Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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).
- 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
I take it you didn't actually purchase a computer between 1995 and 2000.
Had you done so, you would have found that your choices for purchasing a computer without Windows were extremely limited. And this was no doubt in large part to the anti-competitive OEM agreements that Microsoft foisted upon any company that wanted to sell Windows at all.
But hey, you knew this already and were just trying to troll me, I realize..
Hence the sig...
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
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