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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.
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
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.
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.
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...
I'll second that - I'm a huge CorelDraw zealot as I've been using it for years. I know the "real" pros use Adobe, but most of those people probably don't realize how ahead of the curve Corel was for graphics technology at times.
The interfaces between the packages were so different that to an Adobe person, Corel seemed lightweight and useless and from my perspective as a Corel user, Adobe often looked the same. Either way, preference goes and I miss using Corel a lot. I got a version of Corel9 for Windows running in WINE, but would much rather get the latest versions...
Somehow, I think Vector Capital may be doing this though... I can't imagine what they expect to do at this point, but it will probably be focusing on something that won't compete with MS at least until Corel gets back on its feet. If so, CorelDRAW is the perfect candidate to bring back to the market.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
High sales volume is great, but they're losing money, so they're worth nothing (as a whole anyway) unless someone can turn that around. Good luck to everyone at Corel!
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.
The post isnt actually accurate. Vector Capital purchased 22,890,000 Series A shares from Microsoft on March 10th or thereabouts at $0.5625. They are now offering $1.05 per share for the remaining stock. The board of directors has recommended that shareholders take the offer. It "represents a premium of 42% to the market immediately prior to our announcement that Vector had entered into a non-disclosure and standstill agreement with Corel," said James Baillie, Chairman of Corel's Board of Directors.
So from the point of view of the shareholders, its probably not a bad deal.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Logically, then, if someone wanted to kill the Free Software movement, they'd only have to free the Wordperfect source and then...
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?
A lot of misinformed investors think LNUX is the maker of Linux. So between the Munich news and Balmer memo in the last couple of weeks, there are a lot of people thinking this LNUX company is the next Microsoft. CNBC compounded the problem by calling LNUX "Linux" and comparing it's chart to Microsoft.
$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.
The really interesting thing is not the price, but the volume. Nots since the company was floated has there been this much trading in its shares.
Good luck to them, I say. A bit of financial bounce in companies associated with Linux would be good for all of us concerned with FOSS.
The maths for anyone who cares;
Corel shares;
24,000,000 Series A preferred shares
91,840,000 common shares.
VC bought 22,890,000 Series A shares at $0.5625=$12.876 Million.
They now offer $1.05 per share for the remaining 1,110,000 Series A and 91,840,000 common shares=$97.6 Million.
So all up your looking at about $110 Million for Corel, 'lock, stock and barrel'.
Check out their end of quarter financial report up to 28th Feb '03 for the lowdown on their financial position.
The long and the short is; $50 Million in cash/liquid assets, posting losses but with very few liabilities.
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
Peru is considering Open Source and GNU/Linux
India is considering open Source and GNU/Linux
Germany is considering open source and GNU/Linux
etc, etc, etc
Bill and Steve travel to Peru, China, India, Germany, etc and offer hundreds of millions of dollars to stop any migration to GNU/Linux and OSS.
Peru still continues move to OSS and GNU/Linux
Indian president proclaims need to move to OSS and GNU/Linux
Germany/Munich starts move to OSS and GNU/Linux
etc, etc, etc.
Steve Balmer decides he'd like to have SOMETHING left from his years at Microsoft so he starts selling some stock.
Leaked MS memo shows to the public that GNU/Linux and OSS really is a concern/threat to Microsoft.
In the mean time, Corel has been spinning it's wheels on figuring out what/how it's going to do anything with MS.Net then realizes there's nothing in it for them and that there's no money left in the bank. They put up a "For Sale" sign.
GNU/Linux companies find renewed interest in their companies/stock. ( not chronologically exact ;)
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
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'd love to. Perhaps you could provide a link to a vector drawing package that is as good as Corel Draw? With the same amount of (actually useful) clipart?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
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 read in the Ottawa Citizen this morning that this deal (about 22 million CANADIAN) is about 75% of Corel's annual sales.
Cheap? I think so...
using System.Awesome;
I took mine back to the store, exchanged it as decective, then turned around and returned the unopened copy. Good riddance.
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!
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.
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*