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."

Comments

Re:90% Loss?

[Ninja Programmer]

Prior to the X-Box project, the Microsoft entertainment group was profitable. Aside from that your point is correct -- every other division of Microsoft loses money.

the timing

[univeralifepadre]

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.

Re:Missing the point

[Speed Racer]

They practically killed Wordperfect by themselves, even before Microsoft took equity in them.

WordPerfect had been on its deathbed long before Corel came into the picture. Novell mismanaged it into the ground and dumped it on Corel in January 1996. By that time, Word had already supplanted WordPerfect as the word processor of choice for most professionals (with lawyers steadfastly refusing to leave their beloved WordPerfect 5.1). Corel is many things but you can't pin WordPerfect's demise on them. Novell is the culprit in that whodunit.

Re:Missing the point

[twitter]

Uhhh. Pardon me, but I think that 2.5 yrs ago, when MS bought it's $135M share in Corel, Corel wasn't in the Linux business.

Bzzzzt! You could not be more wrong. By late 1999, Corel had a Linux distribution and had ported Word Perfect and Correl Office to it. They were giving away "personal" versions of Word Perfect, the Word Processor that ruled the PC world untill Microsoft dumped Word on business students. As Word Perfect format was still the only officialy accepted private document format at most government agencies and business, Word Perfect still represented a significant threat to M$ and combined with a non M$ operating system M$ had no power to mess with it. Word Perfect 2000 came Windows only and the Linux version used Windoze emulation. Was this a co-incidence? I think not. Crappy management wimped out and took their little M$ bribe when they could have made something new and useful.