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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 $13 million, taking a 90% loss on the investment."
Microsoft business strategy as usual. WordPerfect might pose a threat or competition or maybe Corel owns a particularly juicy software patent? (eww) -- buy them. Nothing new under the sun--business as usual--move along, nothing to see here.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Does that put it above or below most of M$'s product returns? (excluding Windows and Office naturally)
-Thalen
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
...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
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.
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).
You must have never used WordPerfect. Its by a far distance better than Word as far a preserving the qaulity of a document. It produces much better output than Word. Reveal codes are the reall helper in fixing documents of any kind.
" 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."
ack : wasn't = was
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
come to think of it who actually ever used Corel Linux
No, this has nothing to do with Corel Linux.
If you remember, Corel was porting it's flagship applications - namely the CorelDraw suite - to Linux. Not to mention investing heavily in WINE.
At one time, CorelDraw was the only thing keeping my Windows partition around. I would have dearly loved to have a native Linux version, and I know I'm not alone.
It wasn't about the OS, it was about the apps.
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.
And that is just the kind of evil plan that seems to make big American companies drool!
-Derek
P.S. This started out as a whimsical post, but the more I think about it, the more it scares me how powerful 10 billion dollars really can be!
Microsoft wouldn't make a Linux distribution. If they did, and all Windows users eventually accepted it because it was backed by Microsoft, then eventually those users would move to another less expensive distribution. Microsoft would lose its dominance (ie: monopoly) in a hurry.
Also - this is purely speculation - a lot of investors may drop Microsoft. Microsoft's adopting Linux could be seen as "caving in" to the competiton, which some may interpret as a weakness. More realistically, as the Joe Schmoe's start to become comfortable with Linux and begin trying new distributions, the investors may follow those users to another Linux company.
It seems to me that Microsoft would have way too much to lose by adopting Linux. Though the way things are going right now, Microsoft's loss is inevitable. One way is just quicker than the other.
-kidlinux.
I don't know about modern GUI versions, but about 10 years ago my mother, a touch typist, used Wordperfect for DOS. She later retrained for Word, but she said that she missed the way that her hands didn't have to leave their positions to access functions in WP.
Myself, I never liked it. F2 for help? What was that about then, eh?
Amen. I remember trying it out on a P200 and it sucked mightily. It was slow. It was buggy. But it worked. And TODAY it would be just fine. Java is faster. Computers are faster. If Corel had stuck it out then today they'd have an office suite that ran on Macintosh, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows CE, ... probably even bloody Palm Pilot. Instead they gave up at the first hurdle. Yes, it will always be slower on Windows than a native app written in C++ using MFC. It doesn't matter. I use interpreted applications all the time. They should have stuck to their guns. They are a victim of their own insecurity.
No, Corel is dying because their managers have no sense of leadership, vision, marketing strategy of even simple common sense.
Corel Draw is the best illustration software you can buy, Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand are years behind.
Corel Photopaint is a very decent alternative to Photoshop - the only program that can be called that. Some of its features are less polished, but it has many useful features PS never heard of.
So why are Illustrator and Photoshop "industry standards"? Because of marketing and because historically Corel products are/were buggy. And they were buggy because their CEO insisted in 12-months cycles, which is insane.
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