Slashdot Mirror
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.
They can try to compete against Microsoft, which is pretty much a loosing battle given the commercial monopoly Microsoft has on the Office application suite, or they can compete against the OSS office application suites, in which case its pretty tough to compete against no-cost development. I predict they hang around a bit longer, but only selling to those buying PCs bundled with Windows and Corel where the buyers don't know much about Office software and want to squeeze an extra couple of pennys off the price of their machine.
That isn't the city of Ottawa web site, thats a local news web site. If you want the City Of Ottawa's web site, check out http://www.city.ottawa.on.ca/
If you think you were surprised to find out Corel was laying off 220 people. Then imagine my surprise to find that they are still in business.
Who buys this stuff?
Cash strapped and confused as Corel may seem, this move would appear to me to be a consolidation and focusing of Corel's main products (those being WordPerfect Office Suite et al.)
In fact, having a former life in the photographic industry, I could never figure out what Corel was doing in the stock photographic / images business anyhow. The quality of their libraries were fairly well below the industry normals in addition to some fairly draconian and muddled contract agreements.
In particular, there was an instance where a former employer of mine used some Corel stock images for their catalog. The photographer who actually took the shots summarily attempted to sue my former employer. When Corel was contacted, we learned that certain images in the library were still property of the original artist.
This caused us some deal of confusion since this is not the not the norm for stock photographic images.
This is a prime example of a company getting into a business they really didn't understand (Corel), its about time they started dumping their ancillary business and focusing on software development, rather than services like stock imagery.
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.
Not that they aren't the same ones made by a good many other companies in times of losses. Borrowing from the future will come back to burn them badly, I just hope they don't try to squeeze too much more out of the people who are left. I've heard some horror stories from Ottawa friends about working for them.
IMO, if somebody were to come in with a good amount of cash and try to take them private, they might be able to leverage it into a powerful software maker again, without having to worry about quarterly finances quite so much.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
average out to be 54k / person.
which means that if we bell curve it, there are some highly paid individuals being cut. probabbly software engineers, maybe some management.
I have heard somewhere that when a company start cutting engineers, then the company REALLY is not doing so well. I wish them luck regardless, though. They make some nice software.
but then the 12M may not be all from job cuts, though - so I am just blabbing, actually.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
It's seems like a loose-loose situation to me.
They could've cut 12 executives and saved $24M.
I have to say that as an ex Corel Linux employee who saw what happened inside the organization 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 :-)
I don't see why the "MBAs of Wharton and Harvard who run the country" should have to explain about a Canadian company laying off workers....
That appointment was made permanent after he orchestrated a $135-million US investment by arch rival Microsoft Corp., which provided Corel with enough cash to ride out a period of declining revenues while it worked to develop a new business strategy and products.
Maybe we should just make Microsoft Corp. give (not invest) $135-million US to all the major companies (an Open Source projects) in trouble due to the economy...they can afford it...and it certainly would be good PR!
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
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.
Infuse, say, $20M into the company with a promise for Corel WordPerfect for OS X, and maybe stronger ties between Corel's graphic products and OS X...
GPL Deconstructed
Since I live in Ottawa, I can correct two errors in the story:
1. ottawa.com does not belong to City of Ottawa. It belongs to GlobalWest Communications Corp., as well as canada.com and many other similar domain names.
2. Slashdot crew, update the Corel logo!
As I hear about these continual massive layoffs, I wonder if the ex-employees are keeping in touch. Most of them probably haven't looked for a job lately, so it will take them a little time to get back in to it. Also it's important for them not to feel bad about it. They will go through a life-changing event, and there will be hundreds or thousands of people going through the same thing in a conveniently small geographical area, so it would be great for them to help each other and at least use each other for networking.
I guess I'm just proposing something like www.exemployees-forum.com.
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
Why'd you have to go and sully up a perfectly good karma whoring with your FACTS and LOGIC?
Jackass...
Hear! Hear!
:)
Succintly and very well put!
Almost all my formerly well paid and experienced friends are out of work now, having been "laid off" and replaced by either far lower paid wage-slaves (in the fullest sense of the word) visa workers or simply by much less experienced and lower paid people.
A great many IT workers are getting OUT of that rat race (including myself) and going back to school to learn other professions. I COMPLETELY agree with you that the greedy CEOs and other board members have completely gutted their own companies and transferred the money to themselves and I completely AGREE that the Dot-Com crash of 2001 is only a portent of things to come with the overall American economy.
As for me, I COMPLETELY refuse to work my butt off (no matter how highly paid) for the Fortune 500 any more in order to increase the value of the stock options of some schmuck at the top. I just got a job at a lower salary (half of what I used to make which is still pretty good) at a non-profit and am going to night school to be an RN.
When the economy crashes in another 7 ot 10 years look for me at the bottom of the sky-scrapers selling hot-dogs to the crowd as they watch those assholes come flying out the windows.
Yeah...I'll be smiling too
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
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.
I've had more issues with WordPerfect 10 than I've had with any version of WordPerect since 6.0 for Windows
Whoa. That's saying something. I was a 100% rock-ribbed Word Perfect user up until 5.2. Then they came out with that HORRIBLE 6.0 release, and it drove me try out Word. The rest is history... Word was a much, much better product.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Why do you care? Seriously.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
and here are just a few reasons why: gateway, dell, hp and sony. all announced in the last year that they are beginning to bundle various forms of corel office with new computers. a wonderful way in itself to renew the user base; hook em while they're young! for a first time pc buyer (read: gateway) get the software in their hands even if you have to lose money. as opposed to say MS[sometimes]Works im sure that liscensing costs are less for the pc distributors which will definately give corel some legs (oh yeah and that article thing we are supposed to be talking about, i think it said they found a way to save a few dollars somewhere....). plus it seems they have a niche in a niche market (osx) that will still pay some of the bills. they did a very wise thing by being one of the first developers if not the first into every product market they have on macOSX when the big boys (read: adobe) were taking a wait and see approach. as much as i personally use their software (none) im not sure why i always keep up with their camp but i think all you naysayers will have a long time to write the obituary yet.
this is really going to start putting Ottawa in the shit.
First off, houses in places like Beacon Hill, even, are going for at least a quarter mil, thanks to a massive influx of greed and dot com wannabes.
Now, Nortel is tanking, Entrust doesn't seem to be doing so well, and Corel? Well, apart from giving Ottawans yet another interestingly white trash tacky overpriced outfit to look at at every new gallery opening or whatever, it isn't doing much apart from being a big copper eyesore next to the Queensway.
Man, I feel for those employees - but it looks like Ottawa's basket is rapidly emptying of eggs.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Lets see. Factor in the exchange rate, and you're down to $35,000US a year. Then when you remember that the annual cost of an employee is alot more than their base salary alone. Typically youy can assume that an employee costs about twice his salary, with taxes, overhead, benefits, etc. Now we're down to 17,500 roughly. That's $8.75/hr.
The Starbucks the next block over, is hiring Barista's for $9.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
My thoughts exactly. Companies need a large and healthy middle class *TO BUY THEIR PRODUCTS*. They're busy killing the kinds of jobs that allow people to buy their products. When the middle class has shrunk enough no one will be able to afford a college education (who can afford 30k tuition and to be unemployed for 4 years), and we will have made ourselves into a 3rd world country.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
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.
We saw this in the mid-90s. Heck, I was fresh out of school in 1993 just as NOONE was hiring. So I retrained as a programmer analyst to find that every shop in sight was outsourcing to Bangalore (gotta love how cheap Canadians can be). Of course, within a few years it went from scrounge what you can get to the boom of 1999.
This too will pass. Sucks if you're unemployed, but it's part of the rhythm of life. Eventually these guys'll realise that if there isn't anyone to buy the products, noone'll buy them, and the money dries up no matter how low you drive the interest rate. That's when employment will pick up again as they spur capital spending to build new products and try to gain market share.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
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.
America is rich enough to look after a few overpaid IT workers who lose their job.
Moving these jobs to equally talented humans who were born into poorer nations is a great idea.
Hell, maybe if india gets richer, then it will increase trade with other nations in the region.
Hell, maybe if other nations in the region get an economic boost, from supplyings goods and services to rich indians, they might actually be able to feed their citizens instead of leaving them to die of starvation.
So in conclusion, moving IT jobs offshore is a good thing for humanity.
"I live in an upper-middle class right-wing Canadian Neighborhood. Kids have access to High speed, and many of the teachers do to.
My neighborhood was the first to figure out Kazaa and other such things."
Teachers are often middle-class left-wing, wherever they teach.
The other reason i hate Corel is they buy really good products and ruin them. A good example is Fractal Painter, which is a really cool product, tons of features. The best part was the integration with tablets. Corel bought painter and it has fallen in to obscurity.
News forum Slashdot.org, this evening, in a reader-submitted story, revealed shocking allegations and supporting evidence substantiating the claim that someone actually reads the city of ottawa's website.
Michael Cowpland took the right direction at the wrong time when he rode on the Linux revolution.
I believe Linux is the way, but he put too much of the business on doing stuff for a market that wasn't
ready for it. Even though Michael is not a part of Corel anymore, the damage from this decision still
affects Corel to this day. I hope they'll return to profit one day.
The 220 who got pinkslips can look forward to a long period of unemployment since there are about
30-35,000 unemployed techies in Ottawa. Home Depot recently announced that they wanted to hire
80 people for a new outlet, and got nearly 30,000 people applying. (techies and non-techies) The only
way out of this unemployment trap is either to move or to start up your own company.
Why isn't Corel releasing the source for their whole office suite, then selling plugins, service, and other add-ons for the base product? Selling their base product isn't working, right? This isn't a rhetorical question. I really want to know if there is a real problem with them going with a different model a la Netscape.
Siemens in Germany is laying off ten thousands of workers; the whole telecommunication biz in Germany is on the ground. So why are a couple of hundred workers at Corel are worth a headline at /.?
Nobody is talking about the thousands at Marconi, Alcatel, AT&T, Siemens, name a company.
Sorry, i might be a bit pissed of, but sometimes i don't get the point about selective recognition.
Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
I don't remember 5.2, but 5.1 rocked! Back in the days of the "Wordperfect Corp." I think the fact that Wordperfect changed hands so many times really hurt the software (Borland, Lotus?, Corel). I think they should release the codebase into a GPL or variant, and then sell a commercial version with support. I mean clearly Corel is not great at making Wordperfect Office a competive suite, and making it perfectly reliable, but maybe they can make some decent coin from giving support. Maybe if they did this it would take over OpenOffice.org as the most popular open-source office suite. -
No way, WordPerfect was way better because of the "reveal codes" feature. I'm not sure if that feature still exists. I was using Wordperfect 2000 I think it was called... I think it still had this feature. The software wasn't very stable, it sometime crashed and the like. But reveal codes rules. It's sort of like editing a Latex document or something (bad example).
Nobody wants to admit the root of the problem is this insane move towards growth. Rather than build up a company slowly, maintaining profitability even if it means they don't get every single customer they can get, they overextend themselves constantly, then go on a hysterical firing spree.
Yes, Corel a Canadian company, is clearly indicative of American MBA's who are laying off workers to buy golden yachts. Idiot, do you KNOW ANYTHING about Corel?
Huh?
.64 for at least five years now.
The Canadian Dollar hasn't changed valuation in quite some time, at least in comparison to the US dollar.
The exchange rate between Canada and the US has been
(though there's plenty there to work with), but I just hope that if worse comes to worst, they find Painter a good home. I'd sure hate to see that proggie's untimely demise.
Let's take an overview of what Corel sells:
- WordPerfect. Matches every feature of Word, and throws in a few more: Reveal Codes, and a SGML mode, plus frame placement that actually works.
- Paradox. An awesome database engine. Far better than Access, last I read from the pointy-heads that know this sort of thing.
- Quattro. At least up to Office 97, it matched Excel for features. I haven't the foggiest what either company has added (or even could add!) to the spreadsheets, so I don't know how they compare now.
- Ventura Publisher. Its only competition is FrameMaker. It has far better typographic controls and UI, plus it comes with a database publisher that simply rocks, and XML import that appears to be more powerful than FrameMaker's.
- Corel Draw. It is awesome. I think it can be argued that it's the best general-purpose vector illustration program out there.
- PhotoPaint. It's easily as good as Photoshop. It does have a rather different UI, but the power is there.
- XMetaL. From the recent SoftQuad purchase, it is one of the best XML creation/maintenance engines out there. Coupled with Ventura for publishing to print, and it's beyond compare.
- iGrafx. From another recent purchase, these are a set of Process/Workflow tools that are incredible.
- Painter. From its Metacreations purchase, Painter is an incredible "natural media" simulation. It's a world apart from Draw and Paint, and a helluva lot of fun.
I think that pretty much covers their major product list.
Each and every one of those products ranks in the top three for its category in terms of functionality.
Unfortunately, Corel has several things going against it:
- Major (and foolish) Mac bias in the graphics/publishing market.
- An incompetant marketing department.
- A history of buggy product releases (though the inevitable service packs always help a lot).
And, of course, there's always the harsh reality that the best products don't always come out on top... and we're all familiar with some really crappy products that are dominating the market.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Guy I know, knows someone in his class who's on a workterm at Corel...
:)
Turns out that as of noon today he was the only one left on his *floor* that still had a job.
*Everyone* he knew at Corel was laid off today.
He's not quite sure what he's going to do tomorrow.
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
The original poster thinks /. karma somehow matters. He just likes to see himself type and get moderated up (most likely by himself). He can be safely ignored.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
that 150 million they got from Microsoft to give up their future didn't seem to go very far. .Nyet anyone? ;/
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Actually, a "swan song" actually has to be something beautiful, which Corel Linux was not-- I believe the cliche you're looking for is: "death knell".
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
I'm not advocating the death of Office, but you're saying that increased competition in the Office Suite arena in Macland is a bad thing?
I imagine having two competent office suites would drive down costs for the consumer, increase features and support for the consumer, and in general increase the capability of OS X fitting into a business environment with the added application support.
You're saying it's better for Apple to bend over for Microsoft than to invite Corel to play in the sandbox?
GPL Deconstructed
And it's not going to stop unless the exchange rates start to change -- why work for 50000 CDN for example if someone in the US is paying 65000 USD? *shrugs* That's mostly, if not all of the problem. It's very very common in the medical field and certainly isn't suprising that CS and IT are getting hit badly as well.
Karma whorin' since 1999
That's true. First people are laid off, then the cost of health care gets transferred to the employees, then the core team left gets all the work. Members of that core team (that didn't bail) would feel guilty if they left and screwed their coworkers even more, so they keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. That's where I'm at. You know what? I'm willing to bet that the beancounters decide that "we did this with X number of people back in the bad old recession days, why do we need more?" once the economy comes back. Then they lose the core team, but they're just names on paper, right? Accountants look at salary and cost savings, not lost experience. Yeah, anyone can be replaced, but plan on them taking a year or two to get up to speed. I'm staying where I am if I can, but I give it 50/50 odds that I feel like a moron for doing so a couple of years down the road. Damn that ethics class!
If you think IT is bad you should take a look at what's happening in blue-collar American manufacturing. If skills like programming are cheaper in India, what do you think happens when riveters are cheaper in Mexico? The company moves. A service industry based economy is a recipe for destruction, in my opinion.
Not to sound trollish on Corel, but...
Personal experience with WP 2002 is that it runs sluggishly and I can expect it to crash every time I run it. Furthermore, the VBA module to automate WP is poorly documented at best.
We were trying to merge documents of different sizes and orientations into a single file per a client request... something MS Word is horrible with due to the alternating headers. Acrobat was not an option because they did not a document they couldn't alter/cut/paste and all that jazz.
After an entire week of development, we found that if you used late binding on some of the objects to activate a hidden parameter, you would get the desired effect of pasting a bunch of documents together. If you used early binding, the program would crash horrifically. The app is full of stuff like that.
Further parsing and automation via WP has been a nightmare. I honestly don't know why the law profession is still using it, other than the fact that the legal profession seems to stay behind the curve with technology anyways. It seems legal partners are not eager to blow money on IT. If someone could explain it to me, I'd appreciate it.
I'm surprised Corel is still around. They might not be around in another couple years if they don't fix their WP app quickly. OpenOffice is more stable and you can't beat the price. How can you compete with free or with Microsoft?
I don't think its possible.
This space for rent.
I don't know how you figure this considering it was at .75 in 1997, .70 in 1998, .68 in 2000, and .64 this year. Thats pretty terrible for people trying to pay off US college loans but fantastic for companies exporting from Canada into the US.
Hey, I work for a Canadian company, but it's run by an Harvard MBA -- they run Canada too.
That's why Wordperfect has persisted for so long.
Legal documents are primarily "Text Only", as they should be.
And always will be!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
I agree... but on the other hand, what are high school councilors going to do? "No, don't become a programmer, don't become an engineer, take Burger King management classes." Policies that protect jobs have some merit. God knows it's hard to compete with what the liberal American academic institution puts out. I once met a high school graduate from Bosnia who had more Calculus in high school than I had in college, and I went through cal 4.
- Corel Draw. It is awesome. I think it can be argued that it's the best general-purpose vector illustration program out there.
Yep, it could be argued. Of course, the person arguing this position would be wrong, but I guess that's beside the point...
I used to do a lot of portfolio evaluation at the ad agency I work at. People would get pissed when I made a comment like "hmmmm, you must really like Corel, eh?" It's one of those graphics programs which taints every project it touches with its own "feel." Too many gradients, too many too-bright colors. Tacky.
It's only "awesome" if you don't know any better. Which, apparently, you don't.
For professional vector illustration, Adobe Illustrator (like Photoshop) is the standard. If you can't use it, well, we won't hire you. Flaws it certainly has, but each revision is better (with the possible exception of 9, which I more or less skipped).
- Major (and foolish) Mac bias in the graphics/publishing market.
Okaaaaaaay. You don't like Macs. Congratulations, you're part of the moral majority. Bully for you.
However, there's a very simple reason that Macs rule in design and publishing: Adobe software runs better on the Mac that it does on Windows, and Adobe software is the engine that drives this industry. You can deny it, and you may dislike it, but it's an established fact.
Painter? A toy. Always has been. Like you said, "helluva lot of fun." I'm not in this for fun. I'm doing this stuff to please my clients, beat deadlines, and sell product. Having fun is great, but it's more important to get the job done, and get it done right. I'd rather finish my projects early, get off work early and ride a bike or something.
Corel is failing because too many of its apps are mediocre. It's the Plymouth of the software industry. The only people who buy this stuff are shopping at Office Depot at the time, and pick it because of the pretty box.
- PhotoPaint. It's easily as good as Photoshop. It does have a rather different UI, but the power is there.
It's an interesting little world you live in, isn't it? I think maybe next time you should wait until the pails on the lunchbox tree are ripe before you tuck in...
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Maybe they could save a few bucks by not paying to have the Ottawa Senators stadium named after them.
The Corel Center naming rights must cost a few bucks.
http://www.corelcentre.com/index2.aro
February 27, 1996 The Palladium is renamed the "Corel Centre" in a 20 year, multi-million dollar agreement with the internationally-known, Ottawa-based software company. The new identity positions the Corel Centre as the highest-technology sports and entertainment facility in the world.
My condolances to those that lost their jobs.
Wax on, wax off baby!
- PhotoPaint. It's easily as good as Photoshop. It does have a rather different UI, but the power is there.
Well, not quite actually. PS rulez through filters. That's why PS is the industry standard. For good reasons too. CPPs filters just plain suck.
But I do agree that workspace management and the tools are on par with PS and Corel Script kicks the crap outta PS-automation.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I read this and thought: Great way to increase profitability: sack loads of people. Get the rest of the people to just work more - I'm sure the rest of the people at corel are delighted... Sometimes yes, there isn't really anything else you can do, and maybe it's even part of a downsizing plan so that the others don't really do more, and you're just cutting out middlemen.
A cool solution when the problem is just that the company will go bust if you don't close a section or start to decimate the employees is one I read a while back about how a recession was managed in the 80s in denmark I think: they just cut jobs in half and made it easier to work part time.
This was done at a government level though: it meant people could have 2 part time jobs and make the same or a little less than they used to, and also couples or families could both work part-time and get the same salary as if only one was working full. And it meant people could have one big cash job that might be boring, and another low cash job that was what they actually wanted to do. It apparently worked really well, and now they are an example of how you can save money and help people at the same time. Just vague memory of this though so I hope someone else can be more precise!
Ale
Here in Oz an employer has to give a months wages for every year worked when a worker's made redundent.
Plus 2 or 3 months paid long service leave that accumelates every 5 years
& any of the 4 or 5 weeks annual paid leave that doesn't get used accumalates every year too (5 weeks for shift workers).
Ontop of which some awards permit the acumelation of unused sickies, which at 15 sickies a year means if one worked somewhere for 10 years, taking just 5 sickies a year, that's 100 days of sickies left. This means that 3 months before redundency they just have to get a doctors certificate for depression or a bad back (no big deal) & 100 days worth of sickie pay gets added to the redundency pay.
So if Corel was in Oz & one had worked there for 10 years & only used 5 sickies a year, one would leave with redundency payout of 10 months pay + accured unused paid sickleave of 100 days (pending sickness certificate - has anyone met a doctor who's refused to write one?) + 2 or 3 months paid long service leave (it depends on the award, plus the 1st 5 years arn't counted) + accured unused annual leave.
Mind you some awards have a 'use it or lose it' setup for sickies & annual leave. But with such jobs employers have to schedule the full 4 or 5 weeks annual leave to you every year. With other awards where you can accumalate what you don't use, you still have to use at least a week of it every year.
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
Why do the posts I submit intending to be funny always get modded down to flamebait? Oh well, maybe I'm just not that funny.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Factor in the exchange rate
No, you don't factor in the exchange rate when it's a home-currency transaction! $50K is $50K is $50K, as long as that $50K is staying on the same side of the border where it started.
I guarantee that a $50K/a job buys you every bit as much whatever as you could want in Canada as it does in the US (some goods and services are more expensive, but I don't pay half my salary to Kaiser Permanente every month like a friend of mine in Baltimore does). When it comes to cost-of-living, in general, prices in Ontario are comparable to or cheaper than most places in the US.
But the key point is, again, you don't use the exchange rate when the money is staying on the same side of the border where it started. The ONLY time (and I repeat) ONLY time the exchange rate applies is when the transaction is cross-border. Since Corel is a Canadian company spending Canadian dollars in Canada, the equivalence should be understood as roughly 1:1 (based on cost of living and other indices) and not 2:1.
Sighh...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
WordPerfect's current version is 10, and the beta for 11 is coming out soon. It is quite stable, still has Reveal Codes, still has myriad advantages over Word, and can publish to PDF natively.
TANSTAAFL
Yes, thank you :) Either you don't factor the exchange rate in, or you have to run it both ways. Thos Barista's at Starbucks would have to be making $15 an hour here to compare with a $9 an hour job in Canada.
Well, I would gather that I bollocksed it by a mechanism called a typographical error.
Sorry mate, it won't happen again.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Happily, after a minor nervous breakdown, I am now only a Unix sysadmin. ;)
WP... oh the horror ....
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.