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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.
$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.