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Corel Cuts 220 Jobs to Save $12M
Cecil writes "Just saw this story on the City of Ottawa's website:
'The Software maker Corel Corp. is cutting 220 jobs - more than a fifth of its workforce - in a bid to reduce costs and return to profitability amid weak technology spending.'" Of course, this stinks for those who are laid off, but hopefully Corel can turn things around.
I haven't heard of any Corel developments for a looonng time, it was inevitable that the company would start to go under, what with better, and often free, or even open source programs.
They could've cut 12 executives and saved $24M.
I think that Corel's failure was the fact that people pirate MS Office, and don't care to try out less expensive office suites.
In my opinion Corel Office was much more intuitive, yet, in my school, there is not one person excluding myself who doesn't pirate software. In fact teachers indirectly encourage students to get MS Office off Kazaa or "to borrow it from a friend"
It is really really sick.
We must stop piracy in the education system, it'll save good companies like Corel.
I've always thought that an economic slump is the BEST time to agressive hire the best workers so that when the times change, they are in a great position by having the best on staff in place. People without money (cause they lost jobs) won't buy half ass products (due to having smaller staffs working on them). It's as simple as that. Times like this is when companies should be MORE aggressive and buy every good idea and worker, because they will sell for less and be more likely to be grateful when times turn around.
Whatever, it's not like I studied economic theory...
Burn Hollywood Burn
In a lot of third world or developing countries these kind of work conditions are very common. In Brazil, for example, a lot of our economically active people are not in a "legally" contracted.
This is just recently hitting America and Europe and people there are starting to loose jobs and/or work for low salaries... but that's just the way capitalism and globalization works... the lowest price always gets the deal.
The tendency to remove economic barriers between countries is becoming stronger, and these are the consequences... just be glad you weren't unlucky to be born in one America's/Europe's economic "colonies".
I'll play Devil's advocate here.
American workers are expensive. Not only in wages, which are maybe a third of the total cost of an employee. Health benefits, unions, severance pay, etc: I'm not arguing against these things, but from an employer's standpoint, they add up quickly.
Throw in the current structure of American law, which places enormous liabilities upon employers, which makes hiring employees like playing russian roulette. Many modern hiring practices (contractors, part-time workers) are only used to eliminate part of this risk.
Which would you do?
A) Employ 100 american workers. Be prepared for a potential lawsuit. Deal with union problems every 2-5 years.
B) Employ 25 American workers to manage things + 150 overseas guys (@ 1/3 the price) and cut the risk of lawsuits by ~50%. Have the extreme gratitude of the overseas workers.
I'm not choosing one over another, but the situation is certainly more open to debate than you make it out to be.
Of course, this stinks for those who are laid off, but hopefully Corel can turn things around.
/. editors is astouding sometimes.
Doesn't this stink for more than just the people who got laid off? Does the idea that a corporation can layoff dedicated workers not meet with challenge these days? The anti-union attitudes of
What ever happened to the idea that if you dedicate a major portion of your life to a company, you deserve something a little more than just money for 40 hrs/week--like job stability for example.
The US has gone from a "right to work" country to a "right to get fired" country, almost within a few years. The focus on "keeping corporations profitable EVERY SINGLE YEAR" is absurd.
Draw, Wordperfect, Office, etc etc. All the while they're creating ports of .Net to FreeBSD (that won't generate any revenue) and other various frivolous projects. This is a little bit like the plight of Sonic Foundry; getting into video and creating five different audio suites really dilutes the manpower to create great applications.
What Corel needs to do is concentrate on one product and make sure it's the best in the business. Go after Photoshop. Go after Office (well, on second thought, don't). But don't go after both at the same time.
This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel),
Getting into businesses they don't understand is the norm for Corel. In the last 10 years, they have jumped on every single bandwagon that has come along (and been burned every time):
- WordPerfect (it's been through so many hands, it deserves its own bandwagon)
- Java (e.g. the ill fated WP port)
- Network Appliances (a.k.a. Internet Toaster)
- Linux
- The Silicon Valley lifestyle ($50 million company Christmas parties)
I was offered a job there about 10 years ago. They bragged about the office suite strategy in the interview. I thought it sounded like a pipe dream.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
And that would be about the time that Apple committed suicide.
It is critical to Apple that MS keep making Office for the Mac. It isn't anywhere near as critical for MS to keep the Mac marketshare of Office. I have seen people argue (and I am not sure that I don't agree with them) that the x86 port of Darwin was simply to keep some leverage with MS on this one issue.
While you might not like Office or MS (and don't look at me, I am exclusively Linux) from a business perspective Apple cannot afford to mess with this relationship.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Debatable. The thing that keeps MS in their monopoly and Apple in the margins, the argument goes, is that Apple is a hardware company that happens to ship an OS. If Apple on the other hand decided they were going to start acting like an OS company, they might be able to give MS a run.
Personally, I think there is some merit to this argument, but not much. However, I really do think that MS way doesn't want to even think about that right now. Linux is causing them enough trouble. Linux isn't taking over anything but the geekiest desktops right now, but they are eating into the back office space like beavers on meth, and the logic of free (as in beer) could put them on some more desktops in the very near future as soon a few issues get dealt with, and at the speed of Linux evolution over the last few years, I don't think Redmond is laughing at the threat. They think they can win it, but they are starting to take the idea seriously.
In that light, I think they don't want any hassles with Apple. Even if you think you can win a fight, that doesn't mean you want to fight it.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Factor in the exchange rate, and you're down to $35,000US a year.
Or, if you go by the purchasing power parity, you get US$42.6K/year. Unless you want to buy all of your stuff, including food & housing, from the US. Then you'd pay the exchange rate.
The biggest problem I see with the major software companies is that the majority of the high paid MBA types in those organizations don't have any working knowledge of the products they make. I deal with these companies day in and day out and have for more years than I care to divulge. Corel has some good product but if the executives don't have a solid grasp on how to use the software, professionally, how can they have any vision to foster the direction of the software into professional environments? What follows from the executive level is a trickle effect and it typically boils down to the person(s) who has the greatest working knowledge of any given application, or suite of applications, the person(s) who have the greatest potential for vision in the developemnt of those applications, they have the least amount of say in the matter. Adobe is the same as well as those other guys.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion