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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 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
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.
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