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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."

30 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. Wow, what news... by japhar81 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Company dies, investors seek an exit... Next on slashdot: Pants put on, one leg at a time.

    1. Re:Wow, what news... by mickwd · · Score: 4, Funny

      I prefer not to wear anything when I'm sliding the pole into the Bat-cave.

    2. Re:Wow, what news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      where is that meta mod "scary" when you need it.

  3. 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.
    1. Re:90% Loss? by Ninja+Programmer · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  4. Missing the point by BWJones · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Missing the point by Bonker · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
    2. Re:Missing the point by Kevin+Stevens · · Score: 4, Funny

      I wouldnt go that far. Corel was pretty much dead as it was. It would have helped MS a great deal more to leave the 'competition' in place and let it get its 8% marketshare so it could tell the DOJ about how its fragile market dominance could topple at any second. If thats true... then MS should start to look at itself as an Operating System and Software company, and not a Window's company, and port Office to Linux and make its own linux Distro. Sounds crazy? Yeah it does. But I can guarantee that Joe Schmoe wont mind trying linux out if MS backs it. Put on top of that fat service contracts for support and apple as the only niche player... and things work out well.

    3. Re:Missing the point by Speed+Racer · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
      --
      Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
    4. 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!

    5. Re:Missing the point by twitter · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      --

      Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.

  5. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Funny

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  6. Well... by 13Echo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Why corel is dying by Tuxinatorium · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
    1. 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.

  8. 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
  9. Corel Linux's best feature by trmj · · Score: 4, Funny


    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
  10. 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).

  11. I've got it! by generic-man · · Score: 5, Funny
    1. Build unsuccessful Linux company
    2. Get purchased by Microsoft for X dollars
    3. Get sold by Microsoft for X/10 dollars
    4. If Microsoft has money left over, go to step 1.
    5. 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.
  12. Why not... by nedron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  13. The history of Corel's Crazes by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Remember back when Corel decided Java was the future, and said it would be rewriting its office suite in Java?

    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 .NET, again threatening to port the by now rather cobwebby Corel Office to the new platform.

    Now that too has gone and XML is the big thing? Whatever next?

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    1. Re:The history of Corel's Crazes by mcc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the thing to take away here is to remember what happened at the end of each of these crazes.

      As far as i can tell, Corel has never once followed through on any of these buzzword projects. They get *something* in the hands of consumers.. they never really *commit*.. they spend lots of money.. then they get bored, wander off, and dump the thing like it never existed sometime well before the point at which the inclusion of the buzzword would begin to make sense.

      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*. But, from my perspective as a mac user-- well, first off, running it was a bloody mess, you had to bugger about with .jar files. They didn't bother doing the application encapsulization thing on any platform, you had to run it in a browser or appletrunner ultimately if i remember right. But that's just a lack of polish. They had the groundwork. And most of the problems *i* had were that this was in the early days of apple's MRJ runtime and the MRJ was *slow*.

      So then what did they do? Well, um, nothing. After awhile they decided it wasn't worth the bother and just stopped updating, maintaining or allowing you to download it. By the time the MRJ reached a decent level of speed, which was still the EARLY days of java, you couldn't get Wordperfect for Java anymore, and if i remember right the older WPJ versions had some big incompaibilities with the later MRJ versions anyway. Had they kept developing it, they probably would have been able to come up with a reason why Wordperfect for Java is a good idea, and it would have been a usable, considerable project. Java's a big thing now, Java's everywhere, Java could probably use a wordprocessor. But they didn't bother to let that happen.

      And then the linux thing. Everyone said it was a neat distro, not *very* revolutionary, but that it needed more work. Did they do the work? Did they develop the product until it lived up to its stated goals? Did they even maintain it long enough for it to take hold? No, they just went "hm, this isn't taking over the world overnight, it probably isn't worth the bother". Then they ran out of money.

      I don't know what's up with this .NET or XML things, but i'm willing to bet that Corel won't really bother coming up with a reason why you should be excited or whatever that they're using .NET and XML now, and they won't explore or exploit the possible benefits of .NET and XML being part of their architecture, whatever those are.

      This is, of course, just my perception of things, and i could be wrong, but *shrugs*.

      --
      Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
    2. 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.

  14. Corel/Wordperfect by bloosqr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  15. 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

  16. 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.

  17. the timing by univeralifepadre · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  18. Details of Price Hike by handy_vandal · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

    Sure, Microsoft's cost works out to .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.

    --
    -kgj
  19. not quite by RelliK · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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!

    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.