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Microsoft Writes Off Corel
PizzaFace writes "Microsoft resuscitated Corel two and a half years ago, paying $135 million for a quarter of Corel's equity ownership. Corel talked then about bringing its products to .Net, and even hinted that it might use its Linux expertise to port .Net to Linux. Since then, Corel gave up on the Linux business and isn't talking anymore about .Net, but is instead riding its XML hobbyhorse. So Microsoft is selling its stake in Corel to a VC firm for $13 million, taking a 90% loss on the investment."
Microsoft business strategy as usual. WordPerfect might pose a threat or competition or maybe Corel owns a particularly juicy software patent? (eww) -- buy them. Nothing new under the sun--business as usual--move along, nothing to see here.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Company dies, investors seek an exit... Next on slashdot: Pants put on, one leg at a time.
Does that put it above or below most of M$'s product returns? (excluding Windows and Office naturally)
-Thalen
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
The whole point of purchasing Corel was not to investigate Linux or any other option. Rather the goal was to kill it. Dead. Thus, eliminating any competition or furthering the prospects of important applications on competing platforms.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Considering the fact that Microsoft killed Corel (WordPerfect) for the sake of its own products, I don't think that they really care about the loss. They've made more than enough to cover the extra 90%.
Couldn't that be the real reason that they invested in the company? Microsoft always gets its fingers into the competition when they feel that they could be a threat.
Lets hope VC will port to Linux some parts of .NET
That's the heart of the issue, right there. So ironic.
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Corel is dying because their software is inferior. The only reason anybody ever uses it is because it's so dirt cheap. At Newegg, Corel office suite comes free with every purchase over $500. For a while, they were selling it for $10 a pop with free shipping.
Repeal the DMCA!
...corel Draw for Linux?
The win32 version is one of the few truly excellent drawing packages I've come across.
It'd be a pity to see it go to waste.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft probes the Linux world next. Who will be the next company with a strong Linux connection they invest in? Any speculation?
don't go here, worse than goatse.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
No longer does Microsoft have to prop up software companies so that its defense lawyers can point their fingers and say "See, there is competition in this industry after all." Microsoft now has free competition that needs no stock purchases: Linux.
That cool little bean bag penguin that came in the box.
You can still get one of these at your local Staples store for $4.50 on clearance, just ask if they have Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
without corel, the entire computing infrastructure as we know it is going to collapse all around us.
i am off to start the looting.
From Java to Linux to WAP to .NET to XML. And when they're chasing the latest buzzword they always put out a press release saying they're doing it and how much more money they'll make in the future, etc. And they ALWAYS fail. Such a '90s way to run a business huh?
That could mean a few things.
What's this Submit thingy do?
by neglect. They've been putting out a stale piece of software with a handful of updates (most of them to the XML part) since 9.0 was released. 8.0 was the last great version of WP.
Note that the people working at Corel weren't the problem; the ones I talked to were dedicated to WP. I imagine the development resources just weren't there.
The situation with the economy and the tech sector is just now starting to effect M$. I have a feeling we will start to hear more stories about how Microsoft is cutting their losses on bad investments.
[nelson] HA HA! [/nelson]
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
a tree falls alone
in this forest no one cares
no shortage of leaves
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
I think this is probably good news. I'm glad that MS no longer has a stake in Corel. Some of Corel's products are very nice, high quality applications. Hopfully this VC firm will help bring them to competitive market shares. Frankly, I think Draw and Photopaint are far easier to learn that Photoshop and Illustrator. I also liked WordPerfect quite a bit more than current versions of MS Word though I still think Word 95 is to this day the best Word Processor ever written (flame away).
- Build unsuccessful Linux company
- Get purchased by Microsoft for X dollars
- Get sold by Microsoft for X/10 dollars
- If Microsoft has money left over, go to step 1.
- Microsoft goes bankrupt!
Microsoft lost $123 million on the Corel deal. If they do this just 326 more times, they'll be bankrupt!For more information, click here.
Corel was on its way to going out of business without the Microsoft money. I'm not quite sure how the investment would kill them; it just means the Corel Linux stuff got sold off a bit later (when they sold it to Xandros) rather than earlier (when they would've gone bankrupt).
.Net for its applications. It would lend credibilty to the .Net platform. And since there aren't too many major desktop application developers for Windows left (Adobe...?), Corel's an obvious choice.
What *does* make sense is wanting another major software developer to use
Not everything Microsoft does is pure evil.
Now that MSFT has been let off virtually penalty free by the Bush administration, why bother to keep propping up a "competitor". Microsoft was desparate during the trial to insure that none of the competition dropped off the face of the earth, which would have added additional fuel to the penalty phase of the trial.
Now that they don't have to worry about being punished, why continue shoring up companies like Corel? I wouldn't be surprised if they also drop their support of Apple (via Office X) for the same reason. They no longer have to prove that they're "good partners".
Frankly, after the previous round of government litigation in the mid-nineties, the same thing happened. Once they were out from under close scrutiny the loosed the dogs of war.
-David
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
"Microsoft Writes off Corel"
I had written Corel off years ago. What took Microsoft so long?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Pretty much everything Corel has touched has turned extremely mediocre. Corel Draw was a workable program, but nowhere near as good as the competition. The same was true for their photo editor and other side-apps.
When they bought WordPerfect, they took what was a very good product, and turned it into a workable, but mediocre product.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
It is like for one of us losing 13 cents somewhere in the alley; it's not a big loss for MS anyway. I wish I was there earning that money however... ;)
What more is there to say?
Note: This is straight off the top of my head, this is opinion, but it's more of a pondering to me.
It seems that far too much importance is given to WHO is making a software, WHO is on-board (or in-bed perhaps), WHO is going to buy, WHO is shipping, WHO invested in WHO...
It seems corporate software is more about making market splashes than to provide a stable and sensible platform for future development of those projects. Money In, Money Out. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
If the companies involved aren't about making a better software industry (and to avoid argument, let's say "better" equals "more thought out, more stable for the future of software and the industry than a company"), then the products they create won't make a better industry, no matter WHO uses them.
Software has always been about HOW people use it. Not everything made was made for the largest audience, and not everything that is made for a niche audience hits its audience.
Corel was a graphics software development company (remember CorelDraw?). It was far more about real-world transferrable graphics, signs, tshirts, etc.
Why would anyone have expected it to get into Linux eventually, and even less would expect MS would ever buy into a company pushing Linux.
I'm not surprised Corel doesn't do Linux even more. I'm even less surprised that MS bailed out of Corel.
Remember back when Corel decided Java was the future, and said it would be rewriting its office suite in Java?
.NET, again threatening to port the by now rather cobwebby Corel Office to the new platform.
Then a few years later it was Linux. Asked by an interviewer whether the Linux thing was just a passing obsession for Corel like Java had been, a spokesman asserted that no, this was different, Corel was really committed to Linux.
Then they got almost-bought by Microsoft, dumped Linux and started going on about
Now that too has gone and XML is the big thing? Whatever next?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I vaguely remember seeing a few humdred threads on this very topic just this week.
90% loss or a $122m investment in their own products??? I think the point is that MS invested in Corel to kill it are accurate. I think many pointed this out when it first happened and predicted the demise of Corel to come...
.wpd and not .doc. But it's not because Word is superior.
Well, here it may be!
I personally prefer WordPerfect as a word processor application. I feel it is more intuitive, more versitile, easier to control, what not than MS Word. I hate Word. If not for WP I'd have died trying to write my masters thesis. MS doesn't have a superior product, they have a superior suite that most people use because it is on their machines when they get them. And hence it has become a default. WP & MS are not interoperable (and MS will keep it that way) and so WP has no chance at competition.
Sorry, I rant now. WP lost and sadly I must now resort to Word because to many of my coworkers complained about all my files saved as
Carry on.
The shortest distance between to puns is a straight line.
The death of Corel was due to Corel and no one else. They had what everyone wanted a well done office suite that was stable had been running for years on both windows and X platforms (The older versions of wordperfect had solaris binaries for instance). Even today, there is no comparision between wordperfect and koffice or even openoffice (though open office is improving). What Corel did, and I really find this unforgivable, was they got the brainiac idea to "sync" the two versions of the code base (X and window) by using wine! As a result wordperfect 2000 was basically an unusable piece of crap. It was horribly buggy and crashed so often that the corel newsgroups encouraged people to stick w/ free wordperfet 8. Corel jumped on the bandwagon (linux desktop) a bit too early and they simply fucked up on the delivery. People *WANT* a usable linux desktop. but the office suite actually has to *work*. Lets put it this way, walmart is currently selling walmart linux boxes by the droves right? How much more lucrative would it be to sell those things w/ an existing, commercial office suite thats actually been running for ages? Even businesses would find wordperfect far more usable than open office for windows->linux secretarial conversions.
In any case converting to wine was as stupid as rewriting wordperfect in java (which apparantly they tried to do). If they had gotten a decent set of coders to keep a native unix set with decent wrappers they could easily have grabbed the market. The conclusion they drew from being burned by the linux sector (i.e. non selling product) wasn't the wrong conclusion because essentially they were selling a broken, nonworking product that they had no idea how to support.
-bloo
I hope this means that I can keep on using Corel Draw. Haven't found anything better yet.
-- Cheers!
Corel talked then about bringing its products to .Net, and even hinted that it might use its Linux expertise to port .Net to Linux. Since then, Corel gave up on the Linux business and isn't talking anymore about .Net, but is instead riding its XML hobbyhorse.
In reality, Corel wrote Rotor (the shared source version of .Net for Free BSD) and also wrote Grafigo in C# and .Net.
Half-truths are just as bad as half-lies.
I gave up on WordPerfect after v8 for Linux stopped working on up-to-date distributions (it's a libc v5 app). The only product at Corel that I still have an interest in is Painter (started its life as Fractal Design Painter) for the Mac. It'd be a real shame if it went down the tubes with Corel.
So it wasn't so much that they were planning to port .NET, they pretty much did. The shared libraries (which, along with the CLR constitute the .NET Framework) weren't ported or recreated for the platform which makes sense, since Microsoft wants Windows to have some sort of advantage, but armed with the CLR and the C# compiler, one could still do .NET work, and if they were careful or clever, come up with a C# program which would compile on all platforms. The lack of libraries though pretty much meant the Mono and Portable.NET projects weren't in vain.
Schnapple
Gates bought SCO and build a Trojan Horse
to attack Unix. Corel was an attempt to
attack Linux (remember, Corel stuff ran on Linux).
This worked out great for Bill, again.
You guys are missing the point. Microsoft didn't kill Corel, Michael Cowpland (former CEO and flamboyant goofball) killed it. He (a) bought the Wordperfect suite after it stumbled badly with windows; (b) rewrote it all in java; (c) rewrote it all for Linux; (d) bought the Xerox Ventura suite; and (e) declared war on microsoft.
Mikie has some problems. Like god complex. And a show wife who wore slinky outfits and threw huge parties. He sent a postcard out to people with his blonde babe wife sprawled over his lamborghini.
Corel began as the first high-end graphics package provider for Windows 3.0 (actually it started with hardware, but graphics made Corel an international company).
If Mikie had kept his eye on the ball and stuck with graphics with an increasing emphasis on web and perhaps looking into media, streaming video, backends etc, it would never have gone down the rathole of wordprocessing suites.
The new CEO seems to be concentrating on graphics again. Maybe he can get somewhere.
Microsoft only became relevant because Mikie didn't stick with core competencies.
Jeesh, what a lame ass investment that turned out to be. It's refreshing to know I'm not any stupider than microsoft.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Like most of us didn't see this coming, and even predict it, two and a half years ago?
As a matter of fact, didn't Nostradamus predict this? I think it was in some quatrain about the tyrant at the 45th parallel in the new world.
I'll bet you can even dick "Hister" around with numerology to make it turn out to be "Bill Gates," or at least "Borg."
Nothing to see here. It was all preordained.
KFG
Microsoft purchased 23.6 percent of the British cable TV company Telewest for $2.6B a few years ago. The current price of telewest shares values the whole company at about $100M. Considering Telewest is billions in dept I think it is still overvalued, zero would be closer to the mark.
crackhead mods: read the responses to parent and decide if its worth +5.
just more baseless flamebait FUD from another lunix fanboy karma whoring his way to slashdork fame an d fortune
Microsoft is selling Corel to the Viet Cong. Must have pissed em off pretty good....
OPEN OFFICE
Viet Cong?
Huh?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
CmdrTaco: Guess I can retire this topic icon ;)
You can make sorts of credible, Machiavellian explanations for Microsoft's maneuvers concerning Corel. But why the heck would Vector buy Microsoft's shares in Corel? Can Corel really go anywhere with its current products?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Only dummies could still thing so :o)
;)
:o)
dotNet will never be available on non-MS platform ! MS clearly confirm this point.
Of course you can have a CLS rewrite attempt for a given platform, but this is not relevant as it does not scope the full dotNet platform
"Excuse me sir, but as my application is powerfull, you can not run it on linux"
Sure it will.
.Net on Linux servers.
MS is slipping in the Server OS market, so they're smart enough to get in on the server application market.
MS couldnt sell the OS to Mac users, so it sells them the application suite instead. MS Office on OSX.
It'll happen.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
to kill WordPerfect for Linux...
At least, this was the perception that I reached. Before the M$ bail-out, you could find WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux in a variety of markets. Heck, you could even find it for sale in the software section of the bookstore here at Texas A&M. After the bail-out, *poof!* it's gone - you can not find it anywhere.
In a similar fashion, the WordPerfect for Macintosh development was stopped (it may have stopped before this, but it certainly died as far as native OS X development was concerned) when the bail-out happened. This has given Microsoft an even larger share of the office software market for Macintoshes than they have for Windows systems. How ironic is that?
For those who think that the Corel products are junk, as I saw in several of the posts - I suggest you try them, before you post...
CorelDraw was compared to PhotoShop, which is like comparing Excel to Word (I thought I would put this in Microsoft products to make it easier to understand) - they are both useful programs, but if you use one for some a project that the other was specifically intended for, you will be frustrated.
Likewise, WordPerfect is a much more versatile word processor than Word. In my job of doing computer support, I have amazed Word users by fixing massive formatting problems in their documents in seconds by importing the document into WordPerfect, turning the "view formatting codes" on and seeing why the formatting is not working the way that the user thinks it should look. This feature alone makes WordPerfect my choice - the fact that all of its other features work better is just gravy.
just a couple more tidbits - yesterday corel announced that the next version of WordPerfect Office 11 will ship in April, at least two months ahead of Microsoft Office 2003, and there was also an eWeek story about Microsoft Office embracing XML.
no more microsoft bashing.
Since obviously it was the same for Apple. With Microsoft investing just about the same amount of money in it, to keep a competitor afloat and Office on 'anoter operating system' to pull the rug from under some anti-trust arguments...
How long before Microsoft 'writes off' its Apple investment?...
I had hoped that Microsoft buying Corel would lead to its downfall. After all, that's what's happened to everyone else who has had wordperfect :) But at least they took a huge loss in the process.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Corel's Linux products, before the Microsoft investment were great. I'm
talking about Wordperfect 7 and 8. Their Wine project had potential,
but version 1 sucked. Unfortunately they didn't stick it out and release
a 1.1 version - which would likely have ruled - due to Microsoft's
influence.
Considering Microsoft's capitalization, that means that future Windows XP licenses will cost .000001 US/cent more in order to recoup the Corel adventure losses...
.000001 US/cent per license count. But MS will actually charge $9.99 more per license count. Why? For the same reason a dog licks its balls: because it can.
Sure, Microsoft's cost works out to
-kgj
Keep in mind that the most probable reason that Microsoft invested in Corel was to keep the FCC off their back since MS owns both Windows and Office.
My two cents.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Corel Did. MS did NOT own a majority share in Corel, thus they couldn't do anything in the company without support. Corel's horrible management killed Corel. They should have just stuck with what they were good at. Instead, they jumped on (and are continuing to jump on) ev ery trendy bandwagon that rolls through the industry. Corel is irrelevant. Too bad WP is gone. I use Textpad now, but it would've been nice to have something with a few more features.
It's ironic how this moderation thing works... If I hadn't seen the child (moderated at +1) I would have never known of the parent (-1).
:)
It was cool, cause I didn't know things like that even existed.
Server Platforms (which includes SQL Server which by itself brings in a billion dollars in revenue) is also profitable.
Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.
According to this post Microsoft Bails Out Of Corel, Microsoft converted their shares for sale back on Feb 22, 2001. All this means is they found a buyer. Also, for all of those that say Corel is dead, I haven't seen anything about them declaring bankruptcy. In fact, they are refocusing their efforts on what they do best, graphics. Their graphics programs have always been simple to use, and output quality images. With their new CEO, and refocused strategy, they may have a chance to recover from their Linux debacle.
Microsoft never needed Corel to port .NET to Linux. They already have it running on Linux internally in their labs. Not only that, but MS has *all* of their major apps running on Linux in their labs.
*If* they wanted to release SQL Server for Linux, it'd take them less than two days to do so. Ditto for Office, IE, and everything else.
It's really a business decision. They have zero reason to release a Linux version of those since it'd take away OS sales.
Oh well. Right up there with Xybernaught
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Babies.. before we're done here.. y'all are gonna be wearing gold-plated diapers.
1: Corel waiving any claims to sue MSFT from previous business practices (a cheap buyout given legal costs and potential settlements)
2: Corel forced to focus on "creativity applications" (MSFT never cared about .not for BSD, come on!. that clause was all about abandoning their Linux effort (now championed by Xandros))
MSFT never invested because they thought Corel was going to be successful, or they liked the product line, or because they needed help porting .not. It was 85% due to legal feers (and propping up a competitor during anti-trust negotiations) and 15% clubbing Corel's very successful Linux initiative over the head.
They actually registered the stock for sale quite a while ago (probably as a threat in some negotiations we know nothing about).
My guess is that MSFT had threatened Corel long enough, Corel finally quit being the marionette, and MSFT tried to recoup what cash they could.
Hunger is the best sauce.
I used WP 5.2-8 and always found them much more intuitive and useful than the equivalent MS Word products (6-97). The thing that was especially useful for me was the way that later versions of WP kept file compatability with older versions, something Word eschewed to grab more upgrades. I couldn't easily work on Word 95 at home and Word 97/2000 at school.
I think its a testament to WordPerfects former glory that I *still* see photocopies of the old keyboard commands on secretary's computers. Sigh. I miss my lil' ol' WP 5.2.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
from Citizen Kane:
Charles Foster Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place... in 60 years.
I'm not really sure what I mean by posting this, but it seems appropriate somehow.
Carthago delenda est!
Sorry, still second place in my mind to Mattel's purchase of the Learning Company for around $2B, 2 years later 'sold' to gores for nothing. Here's a tip, HP/Verifone fans, any time you hear of something sold to Platinum Equity or Gores - they don't actually pay anything. They 'buy' the business by giving back equity or notes and basically do the hard work the company was afraid to do, ie, be a**holes and fire everyone and milk it for cashflow.
Microsoft has as much of monopoly as the consumers and vendors let them. If you don't like them having so much control, then stop buying their product or supporting vendors that buy their product. That includes copying your friend's Office XP CD that he got from work.
I'm sure this will be moderated as flamebait, but the fact remains that the consumers made their choice whether they like it now or not, and there is no reason Microsoft should be punished because their marketing works too well. This is something every one of Microsoft's competitors, including Corel, needs to learn. The quality of the product means nothing if you can't market it properly. Microsoft's products are on many levels inferior to those of their competitor's, but their marketing is second to none and they will pretty much call the shots until the rest of the software industry learns how to play the game.
If the consumer doesn't like IE being bundled with Windows, let them prove it by buying and using other software. If competitors want to gain a larger marketshare, let them innovate instead of whining. It's not like they're competing against quality software.
No, what Corel did, back in 95 or so was simply drop WP on all platforms but Windows and started to compete with Microsoft head to head on Microsoft's own platform. We all know how well that turned out. When Linux became a buzzword and Corel was looking for a new bandwagon to jump on, they simply couldn't produce a native version of WP in a reasonable timeframe, so they just hacked it until it ran under WINE without crashing too much. When I downloaded a trial version of WP8 for Linux, my first reaction was "are they actually trying to sell this thing?". I had the same impression about their distribution: a good start, but far, far from a finished product.
Had they kept the Unix ports going, they would have been able to provide a high-quality office suite for Linux. The last version of WP I used was WP8 (for Windows), and I certainly would have paid for a Linux version. But no, I am not interested in half-assed wine hacks.
Anyway, the story of Corel is truly sad. They were an awesome graphics company back in early 90s, but they kept making one boneheaded decision after another. This is a perfect example of how *not* to run a company.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Works! It was all that the average home user needed at the time, and came for "free" with most home PCs.
I'm saying Microsoft is like an enormous dog, licking itself.
-kgj
It does not work, when the executives making the decisions understand platforms are different and compatability code is not the answer maybe the madness will end. Hopefully GNUSTEP will be completed and we will finally have an open source multiplatform system for programing. Now that would be a boon to companies with multitarget projects.
Certainly. I'm certain if someone walked up today and told the Microsoft board of directors that he could 'eliminate' Linux for 1 Billion dollars and could prove it, then they wouldn't blink twice before signing a check.
What do you think Palladium is all about?
This space left intentionally blank.
I didn't see any opinion in that post whatsoever. Only a reference to a news source and a Microsoft Press release. Doesn't that make your .sig misleading? I expect better. Try to include a few baseless assertions next time, please. Thanks.
There was a guy who made big deal (and even made the Economist) a few years ago about MS being a net money loser if it was forced to account for the massive stock options it gave to bolster its otherwise weak salaries as an expense. This has become a more popular topic (if not practice in some cases) in the post-WCOM era as it can distort profitability and valuation.
The counter argument, if I remember the Economist story, was that shareholders, employees and the corporation were able to get away with cranking up the stock printing press because in spite of the dilution of owership and value that printing stock normally would have, MS stock valuations continued to climb stratospherically, and that made everyone happy and ignore what might otherwise be fundamental problems with their management.
I'm not informed/smart enough to know if the Parrish site is right or not about Microsoft, but the financial shenanigans surrounding stock options as pay have certainly become public knowledge and a number of businesses have collapsed, if not due to this specifically, due to these kinds of accounting tricks masking their true value.
The question I have, though, is if you can keep making this trick work year in and year out for at least a decade, are you still a fraud or just talented? I don't know the answer to that and I suspect that as long as MS has a ton of cash, employees that feel well compensated, and shareholders that the answer doesn't matter. I also think that we'll never know the answer, either, since MS is too huge to just collapse quickly and its technology assets (slashdot critiques notwithstanding) would cause it to morph before it disintegrated.
Unlike /.'ers dogs can't make a fist.
No sig for you!!
Novell owned Wordperfect at one time. Wordperfect was having horrible financial difficulties at Novell bought them out. I even still have a CD that says Novell WordPerfect. The entire product became Groupwise.
i ll ings.html.
d pf ct.html
The word on the street at the time was that Wordperfect was going under and since both are Mormom companies, the church steps in and gets Novell to bail them out.
Novell does this and decides to integrate the office suite with the Novell NOS. To compete with NT, as NetWare had the Market but MS had a total package of NOS and Office. Whereas Novell just had the NOS.
Following link is an article about the purchase in the day. Very interesting, and predicted Novells and Corels demise.
Novell sells the Suite to Corel cause they could not do anything with it.
Read about it here.
http://news.com.com/2100-1033-203536.html
And if you want to hear about Novell being a mormon company.
This article is about a guy who left the church and they tried to get his patent revoked.
http://www.base.com/software-patents/articles/b
So get a clue on the history of things. Corel had problems long before MS, and MS actually helped Corel in its own screwed up way.
Puto
http://www.computerbits.com/archive/1995/0700/w
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
If I had to choose a disability, it would be Tourette's.
Not the 'MS invested in Apple' myth again, please. MS coughed up $$$ as part of a patent lawsuit settlement agreement. Any talk of 'investing' was just so much bs from the MS public relations mill in another attempt to rewrite history in bg's favor.
And has been for about a year. Not that there has been too much to write about, w.r.t corel for the past year or so. The last time I looked, it was all blue, (ugly) but even that one seems to have now vanished from the scene, if you go to the corel.com home page. I will have to check what is up front on the corel centre, (http://www.corelcentre.com) next time I swing by Ottawa. If this keeps up, they will have to put up the logos on the front of the building with velcro. This company is something of a chameleon. (Was a fun stock to own during the dot com heyday though)
My rights don't need management.
...wanted. IMHO.
Corel had a good shot at the desktop with Corel Linux and all Corel applications they ported to Linux( via Wine but hey, it worked ).
I'd say Microsoft got alot for it's money. Corel on the other hand wasn't able to do much with the $135 million. I'm sure the agreement was that Corel only could do SO much anyways.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Taking out 40 key developers would kill Linux.
1 October 1993: WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows -->
h tm l
/.
WordPerfect failed at version 6. I remember it well because our office made a business decision to stay with WP. We paid a price for that decision. It turned out that the software was fine for letters. It was buggy, unstable, a system killer for anything complex. After a few months of agony in the office and with our client base for whom we developed documents, we jumped to MS office and never looked back.
WP 6 for Windows should never have been released in the state it was in. The fixes released didn't fix it. In the long run that mistake cost WP its market poition and ultimately everything for Corel Office. It is now a giveaway coupon.
Look back and remember:
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.
Apologies to Columbia for the potential
This has probably already been mentioned somewhere in the hundreds of responses, but to all those guys saying that WordPerfect is absolutely dead - no. It really isn't.
I work as the computer guy as a large law office. We have 4 partners, 25 practicing attorneys, and about 60 paralegals and secretaries. Every single one of the staff that does anything with computers has WordPerfect installed on his/her computer. Why? Some of the reasons have, again, already been mentioned - precise formatting and the reveal codes are invaluable when you are working on legal documents that *have* to be formatted just right, or they are automatically rejected by the Board. I am not exaggerating here - a large portion of incoming documents to the WCAB (that's Workers' Compensation Appeals Board; our office deals exclusively with that area of law representation) is scanned automatically and, of course, if the formatting is even a bit off, the document is not recognized properly.
One of the attorneys insisted on using MS Office, because she was used to it. Everybody in the office vociferously advised against it, but she's a real ball-buster, and she got her way after all. Just a couple of weeks later, Word screwed up the formatting on an Objection (a fact that went undetected at our office), she missed the deadline, and lost big $. She promptly threw out the MS Office package out the window and went back to good old WordPerfect.
To sum up. I don't claim that WordPerfect is immensely popular, or that it rivals the customer base of that of MS Word. I know that's not true. However, I do know for a fact that at least 75% of all law offices still use WordPerfect as the de facto word processor and are *very* unlikely to give it up in the near future.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
What really screwed Corel was Copland's attempts at building a cult of personality around himself to rival that of BillG. Case in point: For quite a while most Corel software advertisements were "Mike's Picks" which very prominently featured the CEO with some piece of software that was very much in the subordinate role in the ad.
Copland became too concerned with trying to take Bill on head-on by trying to be like Bill.
It also didn't help that Corel followed the following business strategy:
1) Make a profit
2) Buy out some company/product from a market segment that Corel either has no experience in, or is a niche market for a whack of $$$ (thus nullifying the profit, and puting into debt.)
3) Lose money
4) Lay off huge amounts of staff, scale back development or outright drop the assets gained in (2).
5) Slowly recover.
6) Go to step (1)
I had hoped that Corel would have kicked this idiotic cycle when they ditched Copland. I'm not convinced that they have.
Another sucessfull kill of competitor, much like Microsoft did in Europe to kill off DR DOS, it costs money to make it appear no one wanted DR DOS - but in the end it was a priceless investment
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Time to update that logo Taco!_ index_footer.gif
Get it here:
http://www3.corel.com/6763/Storage/CorImage/corel
Then Micros~1 Word on the next version contained most of those powerful features that AmiPro contained and somehow managed to take market share.
The purpose of the investment was to make sure Corel could not create an alternative to windows. Corel Linux was the first distribution the average schmuck could install easily and use effectively. Microsoft killed Corel Linux development and more than got their money's worth out of the investment.
Word Perfect as far as I am concerned is the best word processing program out there.
I believe MS like with so many other products has had "some hand" it its present troubles.
The other problem is developers were not supporting WP like they were MS. At all the shows over the last few years you were presented with developers creating all types of addons and products for MS and not WP. They could never really explain to me why this was happening. I hope WP can get itself together and continue on.
WP
Webbing Along!!