LinuxSoft RealOffice Suite, with the logo "Do you want to work today?"
Although, Sun might say something about the logo...
It has to do with the fact that Microsoft is so big, so monolithic, so...everywhere, that the threat of stagnation is its own worst enemy. The ONLY way MS can hope to show even a hint that it still has some kind of innovative energy is to BUY it from other companies. Corel now owns Painter, and there is NO WAY IN HELL that MS could manage that kind of innovation on its own. I realize that the agreement focused on MS's ".NET" initiative (something I hope joins some of MS's other failed efforts) - it will be very disconcerting if this agreement allows any kind of implicit influence on other aspects of Corel's business.
__________
Extra money is always good.
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
I wonder what M$ gets? Remember when Apple had to agree to make IE the fefault web browser on the Mac? That killed Netscape on that platform.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
The money is urgently needed by cash-poor Corel, and this little amount (to M$, of course) can keep a dying competitor on a life-support, just a way to avoid being beaten up by the Justice Dept.
ahem... Microso ft invests in Corel, settles legal disputes from Cnet.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
It's gonna happen, i'm scared.
MSlinux.org
MSLinux Makes Baby Jesus Sad
this link returns:
"Your browser sent a message this server could not understand."
Yup, microsoft is in da house.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
This aughta be +5... note why Microsoft has plans to port a lot of its apps to Mac (mostly games, +office too), and why IE is available on Solaris: Microsoft likes to pay off competitors with legal itches by providing products on their platform and investing in them instead of facing the much, much more unpredictable courts. Expect to see IE on Linux soon. Very soon. And bundled with Corel Linux.
MS's investment in Apple was $150 Million, non-voting shares
Apple didn't "drop" Netscape; it is still present to this day on MacOS 9.0.4 install CD's, and will be installed automatically by the default installer script. IE is chosen as the default HTTP handler, and that can be easily switched by changing your Internet preferences.
Hell, you can simply not install IE in the first place if you don't want it.
Once again, when it comes to *actual* information about what Apple does, the Slashdot crowd just simply doesn't know: and the average person doesn't know either.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Hmm, isn't that about the number they kicked in to Apple as well?
My dear NAIVE friend...
Yes, MS is business, but it's politics also...
Want Example? sure..
According to IDC, Linux got more workstation installations than the Mac (and I'm talking about SOLD Linux distribution copies - NOT the one you downloaded few days ago) - so in reality - Linux workstation installation is at least (being conservative here) twice then Mac..
Yet, MS doesn't port their Office to Linux. We all know that Linux can run Linux port of office quite nicely, and that more and more people install Linux - yet MS claims there is no demand, which is a lie ofcourse...
So, if MS was business only, then we could have a port of MS Office a year ago..
Hetz (Heunique)
They didn't have any control over the course Apple was and is taking, yet Steve Jobs WAS thankful enough to make IE the default browser on the Mac, AND state publicly that it was the BEST browser choice available.
(thank goodness we now have OmniWeb!)
Soylent Green is people!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Many people have wondered why Corel did not sue MS for damages after MS was convicted of being a monopoly. Some of the states had originally wanted to make MS Office the focus of the anti-trust suit. MS did the similar deal with Inprise a few years ago. If Corel is dropping any threat of law suits now then MS is getting off lucky. On the other hand, Corel does not have the resources to spend millions in court and needs the money now not years from now.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
What all thinks that M$ is doing this to get their foot in the Linux door? Granted they are getting a lot of stuff that Corel bought last years, but I don't think that matters to M$. Hell if they wanted the app, they'd just copy off someone else and make their own proprietary version to compete. I personally think that M$ will use this as their opening to the Linux market, probably leveraging and remarketing Corel Office for Linux as their own. Bastards. Another good company down the drain.
The idea is to take their libraries, bend them to fix the MS Office motif and publish a single word processor. They don't have voting rights now, but they will have them soon, I can guarantee it.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
On the good side, Corel was practically worthless to begin with. It was looking fairly likely that they could go under at any time. This investment seems to at least keep Corel, as one of the largest contributing companies to Linux, afloat for a while longer, whatever the actual motivation for it may be, that is the immediate result.
Good or bad? Maybe some of both. It's definitely puzzling though, and the final result is just a little uncomfortable.
________
I read about this right around christmas of last year,t ml
Heres the link to it on Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/19/130200.sh
If a customer is using Corel products, and Corel doesn't choose to support .NET, that customer may well ignore .NET and try to survive with a standalone software model. M$ cannot allow that to happen, so they have a vested interest in making sure the standalone software providers are either assimilated or removed...
There is another reason that M$ needs Corel: Did anyone else see the Corel office suite beta written in Java back around 1995? If M$ can get them to port it to C#, they have a ready made .NET application that probably already works better than anything they will be able to produce for the next 3 to 5 years...
0x0000
"The Internet is made of cats."
Does anyone have a list of all companies Microsoft holds shares in (or vice-versa)? I think it'd be nice to have a list of the influence MS casts on other companies you might not think about...
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
You must be kidding me. Where exactly do you base that on? I worked in the graphics design industry.
Anyone in the graphics design business knows that the first choice of vector graphics software is Macromedia Freehand and Adobe illutrator. The best publishing software in QuarkXpress. Raster: Photoshop.
Corel product is no where to be seen.
MS seems to have a habit of buying into their competitors and buying into technologies since they seem less able to innovate. Although, I am not a big fan of Corel products, I don't necessarily like the ideal of MS owning part of their competition. That seems to eliminate the competition and make less choices for us consumers.
Beware Microsoft's Prometheus strategy. The investments chain rivals to a big rock. If the rival gets out of line, gnaw on its liver until it moans in pain. This is a blatant anti-trust manuever. Microsoft cannot allow rivals to fail, or it will appear that it is a monopolist. Don't fall for it!
I don't buy that Microsoft is forking over $135 million simply so that that "two companies will work together on developing and testing products for Microsoft's .Net platform, which lets customers "rent" software over the Internet."
Microsoft has invested in companies, albeit few, with some type of Linux presence. I am curious what role, if any, the prospect of breaking up Microsoft into two companies has had in Microsoft making such investments.
Well, with Corel now in Microsoft's bag, the only other competitive office suite is Sun's StarOffice. I bet Sun is licking their fingers over this story. If the playing field wasn't completely clear before, it is now.
Quark? For long document publishing? You're a loony.
Ventura is for publishing long documents: fifty to five thousand pages of content, in book format.
Quark is for laying out advertisements, brochures and other piddly documents. It simply doesn't support the functions needed to publish long, complicated documents. Not with any grace or ease, at any rate.
I think you'll find this link enlightening: [Comparison of Ventura, Framemaker, Pagemaker and Quark]. Though there's every chance that, having always done things the hard way, you won't realize that features like paragraph numbering, footnotes and page imposition are essential when creating long technical documents.
As for your assertion that Freehand and Illustrator are "first choice" products -- you're right: in the same way that Windows9x is the "first choice" in operating systems.
But that doesn't make them the *best*.
In terms of sheer functionality, the Corel products I listed are best-of-class or in the top two or three.
You can run with the crowd. That's apparently what you've chosen to do. You don't have to think... but you'll have to work harder, and you won't be able to do live up to your potential best.
Or you can use the best products to create the best work, with less work. You'll have to take the time to identify what software has the most functionality, and you'll have to go against the crowd. But at least you'll be able to be the best.
--
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
.NET will be Coming to a Linux Distribution near you.
Time to start studying SOAP!
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Noooo! Noooo! It's just too sad, I'll be forced to VI and ispell, Latex and I don't know what. Man the GNOME word processor source, batten the hatches, the Borg has landed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ok, woah.. this is bad. Corel makes word perfect which has a thing for Linux... However, Microsoft now owns Corel. does this mean they will or won't keep the WP product line for Linux, and if so will they continue to develope it?!?!
Matt
...that soon after Cowpland left, something like this would happen. I used to respect Corel for being brave (or is that dumb?) enough to try to take on MS in the Office app market, and folks like Adobe in the graphics market. They had (or have?) a really good product core in the Corel Draw line, but I think the battle on the Office package front, plus diluting the company even more with unfocused forays in linux weakened what was Canada's greatest software giant into the MS fodder it has become today. Sad news.
Going on means going far
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I can just see it now:
"Microsoft CorelDRAW" or "Microsoft Corel WordPerfect".
Yes, I do realize that it probably won't come to this. =P
I understood why Microsoft bought into Apple and Borland. These were simply an easy way to get out of lawsuits and patent issues. They gave other reasons but mostly for PR purposes.
And now these actions by Microsoft are identical, but why? The anti-trust can't be an issue, the antitrust battles center around browsers and operating systems. Plus, Office won the war not by being free or cheap nor by being preinstalled on new PCs. Last I looked, Office is rather expensive and Word Perfect comes pre-installed more often than Office (not to be confused with MS Works).
Plus Microsoft has blatently expressed their dislike for Linux. Heck, Linux source code is free, why would Microsoft have to pay a cent to anyone for it? I'm sure that Microsoft also knows that a large percentage of Linux users would rather die than use Internet Exploder and Lookout Express.
But then again, maybe Microsoft is turning over a new leaf... maybe Microsoft is going to contribute to Linux and Free Software. Ya, that's it.
Ozwald
I'm not sure, but I remember Corel's CEO in the past saying really bad things about Microsoft and the .net initiative and praising Java instead. just because MS purchased 24 million shares now Corel doesn't seem to have a problem with MS, they're suddenly in love.
Corel is just a bunch of hypocrites and suits. Also, you gotta admit they make the crappiest linux distribution.
Remember how Word '97 couldn't read some files from earlier Word versions? If you wanted to read '97 files you had to update. Whether you wanted to or not or needed to or not.
I certainly do not remember this because what you state is FALSE
Word 97 was perfectly capable of reading earlier versions of Word files. Earlier versions of Word could not necessarily read Word 97 files, that is what happens when file formats are upgraded. Other software programs have done this. This was documented and announced when Office 97 came out.
The complaint was this, that when you were working with Word 97 and choose to save as a Word 95, it did not save it in true .doc format (binary compatible). Instead, the output was a Rich Text Format, which is not as "robust" as 95 format (ie 6.0). Microsoft goofed, admitted it, and released a binary level converter that would save as true Word 95 docs.
Also, Microsoft released a free Word 97 viewer so users of earlier version could view and print. Also, they released an add-on to Word 95 so that owners could open Word 97 docs and modify them, even if formatting features of the new version were lost if there was not a compatible feature in the 95 version.
More than fair for them to release these freebies. The stink was that they did not inform the user that the Save As command in 97 was RTF.
Get your facts straight. People always complain about the lies MS or others say about Linux and Open Source/Free Software, well make sure you don't spread lies about MS as well. Damn them for what they do, not what you have a vague rememberance of what they might have done. And telling someone who sends you a file, you cannot read it in the format sent is VALID to do. Linux users say it all the time. If they want to communicate to you, they will.
Anyone ever play the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon? There should be a n degrees of Microsoft, 2 or 3 would probably be realistic.
__________
This might be the funding Corel needs to get back going. They won't let microsoft influence them that much, and people shouldn't overexaggerate it. Bestcase: Corel does some stuff for micro$oft and gets money, and now ports .NET apps to linux, and continues making apps and distros with their funding.
Worstcase: Microsoft corrupts corel, but corel is too small to make a difference.
The real worry here is how much corel will speed up the .NET plan
I don't know offhand if there's any Corel-MS litigation recently. But it wouldn't be suprising if the new Corel management used MS's current troubles to extract a little greenmail. After all, they own WordPerfect, Paradox, and Quatro Pro -- all products which MS succeeded in burying, whether by fair means or foul. If this is true, neither company will ever, ever admit it.
__________
Microsoft signs a special deal so Corel gets access to Windows source code "to help build .NET." M$ sits still for six months. M$ then sues the WINE project, claiming that some of Corel's contributions are covered under NDA. Of course, M$ won't have a leg to stand on, but its ability to draw out court cases will kill off WINE.
I believe the WINE leaders should thank Corel profusely for their contributions in the past -- and immediately cease to accept any further contributions from Corel.
No your honor, where not a monolpy.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
The name of the company is ZINMAL. What is ZINMAL? ZINMAL Is Not Microsoft's Answer to Linux. Zinmal will take all the software that Corel has released under the GPL, repackage it under the Zinmal label, and continue to develope it independantly of Corel. All the Slashdot types who care about the GPL will buy Zinmal distributions and refuse to have anything to do with Corel. Corel's proprietary products will be treated with the same disdain as Microsoft's proprietary products. People who work at Corel will flee to come work for the new startup, and Zinmal will eventually be purchased either by VA Linux (LNUX) or RedHat (RHAT).
This is one stupid purchase. MSFT needs to wake up and realize that Linux can't be bought, and that profitability in the software market is shrinking long term due to the presence of Free Software. Concentrate on the hardware, dum-dums. You can't pirate hardware as easily as you can pirate software.
NOTICE to those who read both Yahoo! stock message boards and Slashdot: istartedi==smm7epub
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Am I to understand that Microsoft is becoming and application service provider with its .NET offering? I may not fully understand.
.NET products) would become vulnerable to hackers (via DOS), documents would be snoopable (esp. by Microsoft :) etc.
Certainly the value proposition makes sense, write once in Java and your software is available on every platform with a JVM. Easy updates, more payment options, etc, etc, etc, etc.
An implication of this would be that billions of dollars of annual productivity (ie, productivity created by Microsoft
Am I correct in my assumptions?
//.i2
I was curious about this too. Aparently .NET refers to Microsoft.net... whose welcome screen reads:
From what I gather -("new offerings (that will)deliver the reliability, performance, scalability, and manageability required for enterprise solutions") MS is planning on co-branding Corel Linux... how else can they get such features into an enterprise server? "Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Servers provide the fastest
way to integrate, manage, and Web-enable your
enterprise business. Find out how these new offerings
deliver the reliability, performance, scalability, and
manageability required for enterprise solutions."
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Suppose that MS were working on a office for linux port... where else would you go for people experienced with office suites for linux? Corel, of course...
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
It's time to start thinking outside the Linux box.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
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I don't think this will have any effect at all on Linux. If you read the story, it appears that Microsoft won't actually have any control over the company's strategies. In fact, this seems to be similar to when they bought a good chunk of Apple a few years ago. They essentially don't have any control over the course Apple was and is taking. I think they're just a big shareholder.
Microsoft is going all out with its own monopolistic products, Windows and Office, to drive customers into the arms of .NET, its proprietary Internet-as-a-service scheme. The end goal is to have every Internet using paying Microsoft a fee. Give it a year; XML and HTML will be so corrupted that you can't help but use a Microsoft product to view the Internet.
Bribing Corel into using .NET in its own products is just a small step in locking us all into that mess. Considering Corel's recent financial trouble, selling its soul to the devil may have been easier than standing up for the right thing. I'm just thankful we still have products like StarOffice, ApplixWare, and AppleWorks that don't depend on .NET to function.
Paul Rickard, Editor, The Microsoft Boycott Campaign
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====