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Corel To Sell Linux Arm
ZeroLogic writes "According to zdnet Corel is getting out of the Linux Business." According to the article, the exact dollar amounts are unknown, although $5 million in cash and 20% in the company that's doing the purchase. It's a venture capital firm called "Linx Global Partners". I wonder how this will impact .NET and Corel's participation.
I had tried corel Linux (actually, I got 1.0 for christmas last year) And hated it.
Basically they tried to make it as much like windows as possible, and it just made it suck, because it was to simplified.
I used Windows straight up until about 2 years ago, and now use Linux for internet and typing, and some games, and use windows only for games that don't have linux releases, so its not like I hate windows terribly, but I use Linux because it's "cool" and not windows (I love Gnome), so it was bad to see a distro look so much like windows.
Anywho, I'm sure it won't kill corel to much.
I guess the call the bring .NET to Linux was a little off.
A top-ranking development engineer from Corel was quoted as saying, "It was baffling. How could they [the management] expect us to build our distribution without access to RedHat's RPMS? I mean, seriously! We can't make a distribution without those files! [sic]" He then returned to his game of computer solitaire, which he lost. Eleven times.
RedHat declined to comment.
Got friends?
First off I have to buy that bridge in Brooklyn.
Then it's off to buy Linux from Corel....
And then if I have time I will see if Apache is for sale. Does anyone know who I can talk to about buying Apache?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Maybe it's not a great big MS conspiracy. Perhaps they just made a bad investment.
This is the most important part of that link you sent:
"However, in the Tribunal's view, in order to declare the complainant's proposal compliant, the Department had no choice but to evaluate the software proposed in the complainant's offer and submitted for evaluation. This software had to be capable of importing PowerPoint version 4.0 files. The software submitted by the complainant failed to meet this requirement."
Whether or not you think it's fair or not is immaterial. The fact that they didn't show up with the correct version makes no difference. Rules are rules, and investigation of the whole thing proved the reviewers right.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Corel's distro was the closest Linux has ever been to "easy". The installer was simplified, the file manager (my favorite part) was very windows-like. I wouldn't doubt that these things struck a chord with Bill and co... what if regular users could install and use Linux by themselves?
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Corel selling ARM based linux systems doesn't sound like they are getting out of the business. It sounds like they are getting pretty deep into linux territory.
-- Virtual Windows Project
In my experience, Corel Linux is one of the least functional distributions I've ever seen. I am now an extremely happy user of Mandrake, so I know Linux isn't all that bad.
.DEB packages to go to it, and compiling the program would generate a random error (can't find the host-cpu type? I mean, wtf?) because it lacks the most basic developmental tools. And YES, I installed Desktop Plus, for all of you that care.
Getting Licq to work on Corel Linux was hell, because I couldn't find any
And on top of that, Corel Linux would be no more stable than a typical Microsoft Win9x installation. Random reboots and freezes would be common, other times it would just kick you back to the login prompt.
Gnome on Corel Linux. Don't make me laugh, I don't want to think about it. Either you bend over and take their modified KDE desktop, or be forced to work with the command line (not that that's a bad thing).
The only surprisingly good thing was that the install was smooth, and it didn't choke when it detected my hardware.
At least he's consistent.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Their distribution is always out of date (sort of like the stable branch of debian :)
Kept adding/backporting staff to KDE 1.1 which eventually ended up in KDE2 (corel wrote a great file-manager for KDE1, but there's konqueror now!), which (KDE2) was never included in their distro
No support of gnome.
WINE-I can understand that it seemed like idea to use wine for huge projects like corel draw etc. But why use wine for wordperfect?! Corel was one of the very few companies to actually have a native linux wordprocessor (wordperfect 8). Why ditch that and go with wine? This essentially ripped people off. And the so WPO 2000 was _extremely_ unstable, was an extreme pain to install under modern (i.e. XF86-4.0) distros, and VERY slow! I can run office2000 PERFECTLY on a p200 under win2k. WPO-2000 was unresponsive in my k6-2 400 & 192MB of ram. Plus during one crash, it decided to trash my current document (and the backup) leaving me frustrated to say the least. And how can wpo2000 compete with Staroffice which is free?
No download/evaluation/free version (apart from photo-paint)
Crappy installer: the installer for wpo2000 depended on a certain utility (which I cannot remember at the moment). If your distro didn't have it, the installer would not install ANYTHING, but it would report that installation went perfectly ok! Can you say q&a? Plus the installer wasn't at all customisable! At least the office installer lets you change install locations, install parts of the applications etc. Not so for corel's installer
slow-slow-slow (I know I mentioned that :)
The "you must be 18 to install this product issue" (there was a really cool UF cartoon about it :)
After wpo was released, they stopped contributing to wine
Fontastic: Why the hell do I need _ANOTHER_ font server for an application? My fontserver already had ttf support! And installing fonts to fontastic was a pain... Bye-bye corel... it sure was a nice dream...
into Corel. Hmmm, Conspiracy Guy, where are you?
You can laugh without eating a sandwhich, but you can do both if bring one.
Who didn't see this coming? First, floundering to scratch out a market for themselves in the post-Corel wonder years with Linux, then realizing that they're not making any money. My question is why didn't they ever release Corel Draw, Paint and other suite products? I beta tested some of them - progress WAS made! Whatever. Corel has had the anti-Midas touch for years now. Time to move on folks, nothing to see here.
Microsoft announces purchase of RedHat, plans to sell off Linux Arm...
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
OK, sure WordPerfect definately has it's rightful place in the word processor market but...
Any graphical artists out there using CorelDraw?
Didn't think so...oh wait, you say you do? Well then, you're obviously not a real graphical artist.
CorelDraw is the _worst_ graphics suite ever made, period. Any artist who has ever tried to use it knew right away that it was written by people whom had no idea what graphics are or how they are made, in the tangible or electronic world.
Before I started using PShop many years ago, I tried Corel Draw, and guess how long it took to decide that MSPaint was the clear winner?
No Comment.
I can take WP going out. I just wish that someone else would create a word processor that has the functionality of Reveal Codes. I think that Macromedia is actually headed that way with the latest version of Dreamweaver--I know, that's a web development program not a word processor, but the idea is there.
If there were a free program with reveal codes and the tag system WP uses, I would start using it now.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Corel had the right idea. They did it the wrong way.
Linux and BSD are at a crossroads. The operating systems are complete. They are stable. Now its time to do something with them. Distributions now need to differentiate themselves by their target audience. One of these audiences is the average non-hacker desktop user. Corel was correct to target this market. Some other distros are making a mistake by trying to make a one-size-fits-all distribution.
But they did it the wrong way. The set it up so that they were always "following" Debian. They forked KDE, making the users ask "keep the Corel file manager or upgrade to KDE 1.1.2?" They bombed on marketing. It wouldn't install on a lot of systems.
But their target market still needs their own distribution. They don't want to wade through six or seven CDs trying to figure out what packages they need and what they don't. They want an easy to use installer, not a GUI wrapper. They want it small enough to be able to learn it. They want a browsable package installer/updater. They want compatibility with other distributions.
All of the parts are there, but only Corel ever got around to putting it all together. Some distros need to become the "server" distros, others the "hacker" distros, and some could be the "kitchen sink" distros. But at least one needs to be the "man on the street" distro.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
While I don't care too much about the Corel linux distribution, I was really getting excited about the opportunity to use Delphi on linux. I wonder what this means for Kylix.
Havent I seen this story before somewhere? =)
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Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
I have to say that as an ex Corel Linux employee (thankfully it as already my last day when I was greated with /.'s headline that MS bought into Corel) who saw what happened inside the organisation that it is grossly inaccurate to say they dropped it on the marketplace and expected it to sell itself. They did run paper advertisments and were dedicating half or more of stand space to Linux and it's (wine'd) Office suite (Draw et al having the other half).
I think the reason they didn't get very far is:
What could they do in the face of this? Could they re-write all the incompatible sections to placate us....NO they couldn't afford to. Could they change from wine for Linux apps... NO they couldn't afford to, they weren't getting money from Linux so in the face of the cost cutting required it was hard to justify expenese on Linux that might actually produce money from Draw/WP 10.
Where next......well after their minor success with their unix WP7/8 and an old draw I think they will be back to the Linux marketplace with a native app, the only questions are how long must we wait, will it be worth it or have MS killed it?
Ultimately I cannot see many/any traditional shrink-wrap software companies converting well into Linux land, they can't comprehend the underlying concept of using the GPL (not just LGPL) stuff out there and releasing products based on support et al rather than licensing revenue. Why didn't Corel just port their whole App suite to Gnome/KDE2 on all platforms rather than work on KDE and wine?
All of their problems probably would have been solved had it not been for the change in relative stock prices of Corel and Borland between the initial merger announcement and the critical dates. What was an attractive deal for both sides become a wholly unappealing deal for Borland shareholders and Corel lost a stay of execution AND the combined "powerhouse" that should have arrived on the Linux platform.
Disclaimer. The above are the conclusions I have drawn from my observations.....not the facts cause I don't know them....as if you all couldn't tell :-)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Come on people! Who has a word processor to compete with Word? And don't give me any malarky about the anemic substitutes that are left over. Who was closest to getting such a competetive threat to run on Linux?
Corel has something that no other Linux vendor on the planet can boast: industrial strength desktop applications. Whether or not this is a reflection of their innovative talent (it isn't) is moot. The fact is that they have acquired a suite desktop applications which, feature for feature, can compete with the best anyone has to offer.
Microsoft may not be able to control Linux itself, but with a few paltry millions, they have obtained control of a suite of applications which has the potential to threaten their desktop monopoly. Which in my opinion is more of a de-facto standard than the OS itself. People buy computers for the applications. Sendmail and Apache may be fun for the geeks among us, but most people want an office suite. Linux has other desktop application alternatives, but they have a long way to go to match the power of the application stable that Cowpland plowed under.
What does Microsoft lose by selling Corel's Linux interests? Not a damn thing. They can download an ISO image for free just like the rest of us.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
I wonder how this will impact
Perhaps part of the deal was that Corel must get out of the Linux business?
I bet this has to do with Microsoft's investment in Corel. "We'll give you the $$$...you guys wait for a little while, and then drop Linux."
Whoa! I want a Corel Linux arm! Corel Linux is the best artificial limb operating system ever created since Project ArmitageOS.
Corel reminds me of many dotcoms... cool product, cool image and yet they can't sell their products.
The essential function of any business is SALES.
Had Corel learned to SELL their desktop Linux, they would have been wildly successful. Instead they left it to a retail channel that DID NOT KNOW LINUX to sell it...No sales = no revenue.
You can put in all the features in the world, and good sales & marketing will win every time.
-- $G
But you're forgetting the original --and probably still the best-- document system that works in Linux. (La)TeX!
LaTeX has a bit of a learning curve, but really no more so than HTML. It makes very professional output and it's un-bloated enough that I can use it just fine on my 486 laptop.
Then came along programs like LyX that built easier UI's on top of TeX...
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
>>they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.
>>Corel has been rudderless for far too long.
This, however, I have no argument with. Corel was once a real contender, but they have slowly foundered, no thanks to a lot of me-too strategies.
Anyone remember their Acrobat-style portable-document clone, Envoy? Remember what a gigantic hit that was? I don't know of a single site or service that uses Envoy as a document format, while I can barely avoid banging into sites that use Acrobat.
>>They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
I suspect they were not clear at all who they wanted to sell it too. If they had wanted to sell this to mainstream computer users, then they needed to do so effectively. It's clear they weren't trying to steal away RedHat or Slackware customers.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
I wonder what sort of message this will send to big businesses with potential interest in Linux.
Corel seems to be failing at it, I wonder if this will end up being a black eye..
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
This isn't necessarily a Bad Thing© -- I think it is a demonstration of the fact that Linux is a unique market that is neither like traditional UNIX or personal computer (MS, Mac). Like a dot-com, it takes clever management, niche appeal, value added services, and more than a little bit of luck to be successful. AFAIK, Yahoo! is the only dot com turning a profit. If it is about being the first (or close to it), Yggdrasil and Slackware would be king, but it appears that SuSE is the only company that makes money with Linux.
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Actually Corel's government business started declining seven years ago when the Liberals took over from Brian Mulroney's Conservatives(PCs). Cowpland was a big PC supporter as evidenced by their having a former PC cabinent minister and a former PC Ontario premier on the board of directors. Even the current CEO's father was a former Mulroney advisor. When the PCs lost the Liberals started giving contracts to Microsoft. In 1995, just after Corel bought WordPerfect, the Canadian military switched from WordPerfect to Microsoft(this is after having been standardized on WordPerfect for over 10 years). Revenue Canada did the same. Even though Corel sued RC and won some cash, RC still bought Microsoft. Now that the Liberals are in power for at least another 4 years would not expect this trend to reverse. The only exception to this is the external affair dept who have stayed with Corel so that all the embasseys would be using a Canadian product.
Most of Corel's business has been coming from the US govt, lawyers and universities. Only a tiny trickle of revenue comes from Canadian Govt depts.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
As a side note, I went to helix.com when I first heard of Helix and wondered why they were talking about Irritable Bowel Syndrome... I just find that funny.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Jumped on the Network Computer bandwagon. Failed.
Unfortunately, news articles are not as fun to read a second time.
We should start calling these things CornFlake posts. Read em again, for the first time.
The VC firm is actually Linux Global Partners -- not to be confused with any VC firms containing "Linx".
Scroogle
on the LGP here. It may be a pretty good deal, provided they can get the expertise they need to keep the distro up to snuff. The price is certainly right.
illegitimii non ingravare
Who would have paid for those "stable systems"? The law firm? Right...
... WordPerfect version 5 or 6. Current shipping version is 10, BTW.
Law firms are cheap bastards when it comes to IT. They bill everyone in the office out by-the-hour, so what the fuck do they care about efficiency. Flashing "MS Junk" makes them money.
That is, if they even spring for the flashing MS Junk. Most of them are standardized on WordPerfect
WP/Novell/Corel have tried to sell suite software to these people. They won't buy. Hell, more often than not, they're using a 5 year old version of the mission-critical software (WP), bugs and all*, so write them off as worthless as a sales strategy.
* The Starr Report, written with WP6, had some scandlous deleted footnotes reappear when opened in WP9 or whatever.
You think that they wouldn't have required PPT4 compatibility if they didn't have thousands of PowerPoint files laying around? Or is that not important?
The whole "missing patch" thing makes me chuckle. Back in those days, WordPerfect Suite was big hairy ball of poorly-QA'd DLL hell. There was probably about 32 other patches and INI file hacks needed to get shit working almost properly. (Maybe WP is still this way, who knows since nobody uses it anymore, for some reason.) No Microsoft consipircy either, because Lotus has always worked fine.
What does corel draw need from a kernel?
War is necrophilia.
The only thing that comes to mind is a Linux based gaming box. Possibly they're trying to create an XBox killer? Or maybe a new generation of stand-up arcade boxes. Or something else entirely using virtual reality and a Linux super-cluster. Either way, they got me intrigued.
Or maybe their just a front company for the Knights Templar/Priory of Zion. :-)
It was a terrible mistake to enter the Linux distribution market. Corel was going head-to-head with Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, et al. How did it expect to succeed? By pulling a mini-MSFT and bundling WordPerfect Office.
WordPerfect Office 2000 has not been well received, because it's a dog. Conventional wisdom says the WINE layer slows it down. Whether that's true or not, Linux users see it as kind of an affront--give me a native app., dammit!
There is demand for WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and Corel Draw for Linux. I hope that Corel continues to develop these products. Maintaining a good Linux distribution is a lot of work. Corel should be applying that effort to improving the Linux ports of its bread-and-butter apps.
Corel may not be good for free software, but it can be good for Linux. That's good enough for now.
I agree. Corel's distribution were horror show-worthy. I have both 1.1 and 1.2 on CD's and I have tried installing both of them on about 10 different computers, to no avail. I thought maybe it was me, but I have installed a lot of other distros with no problem (for the most part.) I could never (and still don't) understand why neither release of corel liked any of my hardware... I think the world will be better off without Corel's crappy distro. Thanks for reading all of my rambling.
Cheers
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
If you don't believe me, my (software) company's year end conference took place last week, and I sat in on the bulk of the presentation. One presentation was the results of some market research we had done, comparing my software company's recognition with target demographics in several categories against four other companies, including a dummy company that had a cute, semidescriptive name. That control company NEVER ranked last in any of the categories of research, including name recognition and quality of product.
I know we all hate them, but the Marketing department really is responsible for whether your next check is from the payroll or the unemployment office...
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In all honesty, no, no I can't!
If trying to cluster Corel Linux systems sucked as much as trying to get anything else done on them (other than clicking on the pretty, Windows look alike icons), then I would say there is no way in hell that you could cluster a Corel distro based group of computers.
Honestly, I've never seen such a terrible piece of software claiming to be "Linux". And hopefully I never will again.
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Most of Corel's business has been coming from the US govt, lawyers and universities. Only a tiny trickle of revenue comes from Canadian Govt depts.
I do not believe this is correct, there are many facets of the Canadian Gov. still locked into contracts with COREL. As I mentioned before, I do not have statistics at hand, or I would have posted all of them. I do however recall that not even a year ago, still a full 45% of Corel's business was from the Canadian government.
My father is a Manager for the Ministry of Community and Social Services, and they just switched their division over to MS in January, 2000. They had been trying to for 4 years previous but couldn't due to their contract with Corel.
You are entirely correct in stating that this goes back to Mulroney's PC's, they are the ones who signed on to stupidly long contracts for exorbitant amounts of money.
The proof is in the pudding is it not?
No Comment.
I might also argue that they could have saved the Corel Linux development costs and engineering time if they had partnered with Caldera instead. I suggest Caldera because that kind of marketing strategy is right up their alley. It's too bad. Corel employs some good engineers, and they help the Wine project immensely. But their senior management made some bad mistakes, and didn't stay the course on a market strategy which could potentially work, instead focusing on one thing after the next in a fruitless attempt to grab the quick buck. Welcome to bankruptcy, Corel.
--Maynard
I kinda wish that wxWindows was a little more popular. It's a wonderful idea, a C++ wrapper around the 'native' GUI widget sets on multiple platforms (Win32, OS/2, MacOS, GTK, Motif, etc), is relatively easy to write for, doesn't seem to have a huge effect on performance and makes it damn easy to port. Unless Borland's CLX is released soon and takes off, wxWindows seems like the best of the toolkits. Now if only someone would do a wxQT port so that I could write a single app and have it work seamlessly on either GTK (Gnome) or QT (KDE) depending on how it was built/what libs are installed. To be quite frank, the Gnome/KDE nonsense annoys me, and I wish they'd set aside their petty bickering and work together to make sure that while users have choice over what kind of 'desktop environment' they want to run, they don't have to compromise any of the apps designed for one when running the other. When I first read that people from KDE and Gnome collaborated to work on a unified object sharing system I was delighted, later it vanished and each went their own way, with Gnome sticking with Corba, and KDE using their 'KParts' system which uses an entirely different system. Now it seems the only part they are willing to collaborate on is the window manager 'hints' system, which is admittedly a rather small feature as far as a user would be concerned.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
when it was still Corel's and I was appalled at how unfocused they were.
At the time, we (Comp Eng @ U of Toronto) were visiting Corel on a career exploration field trip to Ottawa (this was 2 years ago). We visited Corel Corp. and were very unexcited - nobody there could give us a cute motivational speach on why it's so great to work for Corel. The best point seemed to be "we get free cola."
Then we went to Corel Computer. Nobody was excited after what we saw in the software division. But I was just amazed at what I saw in this office. At the time, they were finishing work on the NetWinder. This was the first I had heard of it and the idea of it was fascinating. The technical team was inspired. Our jaws dropped to the floor. Here were these people showing us a 15W computer that was powerful and extensible enough to be a web server, a development workstation, a tv set top box, a gaming machine, and pretty much anything else you wanted to push it to.. like a cluster on a common fibre backbone in one box (10 of these babies). This seemed like the future's primordial soup. Anything seemed possible.
The marketing people showed us all this and then I popped the question, "what are you guys going to sell this as?" They didn't know.. they had all these ideas and couldn't tell us what this was going to be sold as first. No marketing plan whatsoever. The box ran Corel Linux and KDE, I believe. The web server version could boot the system from memory for instant reboots. The web server cluster was supposed to be hot swappable soon (8 server and 2 controller motherboards in one box).
The whole place was wholly behind open source and linux. This machine caused some commotion at Microsoft from what I heard - it was that neat! (or at least this is the impression I got)
So what happened next? Nothing... I was stupefied, but I didn't hear about this thing until the division was sold to these rebel.com people who aren't really doing anything with it either and the technology is aging. They should've ipo'ed long ago and financed a marketing campaign for this thing.
This seems to be the trend in the entire company. They just don't know how to market their stuff. I remember looking at the pathetic ads they had for Corel Draw on taxi cabs. The image given by the company is poor. With a better marketing team (one with any skill whatsoever) these guys could be big again, their internal morale would increase, and they could put some cool stuff out. The way things are now, they are toast. And giving up Linux is bad move #2 after selling Corel Computer, which was a gem.
Janimal
This was a typical Corel fuck-up. It reminds me of the WordPerfect for fuck-up a few years back; that particular little adventure costing Corel the best part of 50 million bucks. And before that was the network computers. And before that was the video conferencing. And before that was Corel Home...
I worked for Corel's localisation centre in Dublin for ~2.5 years, during which time I saw more savage stupidity and brute incompetence than one person should should have to see in a lifetime. Corel's top management could not get their head around the fact that they weren't just a garage start-up any more, that they were a big multinational company with big revenues and over 1,000 staff to look out for. Worse, it wasn't just a big company that thought it was a start-up; it was a company that thought it was a start-up, but with big company earnings. About as level-headed as a toddler with a tac nuke. Mike Cowpland was the worst. He took the company off on whatever crazy jaunt his magic 8-ball or the voices in his head or whatever the fuck told him to. The shareholders should have nailed his wrinkly ex-pat ass to the wall of Carling Avenue years ago.
There was no management, no processes, nothing that could by any stretch be called an organisation. The fall of Corel was inevitable. They were the engineers of their own doom. They were greedy and stupid, reaching out to grab new markets while their core business was eroding from underneath them.
I don't know. You certainly may be right as far as moronic buisness strategy, but a good while ago I used to get a lot of work done in Corel Draw [years ago, back when I was still dual-booting]. I hated having to shut down my system just to fiddle with graphics, so I largely stopped, and then came to enjoy the gimp.
But I have still always missed the vector-drawing / layout aspect of the Draw program. I did some neat zines, did layout for a local weekly, it was really pretty powerfull [and cheap] when you got the hang of it.
I was very seriously tempted to buy the Corel Draw for linux package, until a friend of mine was foolish enough to buy the wordperfect office suite. Not only did it have the indignity of insisting on installing itself all over the bloody filesystem, [as opposed to in one or two directories or usr/local like any proper unix package should [or can at least be coaxed to with a bit of bash scullduggery]]. Not only did it insist on installing init some unstable init font server...
But it also had this little problem of not running at all whatsoever. Yes, that's right. He paid 90$ for a nice shiny coaster in a big box. The software would immediately go into an infinite look of forked processes dumping core constantly whenever he would try to start it. He stripped out his version of wine, no good. He installed the samba off of the "Corel Linux" CD, no good. He finally gave up.
A real shame, as I would have been happy to give then 200$ for CorelDraw, if it actually worked at all.
BTW, does anyone know if this was just an issue with wordperfect office, or of anyway around it short of ditching your own installation and dual booting into "Corel Linux"?
Yes, this isn't a particularly insightfull post. I'm tired. Must get back to work. Haven't slept in 40 hours.
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
I finally find a distro that actually works and is as easy to use as any Windows produt. It's a shame to see it go. Time to dig out those (shudder) Redhat CD's - fight with stupid problems with X, network settings that dissapear on re-boot, and any other annoyances that I didn't get with Corral's distro.
Not that we know anything about graphics, either. All of our graphics software was acquired from other companies in the first place.
I don't know then where they got Corel Draw from, but for a while that was pretty much all they did, and at that time, they knew graphics.
Other than that - dead on.
Corel bought Ventura publishing, which is where they got their graphics expertise from. They did actually produce Draw (which was only supposed to sell a few hundred copies).
That is one area where I will admit that they have excelled. But they dropped the ball with WordPerfect in a big way. It was huge opportunity and they blew it.
Most of their problem is summed up nicely on their own web site: Corel Corporation has developed products known for excellence and value that target emerging trends in the software industry
There's something about "emerging trends" that have dot-commers kicking themselves right now. Corel would do well to pay attention to this. Rather than following, they should be making some trends of their own.
Corel's stock-in-trade are GUI apps aimed at Windows users. Given the state of the Linux desktop is it any surprise that they weren't able to succeed? I know that KDE/Gnome are getting better, but why blame Corel for what's really a more general (and well known) weak spot of Linux?
They couldn't survive selling Corel Draw for Corel Linux alone, they would have had to have been able to make it run under, what a half-dozen distributions, each with its own idea of what "stable kernel" means? At least two competing GUIs and another half-dozen hacked up variants? And printing -- what would they have done for Corel Draw printing?
At best they would have had achieved the success of Netscape on Linux -- a buggy, staticly-linked GUI app that everyone loves to hate. At worst they would have had a total config and support mess that would have never given them enough sales to make it pay for itself.
I'd enable fingerd and drive by Redmond, WA.
The original poster was dead on. Corel should have shifted their base to their turf.
My sister works for a prominent firm in Chicago, and she is very annoyed with MS junk. Not being stupid, she gets rather upset when "tech support" asks her to reboot her computer again. She's lost enough work and enough time to try just about anything else. Talking paperclips, flashing banners and all that game junk was not what she wants from a computer. All she wants is a word processor, mail, and some elementery browsing for research.
Moreover, she was very warm to the whole linux thing. Lawyers demand transparency, so both the Free and Open Software models made great sense to her. It was easy for her to see that a software profesional without source was crippled, and then understood why tech support seemed so poor.
Had Correl droped stable systems on desks around her, she would have demanded one in short order.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I haven't seen MS release cd's with thousands of crappy little images, with even worse windows based browsers... :)
If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux,
Highly doubtful. The only reason law firms stuck with WordPerfect for so long is that they had tons of templates/macros which they were either unwilling or unable to move over to MS Office. But you can postpone the inenvitable only for so long -- by now most of law firms already switched to MS Office.
WordPerfect is dead. Actually, it has been dead for a while and already smells a bit. Trying to push it down the throat of law firms wouldn't have helped Corel one little bit.
Yeah, yeah, I know, people will post and say "But I use it and I like it!". You and who else? Is there enough precision in a float to express WordPerfect's market share, or do I need a double?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
RE: the Canadian military switched from WordPerfect to Microsoft(this is after having been standardized on WordPerfect for over 10 years).
I remember that - Corel decided to harass/investigate DND because they felt that the contract should have been awarded to them. Knowing some of the people who made that decision, I can safely say that the decision was the right one. Microsoft showed up on time with a product that worked and fit the spec.
Corel's demo blew up - they said they would come back the following week with a better version that had those things fixed.
DND doesn't allow "second chances" - "well, wait, I realise that what we're presenting doesn't work, let's just pump the handle a couple of times and try again". They can't. It's procedure.
If they'd wanted those contracts, they should have learned to read specs, and to code programs that fit same.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Hmm, nice use of the language. Spelling I can accept, grammar is annoying put usually livable but can we at least have the articles have sentences that make sense please.
Rich
So the question arises, if Corel isn't going to be a Linux vendor any more, why has Microsoft bothered to invest in them? Corel has little of any worth at the moment, and has been thought of as a "Linux shop" for the last two years. If MS intended Corel to be its way in the Linux world, it's not going to work. If MS bought Corel to try to damage the Linux world, that wont work either - removing Corel from the Linux market will barely make a dent in it, and will leave Corel on the sidelines unable to embrace and smother the platform from the inside.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I don't know about anybody else, but me and my friends instantly thought that within 6 months to a year of Microsoft's obscene amount of money spent on Corel shares(here is the article), Corel would stop selling Linux software. Let's see.. That article was dated "October 02, @6:10PM".. Obviously me and my friends over-estimated Microsoft's anticipation to squash it's intimidating competitor, Linux.
Sad to see this. I think many of the comments here are digging too hard for reasons, though. It comes down to this, I think: if Corel was in sound financial shape, they'd keep the Linux division going, and probably have good success down the road. They're not. They need financial help wherever they can find it, and so a deal that cuts costs, infuses $5 million, and retains a 20% interest looks reasonable, particularly to shareholders.
About their Linux work so far... the Corel Linux disto is good for newbies: Debian 'plus', with a simple install. That's the right idea, imho.
The Corel Linux apps are ok and have the potential to be a real income source if mainstream offices can be led off the fence and migrated to Linux. Given another couple years, and some active, intelligent marketing, that could still happen. (Corel didn't have either, unfortunately.) LGP may have made a shrewd investment.
With Helixcode, Code Weavers, and Gnumatic also part of the LGP, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. Could be an improvement...
Yup, Corel is just a poorly run company.
IMO the real problem with Corel is that because of their tried Linux joy-ride their attention in the Windows market weakened.
Microsoft may be in the advantage here (being on their own platform etc.) but for '3rd parties' there are LOTS of possibilities to sell kick-ass software in this market. Simply because the Windows desktop app market is so huge there are lots of possibilities for a positive spiral, imo more than in the Linux app market.
Even if Microsoft has 95% of the Office market share and Corel has only 5%. It would be fairly straightforward to make this ratio a 90%-10% which will effectively result in a doubled revenue stream for Corel.
--[rosso bright]--
When I went for my interview for Corel Linux work I asked if we were going to see other platforms, and ARM was the first possibility........not anymore though by the looks of it.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
As the user who wants to run WPO run
Don't ask me why but it seems that the installer very often makes a balls of the users preferences and this command re-writes them correctly. Fixes a lot of broken installs. Just out of curiousity, did you or your friend contact Tech-Support (as your box entitles you). They may not have had the answer but you should give them a go before slating the product.Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I'm 99.8% sure this would go against Canadian anti-combine laws (similar to American anti-trust laws). I doubt that the Corel/MS acquisition agreement stated such a thing implicitly... and it's unlikely that they would have left any record of "suggestions" made by senior MS people for the DoJ or Canadian equivalent (the Mounties? CSIS?) to find in the ensuing legal case. If, however, Corel execs were shown that Linux was not as good an opportunity as they might have thought it was when they bought Borland and got into the distro business then that might have affected things (except that the shareholders would have to agree to both the acquisition and the sale of the asset and so something looks good somewhere to the majority of their group, whether that's a small group or not I don't know). I am curious about their upside, though. What is their .NET gain (sorry, bad pun) by participating in this affair... if they bought Borland for half a billion (this figure is based only on the rumours I remember) and if they are indeed selling their entire operation for $5 million then they're out a whole bunch and I would never, ever buy Corel shares again (and if this is true then I believe Michael Coupland, the Corel CEO, has earned an early retirement and very chique frontal lobotomy). But if they made out better than I think they have and someone can explain their strategy to me in a way that makes sense, then I might not be so... bewildered... by their behaviour.
-Duke
Actually, the fault really belongs neither to Corel or to Java. NCs were supposed to be the big thing in 98. That was also supposed to be the year Java VMs got stable and fast enough to support serious desktop apps. Which is why everybody was working on a Java office suite. And why Sun spent a fortune buying up companies like Lighthouse and Electric Paper to develop Java apps. Plus Sun, Corel, and a lot of other companies spent a fortune developing the NCs themselves. Only to find that nobody wanted to buy them. Sun, IBM, Oracle, etc., could afford to write off this mistake. Corel didn't screw up any worse, but...
We don't know anything about compilers. Let's buy Borland! Wait, we don't have any money.
That's not what happened. The merger was a stock swap, so they didn't need any money. Indeed, some sceptics thought the merger was just a con to raid Borland's rather fat bank account. Which perception has as much to do with the outcome as anything.
__________________
This has probably been said months before, but this could mean that WordPerfect is about to get new foster parents; it's like a haunted office suite, whenever a company gets it they have to sell it off eventually. I know they have not yet, but it's coming... too bad, I kinda liked that feature-rich suite before discovering LaTeX...
All I can say is that an idiotic company better not get it and ruin it like how Novell killed its market share.
# debian/rules
Anyone remember their Acrobat-style portable-document clone, Envoy?
Ugh, don't remind me. The labs for one of my engineering classes were in Envoy. I had a bitch of a time actually finding a downloadable copy of the viewer. pdf's please!
At least, Corel is just selling it (whatever the price, 30 cents may be a good estimate...), and is not sending an email to their users stating:
"Thank you for participating. These softwares will stop working december 31st. If you have documents produced with these softwares, stop using Linux and go back to Windows, buy the Windows versions of our products. 2nd possibility: fuck off, we don't care, you stupid geek. Sincerly yours."
Framemaker, anyone?
I'm bored enough to answer ACs...
Jesus, can GOD create more stupid people?
According to theologians, GOD (especially capitalized) can do whatever he wants.
So if everybody is using Windows..you do also?
Yes. There is whole bunch of advantages I get by using the same software as everybody else. The law firms, specifically, have to be able to deal with MS Word documents send to them by clients and counterparties in other law firms. Saying "we only accept files in non-proprietary formats" isn't going to cut it.
MS Office..whats the big deal about that buggy package.
Nothing, except for the fact that it is the standard business desktop software.
The Law industry is using Wordperfect because they want a stable, a not OS bound wordproccesor.
Ahem. The law firms do not care about OS dependencies at all -- they have other things to worry about. And Word is stable enough. Not bugless, but definitely stable enough for real life.
Wordperfect outpreforms MSOffice on every terrain.
I wasn't aware they were both 4WD vehicles. And it's not like you can be bothered to supply any evidence.
read your magazines Bill!
???
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
There was a picture of barbells, where the weights were blue squares (to match the color theme of the Corel box) and a headline that said "Power**3" or something like that. There was this picture of an older guy, with a lip piercing, and a little blue square on the lip ring. And so on.
These are the sort of ads you expect Apple to run: too-clever ads that don't reach out to new customers.
They should have said "Gain the power of Linux without retraining your people." "Stability and reliability are now easy to install and have a familiar face." Focus on the strengths of the product; don't try to make it cool. Business people won't buy Linux based on coolness!
There was a legendary bad ad years ago showing a human brain with a floppy disk stuck into it. That lip-piercing guy ad was almost as bad. Corel might as well have taken their ad budget and burned it.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
If they had stuck with half of what they started they may have been really sucessful. A java office suite is not such a bad idea, an easy to use linux distro is not such a bad idea, but they take TIME. Corel wants a six month sensation. Get a clue guys, Microsoft can't make anything sucessful in less than three tries (Windows, Office, NT/2000, winCE?) but they get to the third try(even if the end product isn't so great at least someone BUYS it)! You can't just take the buzz word of the day. put a spit shine on it, and make a billion without a little time.
Insert pithy comment here.
Insert pithy comment here.
Well I do systems work for the legal arm of a large company and all of our law offices switched from Word Perfect 8 to Office 97 last year. About 600 attorneys/paralegals/secretaries in total. So I'd say Corel can't take the sales to legal types for granted anymore.
It seems that every company that owns WordPerfect seems to tank. It's like Tolkien's Ring or something. First the WordPerfect Corporation itself, then Novell, now Corel.
... we might consider both WordPerfect and Corel to be simply the next fatality, the next commercial entity to get squashed by free software that is Just Better.
Here's the sad story of a great application that suffered from a long string of bad management, unfair beatings from a big bad monopolist, and finally... competition from free software.
WordPerfect gives many of us a Warm Fuzzy. It's part of our collective history. But now we've got both StarOffice and KOffice for free, and open source
Mark Williams software (remember Coherent?) was the first. Microsoft will likely be the last. There's plenty of 'em in between -- WordPerfect is merely one of them.
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I agree 100% -- it was a great idea poorly executed, just like their java and netwinder.
The correct execution would have included partnering with Dell or Compaq, integrating their software on their partners hardware, for a soup-to-nuts business solution. A single point of contact for all hardware and software problems.
Microsoft couldn't have beaten that (they don't due hardware, they just blame all their problems on the hardware).
My question is: what did they sell? The distribution or the applications?
If this new group is just a distribution vendor, then they're too little too late. If they get the applications, then do the get the Draw & Wordperfect source code too?
Furthermore, just what does the new company intend to do with it? If they try to sell it as a box at CompUSA, they'll fail as miserably as Corel did.
Does the new company have the resources for a soup-to-nuts solution? Do they have the clout to team with a big PC OEM like Compaq?
Chris
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
It's really sad to see that Corel decided to leave Linux arena. Corel might actually be able to bring multimedia companies to port their applications to Linux, since it's aimed for desktop user. Corel has done a very good job on Corel Linux, and I hope that some people maybe able to continue developing Corel Linux. Look at Corel's contribution to Wine, and they ported WordPerfect Office 2k to Linux. Yes, maybe it's not perfect yet, but at least they've tried really hard. Despite Corel has little Linux experience, I'm still, however, impressed for their commitments for the last 1.5 years.
Let's wish them success for their future business, and I hope somebody can continue Corel Linux development.
I actually liked there distribution, unlike most people.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Since MS bought them it was just a matter of time before this happened. We all saw it coming even when they told us that their staff and focus would remain the same.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
Let see, jumped on the Java bandwagon. Failed.
Jumped on the Linux bandwagon. Failed.
I guess we will see a big M-Commerce push from Corel next -- or they will become an ASP or something....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Umm...I'm willing to bet this IS Corel's participation in .NET. "Sell your Linux assests and we will give you 'undocumented' info on .NET. There by allowing us (Microsoft) to appear NOT to have a monolopy, when in fact we can put you out of business on a whim.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I'll bet that Corel sales reps have been tearing their hair (if not eyes!) out the last couple of years watching Canadian government contracts go to Microsoft.
The critical point is that the "stream" of revenue moves from "gushing river" towards "mere trickle."
I wasn't aware of Copeland's PC connections; that makes the entire situation make complete sense when it had never seemed sensible before.
When I saw Corel getting into the "SideWinder" business, the only way I could fathom the strategy being faintly sensible was if they could get some fat sales out of the Canadian government. The decline of Corel (in various ways) parallels the decline of ability to get such sales.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I only saw Sun give out StarOffice, nobody else has or had a competetive office suite available either gratis or licensed under the GPL. Where were those OSS zealots out to undercut Corel with a competetive office suite? Koffice and Gnome office is coming, but it'll be a year or two yet.
No. Corel attempted to sell boxed software to the Linux market while a major competetor undercut them by giving out an office suite for free. Just like Microsoft gave out Internet Explorer for free, but at least Sun didn't tie StarOffice into Linux -- they're just tying it into Gnome.
Corel's mistakes have nothing to do with dot-com maddness, and everything to do with a complete lack of strategy and planning. They have a withering market of law firms who continue to reluctantly buy WordPerfect because they like the product and have a history of templates and macros. Corel foolishly spend money and resources building their own distribution to sell in a saturated market, and then attempted to sell a boxed product for several hundred dollars while a free competitor ate their lunch. And on top of it they didn't provide the channel or technical support for migration to their base market. Can you give me a better example of what not to do?
--Maynard
Did you catch that bit about some ex-Corel employees brokering the deal? I did a Google search and they seem to be a bit of an enigma. They seem to be involved with WINE development, like getting DirectX and Printing working, but no word on what they do. Anybody know what these guys are up to?
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
That's the question, isn't it? Given that Corel wasn't selling their office apps, was their main competition:
A) Free/free office suites
B) HTML documents written in emacs and printed with Netscape
C) Corel giving its software away
D) Nothing - web servers and routers don't need an office suite
E) Booting into Windows
My completely off the cuff estimate: A -5%, B -1%, C - 4%, D - 50%, E - 40%. It would behoove whoever wants to take over their business to know the answer to that question.
I wish the headline would be:
Corel To Sell ARM Linux
But I probably want too much from this life.
There haven't been many companies who had made money for making software for Linux, period. Not any big companies anyway.
How do make money off a OSS OS is still a question.
Does the Linux minority have to be TOTALLY blind to reality, or can they take their collective head out of their collective ass and see what THEY need to do to overthrow MS from their position?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Doing WINE ports of their apps, while it boosted WINE and made it easy for them to make their applications "cross-platform", rendered them slow and somewhat unstable. Simply put, there was no value in using Corel's applications at the prices they were asking for them. If I want slow, bloated apps, I'd have bought StarOffice (but, it's free now, isn't it?) or I'd be using Windows and MS Office still.
No, this is not about an infant desktop. This is about a company that couldn't execute good business decisions to save their lives. If they don't get back to their core, original business, this money from this divestiture will do nothing for them.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I've an after-hours sysadmin customer that's the head of a small law firm in Dallas. He just wants something stable and something compatible with what they are using at the courthouses. If he could get legal practice management software worth it's salt (the options for Linux aren't quite what he or most practices need...) and get an office suite that is like WordPerfect, or does an excellent job of approximating the same- and doesn't up and eat his appointments, etc. He'd jump at it. He'd have went to Linux if I could have found a decent Linux based law practice management system. He's as conservative as they come- and he's fed up with Windows and the BS he's had to deal with while using it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It was thought that the Borland/Corel merger was good because it would bring great tools to the linux platform. Why doesn't Borland buy Corel's linux division? It's only 5 mil which is a pittance in this industry.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Corel 1995: We don't know jack about office productivity software. Hey! We could buy the staff and rights to the ex-most-expensive office suite on the planet! You can make a lot of money with trendy office software.
.Net. It's going to be trendy.
.Net, except we don't know how it works because all the developers are laid off. Hmm, maybe we could get into the Lawn Mower business. We could call it... Mitel. Or something.
Corel 1996: We don't know jack about Java, but someone said it's the next big thing. Hey! A Java office suite!
Corel 1997: Hmmm, Java isn't much good for more than silly little applets. This Office suite isn't working out. Where did all of our money go?
Corel 1998: We better lay off all of those expensive WordPefect employees because we can't afford them. Back to not knowing anything about office apps.
Corel 1999: We don't know anything about Linux, but someone said it was going to Take Over the World. Hey, let's make a Linux distro!
Corel 2000: We don't know anything about compilers. Let's buy Borland! Wait, we don't have any money. We spent the Linux money last week when we bought Bryce3d. Not that we know anything about graphics, either. All of our graphics software was acquired from other companies in the first place.
Corel 2001: MS gave us some money. We'd better get rid of our Linux shop so we can focus on
Corel 2002: Maybe we could make WordPerfect for
Let's face it, Corel is nothing but a fancy dot-com that only survives off the carcases of other products that they manage to "acquire." If they knew how to "innovate" maybe things would be different.
About four years ago I speculated with friends that Linux could be made a real marketplace/desktop force through the help of an applications/software company with clout. The only company I could think of offhand was Corel. Sure enough, when Corel Linux came out, I was excited -- here we would have some really good choices, at last! WordPerfect and Corel Draw in Linux, just for openers...
And, wouldn't you know it, Corel apparently had no idea how to push it. They packaged it right, but they didn't capture the attention of people who were sitting on the Microsoft fence and looking for an excuse to jump. No ad campaigns. No whitepapers. No grassroots motivation. They just dumped it in the marketplace and expected it to catch fire all by itself.
Bad strategy. Maybe their successors won't make the same mistakes.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
Linux? Sold
Children's Games? Stopped a long time ago (Corel Home Series)
Wordperfect? Why would they compete with Microsoft?
CorelDRAW? Microsoft has Photodraw
Is there ANYTHING Corel is doing anymore that won't compete with Microsoft?
While it's nice to have WordPerfect for Linux and all that, and I doubt MSFT really forced the issue, the thing is that Corel caused more harm than good to Linux.
I'm not saying they had a bad distro, I'm just saying that their jerking around and cash flow concerns about them tarnished the whole Linux industry. If we only had companies like Red Hat and VA Linux Systems involved, the industry would be regarded as far more stable, and the recent add-on of mainstream companies like IBM, HP, and Compaq would be regarded by Wall Street as much better news. But Corel has dragged it all down.
[caveat - I own Red Hat stock, so I'm biased]
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
While at COMDEX in Toronto, the only lineup longer than Microsoft's *shiver* was Corel's (I suppose mainly because of Wordperfect Suite for Linux).
And then recieving a huge bailout from Microsoft....... something's fishy here.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Small is beautiful, not only in code, but also in the boardroom/executive suite.
I'm not saying no one can live off Linux support (of course not, I do!), but throwing big money and lots of people at Linux doesn't make it profitable automatically. Especially when a company like Corel attacks it with a full set of overhead costs. Corel Linux (1.0 and 1.1) were, IMO, horrible distributions, and it's obvious to me that Corel was trying to 'microsoft' it's way to the desktop. I'm glad I won't have to face another distro from THEM!
This is more support for my view that the best, innovative, healthiest companies lean towards the small side, and that simply BEING a big company is a handicap when trying to grok Linux.
This task is much more suited to 'small fry' companies like me!
Many may argue, rightly or wrongly, that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market. Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time. They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
But it was still a good idea. If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux, they would have saved their base the unnecessary costs of Windows, while at the same time preventing Microsoft from pulling the OS API rug out from under them once they become a serious threat to MSOffice again. The shift to Linux was nothing more than self defense for Corel... they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
But Corel has been rudderless for far too long. They've attempted a Java office suite which went nowhere. And now, they attempted to enter the Linux market rather than use Linux to shift their own market to their own turf, and now they're back to square one. What a shame, since WordPerfect is still a damn good wordprocessor.
--Maynard
when i read that, i was like whoa, linux for ARM, yehaw! damn again!
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
that Corel was going to sell a Linux distribution for Intel ARM platforms?
sup
I have read that Corel derives 10% of its income from its Linux operations.
They are selling a branch of their operations that went from 0% to 10% in a very short period for little or no gain.
The people that should be questioning this move seriously are Corel's shareholders. A move like this is clearly politically motivated by the recent influx of MS capital and is not in Corel best short term or long term interests. If I was a Corel stockholder I would be loudly complaining and possibly seeking the involvement of the FTC.
Hell, obviously one cannot sell software for Linux and still make a profit.
Rather than making a distribution, they should have focused on making the apps to sell first. And they shouldn't have used WINE unless they could have had decent levels of performance- which, currently, the Linux versions don't because they're using WINE.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'm supposed to have a job in Corel's Linux dept. come January! That'd be nice... "Yeah, we did hire you, but that division was sold last Thursday. How'd you like to sweep up the empty offices instead?"
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
This nut was the culprit for the fall of Corel. Now they have a new CEO. I think things will get better.
The spec format in question was powerpoint 4.0 which wordPerfect Office could handle but the competion was rigged against Corel from the start. Corel asked for more time as they had just aquired WP but Supply and Services said no. So Corel showed up for the demo. It all worked well on their laptop but the DND test machine did not have a crucial patch for windows. You can read all the details here
BTW it is ironic that Corel is selling off their Linux distro just as DND has started testing Corel Linux as a possible replacement desktop.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Hit their web site. One page there saying they do cool things that they're not ready to talk about...
...but we hope you'll like your Christmas present! -->
In the page source was this:
<!--
Weird...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I am not implying that there are many Sun bashers at /., but there are some, very vocal ones.
Well, I guess Sun has seen this coming. Not exactly the time and the circumstances, but Sun thought that Corel was too weak to sustain the Linux platform with a viable office suite. Hence, they buy StarOffice, and release it free.
Now, why would Sun help the Linux community so generously? Well, that's not their intent, I presume. Rather, Sun wants to bite MS' ass, as usual. I don't know any other company that is so financially succesful, and so openly against Mickeysoft.
(plus, I really like the fact that Solaris comes with bash. Shows good intent.)
Sigged!
... hasn't a leg to stand on :-)
It's getting harder to see where Corel is actually going these days. Still, the conspiracy theorists will have a field day linking this to the MS .NET support. But with sales of Corel Draw 9 not up where the company wanted them and increasing numbers of people happy with their current version of WordPerfect, it doesn't look like a particularly healthy revenue stream. MS has this problem too - people may be happy with the software they currently have (\{deity} help them) - but MS has the additional leverage of both new versions of the OS and the guarantee of more PC's being sold with MS software pre-installed on it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I wonder how much ms influenced (i know they were non voting shares) this descicion.
If this comes as a surprise to anyone, well...you didn't exactly have to read between the lines. COREL is fubar and has been for a quite a while. They've managed to do an admirable job of clinging on by their fingernails over the past few year, but their time is up. Something that you may very well be unaware of, basically, COREL exists because the Canadian government has used COREL products extensively over the years. I don't have any exact figures on hand, but I can say with certainty that 80% of all of COREL's past business has been with the Canadian Government. So, COREL started screwing up their graphics and office suites about 2 years ago. The Canadian Government in turn stopped renewing COREL licenses in favor of other suites. (MS has replaced a huge amount of the gov's traditionally COREL usage) Obviously, with the Can. Gov. being the only thing supporting COREL on a significant level, this really hurt their pocket books, and the slide started. Since then COREL has been trying absolutely everything to try and make a quick buck, none of which have worked. I personally thought it would be the nail that sealed their coffin when I first heard that COREL was going to port to LINUX. How did they expect that dumping millions into the project could possibly generate the required revenue's in a short enough period of time when there was (and is) really no market for traditional licensed apps on the linux platform? Who did they think was going to pay? Well, they've got their answer haven't they? (yet again, same story different day...) I see that last fingernail getting weaker daily.
No Comment.
To quote: 'Humans, the human body or any human body parts may not be listed on eBay...."
It's too bad, cause I'm sure an arm running an embedded version of linux would get a really high price from some open-source-advocate amputee...
It's funny, laugh.
-the wunderhorn
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)