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Microsoft Writes Off Corel

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-end-of-the-road dept.

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."

9 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. Well, duh by AEton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. 90% Loss? by Cali+Thalen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. I wonder if we'll ever see... by Trogre · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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
  4. Good News? by Upright+Joe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

  5. Re:Why corel is dying by Grrreat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Rotor by Schnapple · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Actually, it's a little known fact that Rotor, the port of the CLI and C# compilers (which are parts of .NET) to FreeBSD 4.7, Mac OS X 10.2 and (if you're clever about it) Linux, was done by 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

  7. The object was... by dcr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Missing the point by Derek · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Only a billion? I think they'd pay 10x that, and smile all the while.
    Take $10,000,000,000 and divide that by the number of core kernel and key application developers (a number that I will estimate at 40,000) and you get $250,000. Take that $250,000 and offer it to the developers if they will sign a contract to stop working on anything non-Microsoft. Those that refuse this offer will get a $250,000 bounty put on their heads. Either way, taking out the top 40,000 Linux developers will certainly put a fatal dent in the Linux roadmap.

    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!

  9. Re:The history of Corel's Crazes by nathanh · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Like the java thing all those years ago. They got their office suite *working* in java. I tried it. It was buggy and it was slow, but it was beta, and it was *there*.

    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.