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Corel to be bought by Vector Capitol
mgeoffrey writes "Corel announced that Vector Capitol will acquire Corel by buying out all outstanding shares at $1.05 a share. They are buying 22,890,000 shares. Vector Capitol has published a full report." Looks like the natural continuation after Microsoft sold off their Corel holdings.
...or i just dont get it
Microsoft owned a part of everything. Anytime a company had a product which MS could use, they simply purchased stock, ip rights, whatever they needed to keep market dominance.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
any guesses about what's going on with this company?
I know the slashdot editors won't post any news about this since, they're 0wned by them.
These two programs seem to be the drunk floozies that get passed around at the frat party.
How many different companies have owned these two again?
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
whats goin on here... microsoft owned corel?
Nope. Microsoft never "owned" Corel, though they did use to own quite a bit of Corel's stock, which I believe they sold off not that long ago.
-- Kircle
Wordperfect seems to be a drag on whoever owns them. First they sold out to Novell. Then, Novell unloaded^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^^H sold them to Corel. Now it seems (and its just a shot in the dark) that they have caused hurt to yet another company.
[MS BASH SECTION]
Of course, if MS had played fair, none of this would have happened.
[/MS BASH SECTION]
Anyway, Corel just hasn't had much of a goal lately. It seems they don't know where to focus their resources; They do everything from linux to graphic software to word processing.. And none of its really working.
*sigh* It was bound to happen!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
with vector capitol support ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Our government has sunk to new low levels. With this news, it looks like they've even sold or given our capitol buildings to private capitalists, and now these corporate robber-barons have set up shop in the former seats of government. I guess it's fitting, because they are running this country now.
I have had a special place in my heart for Corel for years, and now they are going the way of so many before them who tried to unsurp the Redmond juggernaut.
Honestly I am suprised they are worth 22 million, Knockout and Paint aren't what the used to be and Corel Office is dead in the water.
Maybe they will go the way of Atari, not even a company anymore but a brand that is labeled on things that the corporate office wants to draw attention to.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
And by the looks of this page, Corel is just another dog to add to thier lackluster portfolio.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Now I just may be stupid, but this is the first time I've ever heard of 'Vector Capitol'.
Who are they? Have they done anything I might know of?
Also, bring back CorelDRAW for Linux, damnit!
I am a filthy pirate.
It would have been nice that governments of developped countries would have shipped in, bought Corel for $24 millions and released all their products as open source...
Generic applications should be seen as public services, the same as roads and services....
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
It looks like Corel has drawn to a conclusion.
-Rusty
You never know...
"and now these corporate robber-barons have set up shop in the former seats of government."
Not only that, but from the name "Vector Capitol" I would guess that the word processing company is being bought out by the maker of the vector-graphics video game console Vectrex.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The sale price is $98,000,000.
r _3 .html
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030606/tech_corel_vecto
I didn't make that a link because I wanted slashcode to annoy you with the extraneous blank.
The latest Slashdot meme.
I know the interest in retro gaming, but the interest in Corel seems to be part of a desire for "retro apps", nostalgia for good old long-outdated Word Perfect.
By the way, anyone know what ever became of Wordstar?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"It would have been nice that governments of developped countries would have shipped in, bought Corel for $24 millions and released all their products as open source..."
Good way to keep the Third World underdeveloped: give them primitive stone-age software for free.
Why not instead go to Sourceforge or similar sites and look for viable recent and up-to-date open source software?
Logically, then, if someone wanted to kill the Free Software movement, they'd only have to free the Wordperfect source and then...
First, Microsoft sells their Corel stocks. Then, a Microsoft executive sells some of his stock in the Company. Am I the only one who sees a pattern here? They must be in trouble...
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Heck, even developing countries might save money by funding open-source efforts instead of paying license fees. Every government desk has a computer on it, and pretty much every one of those is using a microsoft OS... does anybody know what that costs?
$22 million for Corel? Hell. It's time for the open-source community to start considering buyouts. That's about US $1.22 per user, according to one estimate. Not a high price to pay for the WP and Corel Draw source.
Counting the fact that first class countries must help third ones, it makes sense if G8 + other next 16 the most developed ones will pay it. Actually it's them who should be blamed for the Microsoft monopoly. So, let them fix what they've done. And the price ($1M) is not really high for that.
Less is more !
You can tell it's not their own cash on the line.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I'm sorry, but someone had to say it.
Sigs are bad for your health.
The graphics software market is something that no one ever really looks at closely, most people preferring to speak their mind on office and operating system software. While there have been various legal suits in this market (Adobe-Macromedia), it doesn't enjoy the high profile that Microsoft word does.
,even to this day in CD 11, sometimes wildly inaccurate colourschemes and positioning, are the reason why almost no pros use it.
Corel getting bought out by the people who now own Real is not a good sign for Corel users. As someone who actually sold and supported version 1 of Corel Draw back on Windows 2.11 in 1989, I have watched this piece of Software go the way of many other innovative products. Corel was by far the leader in vector illustration software in the early years on Windows as there was no competition to speak of. Then Freehand and Illustrator were ported and those pros who use Windows (good luck) used these.
Corel never learned the lesson why the other programmes were taken seriously and CorelDraw was not: Quality. CD's enourmous amount of features and gimmicks mostly only got in the way. The programme's instability and
Corel has had almost no direction or focus, and buying up other software houses' products in order to bolster their bad model (Painter, Bryce, Knockout, Word Perfect, Ventura) only fragmented an already overworked development team.
I think I will buy Painter 8 now, before it ceases to exist. CorelDraw will probably carry on haunting the world in the form of die hards who still think Corel is fantastic, but I somehow doubt that we'll see any new versions of WP, Ventura, Bryce or Painter.
R.I.P.
Corel was apparently looking for a buyer for Bryce. How this buyout will affect things, who knows. But I'm not going to get my hopes up for Bryce to ever run on the Mac again.
But, we still have Vue. And Eric Wenger, the original creator of Bryce, posted on the U&I forums that he is working on a new landscape creator. Demo images
What I can't understand is why these companies can't get their act together and come to the realization that they aren't going to be able to compete with Microsoft on their own? What there needs to be is a coalition of companies to offer an alternative solution. e.g. Novell, Sun, Red Hat, Suse, Oracle, and Corel should work together to offer complete solutions that work together. This is one of Microsoft's biggest selling points right now. They offer solutions that tie together with IMHO closed standards. Why can't the aforementioned do the same with collaboration and open standards?
Here in DC I do support work on the side for small law firms - at least 50% of the firms I have been to have some (legally licensed!) version of WP installed on workstations - usually next to a copy of MS Office.
There are lots of people who still use WP - their market share isn't great but the total number of users certainly isn't anything to sniff at - I bet IBM would kill to have the WP userbase to switch to SmartSuite...
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
Capitol is where the head of a government is.
Capital is goods or money.
Its not very hard.
Notice the original Slashdot poster got it wrong (Capitol) but -- thank goodness -- Vector got it right
on the linked site (Capital).
I took mine back to the store, exchanged it as decective, then turned around and returned the unopened copy. Good riddance.
learn to f**king spell! capital = $$$ Vector Capital is a venture capital company...
"Microsoft bought it to learn about intuitive user interfaces."
Better give it to Apple. They still don't grasp the basics of representative icons in user interface.
A chief example is the "trash can". It should mean destroy, right? Yet, when you drag a removable media icon to the Apple trash can, it does not format/erase/destroy: it ejects it.
The Windows method for this has made more sense: you choose something called "eject" to eject media (or press an eject button, the easiest method. The buttons are often missing on the Mac!), and the trash can is used for destroying files.
"The maths for anyone who cares"
The plural of math is math. You don't go around saying sheeps, do you?
That sounds a lot like the old OSF..and you know just how successful THEY were.
Several anonymous cowards have already pointed this out, but I thought I'd point it out at +2:
The name of the company is Vector Capital (as in venture capital.) Please update the article.
Thanks.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
are they going to rename it to the Vector Capital Centre?
why the fuck would corel want to spend millions developing software for Linux when the users of Linux are dipshits and don't want to pay for software?
Yeah, I hear this small little niche 3-d package was recently bought by this... open source community of which you speak.
I touch computers in naughty places
Yeah, because clearly poor taxpayers would rather get free Corel Draw than buy a cheeseburger with their share of the cost, and rich taxpayers are too dumb to choose their own software.
You remind me of a guy in college who took offense when I started laughing in the middle of his long and earnest explanation about how governments should provide bread, electricity and cable for FREE. "Because they don't cost anything".
True. Management killed Corel. Their advertising is amazingly bad, for example.
Would play fair in this case mean be late with a bloated version for MS Windows, and overpriced?
No, "Play fair" means not dumping your inferior word processor, manipulating vendors and breaking your competitor's code on your OS. It would also mean not buying 10% of your competitor so you can keep it off alternate platforms, like Microsoft did right after Corel made Linux binaries.
Because that was the case. The first versions of Satellite Software WordPerfect for MS Windows were confusing and bloated. There was one version requiring 6 MB RAM when the norm was 4 MB; MS WinWord at the time asked for only 2 MB. And MS WinWord was cheaper, especially if acquired in MS Office, which was also better integrated.
Put down the crackpipe, please. Every version of Word Perfect has worked faster and easier then the concurent Word version. Word Perfect 4.x was much better then the equivalent DOS Word. Word Perfect 5.1 was much better than the equvalent DOS or Windoze Word and secritaries continued to use it long after newer versions were introduced. Word Perfect 5.2, the first windoze version, is still a fine word processor on Win9x computers, and it's still easier to use than any Word since. Word Perfect 6.0 took up lots of space but was still easier to use and had more useful features than Word. The Linux native Word Perfect worked well on 150 MHz machines, can you say that for Word XP? It offered nice X integration and was a truely useful program. I wish they had continued it and hope to see these Vector Capitol people put one out.
There are plenty of law firms out there ready to have Word Perfect back on a stable platform. They are enough to make it happen too.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Macs don't have floppy drives anymore" ...and most PC's still do, for a reason. Pretty dumb to have to burn a CD just to move one little file.
I've been using WordPerfect since 1986, and Paradox since 1991, so I'm a customer. But bugs haven't been getting fixed in the last few years. The products are pretty stable as they are, but there are well-known bugs that keep showing up in every new version.
A few weeks ago I needed a spreadsheet with a formula in 1-2 million cells. Since Quattro Pro was on my machine, I fired it up, defined my rows and columns, created my formula, gave the copy command, and Quattro Pro crashed. I checked the docs for any limitation I'd exceeded, but couldn't find anything. I tried copying one column at a time, and that worked for a few columns, then it crashed again. It just didn't work.
So I downloaded Open Office, installed it, and made my spreadsheet. No problem.
If Corel can't get its products up to the quality standards of open source software, it has no business charging money for its products.
So Corel has been bought. This is the death of Corel as a company. Parts will be sold off and liquidated and thats it. There will not be new releases of any of their software. Long live Corel. Corel is dead.
-
aphex
I Steal Music!
im sick of this crap. im just going to start pasting this every time i see some idiot not putting anything into the discussion
/.
"Enough with the spelling nazi bullshit. Why not try to, I don't know, further the discussion instead of pointing out typo's and spelling errors (which I will admit I made more than a few in the original post).
Yes I'll and ill are not the same thing, but please.
I guess if you don't have any original ideas then being a spelling nazi or fr0st p1st idiot is about the only thing you can do on
--"
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
The new owners should send Word Perfect Office into open source...its a better word processor than Open Office... The new owners could continue to release a commercial branded *Word Perfect* specifically for the legal field since Word Perfect still has that market cornered... We'd all benefit from this, much to the chagrin of Microsoft... That would leave the new Corel off the hook to focus back on their graphics software...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Maybe if Dr. Coupland had spent more time actually trying to build half decent software, instead of building himself a giant copper-glass colored box to live in, dumping his wife for a bleach blonde floozy who spent a million bucks on a leather catsuit with a huge diamond over one nipple, with a dyed pink poodle.... spending all his days training in sambo and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and trying to dress forty years younger than he really is, flouncing around in a series of expensive cars financed by gullible investors..... Corel might have gone somewhere.
As it stands, it just ends up being YET ANOTHER Canadian nosedive, like the Avro Arrow, like the Bricklin, like everything else. Drive around in flash cars and want the benefits without putting in the work or caring about the quality. When it got to the point where he couldn't even GIVE away Corel Office to all the municipalities in his home town, you knew he was screwed.......
I would caution those who follow investment advice from Slashdot posters... In the following few paragraphs, I have attempted to highlight how an investor might look at the current state of the market.
At ONE point in time, I owned Corel stock just before they announced they were coming out with a Linux distribution. Their stock shot up from about 2.5 to 25, or something around that number. I sold at 17. But those times are long over, and thankfully so are the illusions that adding GNU/Linux to a product lineup will automagically make companies oodles of cash profits.
In fact, not only are those times over, but real business models have started to make a comeback with investors before they buy stock. What a concept!
Even if Linux were to take hold of a market in Peru, India, and Germany, this does not mean that GNU/Linux companies will necessarily be able to capitalize on these new users. They would need a business plan to do so, and I haven't seen one yet that makes any sense. It's much more likely that these governments aren't willing to spend money on computer software, and they're looking for a cheaper alternative to MSFT.
And just as corporations outsource jobs to increasingly cheap labor markets in less developed countries, governments who switch from MSFT contracts to (insert company name) GNU/Linux contracts will continue to demand price undercuts until in the scramble to compete for the crumbs leftover, only a handful of GNU/Linux companies remain, none of them very (if at all) profitable.
GNU/Linux support solutions and services will become highly commoditized in such a competitive market, and attempting to profit from such commoditized contracts is unlikely EVER to be a fruitful endeavor. I would seriously re-consider any thought of investing in a company who aggressively pursues such opportunities.
I'd love to. Perhaps you could provide a link to a vector drawing package that is as good as Corel Draw?
Try this or perhapsthis. Not so many features, but a lot more quality.
Many of us discussed decisions made by Upper Management and couldn't figure out why they decided to do things so differently than their own staff. Truth is, we have no way of knowing who had UM's ear. The company needs strong leadership...maybe now they'll get it.
Good luck in your future endeavours, Corel. You'll be missed.
There has been several useful software being produced recently, most noteworthy of them Linux, Open Office etc. But the weakness of OSS is that OSS programmers generally work on software that they themselves use. This is the main reason you don't have quality Graphics software except GIMP (which by the way can be used only for the web and so is pretty much useless for a Graphics professional).
For all practical purposes it would be impossible for the OSS community to come up with Graphics programs that can compete with CorelDRAW, PHOTO-PAINT and VENTURA.
Just because they have a low market share doesn't mean that the programs are worthless.
With proper management and marketing, the Graphics and Publishing programs can become very profitable assets.
Arpan