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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.
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
It does look cheap. You'd think that Corel Draw sales alone would make that investment worthwhile, although perhaps that's all that's of any real value there once you subtract Corel's debts.
I even owned a copy of 5.0 for UNIX, but I had to through that out the other day...something about SCO source code or some other crap :). I couldn't run it anyway since I no longer have a 5 1/4 drive or a tape drive that could read the tapes.
"It's a dog eat dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."- Norm (from Cheers)
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.
They do everything from linux to graphic software to word processing.. And none of its really working.
I must protest. I am an fervid WordPerfect user and, until the most recent version of each, it worked far better than Microsoft Word.
I also know many who still use Corel linux (which Corel (in a move you would say was wise because it focused their resources) dropped).
I think that their software has usually been good. It doesn't work from a business standpoint, because there is already quality software that is much more popular, and people take popularity over quality any day. It is like VHS vs. BetaMax.
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.
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's hoping Adobe is smart this time around and buys Painter and some of the Corel vector apps. The brush engine in PS & is ok but it would be a slam dunk if Adobe could integrate the Painter brush engine into PS. Corel Knockout could replace "Extract" in PS too. Illustrator could use a shot in the arm too. Corel Designer could add some sorely lacking features into Illustrator. Adobe had their chance once before when Painter was up for sale. Here's hoping this new VC puts these apps on the block and Adobe nabs them.
Yes, there's a lot of misunderstanding about Linux and its "ownership". People in the market-oriented nations just can't wrap their head around the "community-owned product" notion.
I had an uncle who is top man in a very large engineering firm visiting last month. He was very excited to see my personal computing setup because he said the firm was considering a complete switch to Linux, from operations to desktops to development, and he knew that I ran Linux and could show him the "every day" of it that his people couldn't.
Then we got talking... While he was enthusiastic, he was obviously very confused about the ownership question. He kept talking about how the price of Linux would rise when (he was certain it would happen) Microsoft bought it and how he was increasingly tempted to call his broker and move some long-term capital into LNUX.
When I told him that Linux was community-owned and open-source, he kept saying what a good marketing strategy it had been, in spite of its unconventional nature, and how it made people "feel like" they had a stake in the system, and thus dontate free development hours to the company. He said the only downside was that it allowed competitors like Red Hat to essentially release the same product, but he was sure that Linux was ahead of Red Hat in both quality and service.
I kept trying to explain that there is no company, that Red Hat LInux is also Linux, and I named a whole pile of other Linux distributions, but it didn't really help at all, to him all of the distributions were "the competition" to Linux itself, who in his brain was LNUX.
A surprising fact is that if you'd invested your money in Red Hat two years ago you'd be wealthier now than then, but not if you'd put it in MSFT.
Mind you, if you'd put your money in, say, Red Hat, when they floated, you'd be a lot better off if you'd kept it in MSFT.