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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 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.
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Their distribution is always out of date (sort of like the stable branch of debian :)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...
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
I wonder how this will impact
Perhaps part of the deal was that Corel must get out of the Linux business?
http://www.inprise.com/kylix/
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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
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
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