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.

Comments

Great, Painter and Bryce get another "master"

[ScottGant]

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?

Re:links to old stories? whats goin on here...

[Kircle]

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.

Re:cheap?

[swb]

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.

Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[cmburns69]

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!

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[Noksagt]

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.

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[DragonMagic]

WordPerfect is also the best word processor for writers because of its ability to properly typographically lay out a page. Word can screw up severely, even to the point that submitting a work on disk or electronically between versions or even platforms can cause your markup to be askew.

If OpenOffice.org or other open source projects want to take up where WordPerfect might be dropped (if Vector chooses to kill it or take it the Real way), Typography, Grammar/Spell Checker lookups, Document Analysis (passives, incompletes, etc) and a saved format that does not change between versions and platforms.

Word fails miserably at all of these (if you believe that Word's Spellcheck is great, check out what WordPerfect's does and be blown away). If Vector doesn't want to continue the line, or want to make it more like Word, then I do hope that OpenOffice.org or another word processing suite can take WordPerfect's place.

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[bogie]

Word does nothing but get into the way of what your doing. Want to change the spacing on a few lines? Word reformats everything. Now every line below what you just typed trys to be just like the couple of lines you have custom spacing on.

I fucking hate word for anything but the most generic text functions. Word Perfect simply gets out of the way and let's you do whatever you want without having to deal with it guessing wrong about every little freaking thing you doing.

Every seen how legal documents are indented and how they make motions etc look? Image Ever wonder why Wordperfect has such a huge following at law firms? The fact that law firms are conservative is NOT the answer. Sure you can setup a template or macro, but if you ever color outside the lines Word crumbles.

I know some people are able to write books, thesis's etc on Word, but that's only after you learn to workaround all of Word's annoying behaviors. Word may have the monopoly but ease of use wise it doesn't come close to Wordperfect.

Can't wait for the next version of Corel Draw

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

with vector capitol support ...

The Sad Story Of Corel

[ihatewinXP]

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.

Vector own Real Networks!

[Znonymous Coward]

And by the looks of this page, Corel is just another dog to add to thier lackluster portfolio.

Re:Vector Capitol?

[ThogScully]

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

Re:cheap?

[Tancred]

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!

Does anyone here check facts?

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

The sale price is $98,000,000.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030606/tech_corel_vector _3 .html

I didn't make that a link because I wanted slashcode to annoy you with the extraneous blank.

Re:cheap?

[PerryMason]

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.

How to Kill Free Software

[jellybear]

Logically, then, if someone wanted to kill the Free Software movement, they'd only have to free the Wordperfect source and then...

Re:va linux buyout?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

OSS Buyouts

[Anonymous Coward]

$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.

Re:cheap?

[PerryMason]

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.

Re:I smell a conspiracy

[Locutus]

I think the pattern is more like this:

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

Ouch!

[theolein]

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.

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 ,even to this day in CD 11, sometimes wildly inaccurate colourschemes and positioning, are the reason why almost no pros use it.

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.

Bryce

[macaddict]

This is interesting, considering Bryce for Mac was just killed. From MacCentral and MacNN . The Corel suit won't give a straight answer, but the Bryce page no longer lists a Mac version.

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

It's Vector CapitAl. Please change headline...

[SlashChick]

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.