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Corel Ousted From Public Life?
gagy writes "Ottawa's Corel Corp. has been showing signs of weakness in the past few years, and looks very likely to be bought out by Vector Corp, at which point it will become a privately held company. A Toronto Star story spells out the details of the deal, and takes a brief look at the history of Corel." We mentioned Corel's deal with Vector last month.
Maybe the law firms will think about converting now?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Even back in the days before Linux went mainstream, from Corel Draw onward, Corel was ever a thorn in Microsoft's side. It looks like they went down in the good fight. The name "Corel" may emerge from this yet, but it sure won't be the same rebellious little software firm with a chip on it's shoulder.
Here's to Corel... may it live on in out hearts and minds in "the happy coding ground."
Well one would hope they will stay alive, even though they've been around for their fair share of trauma a lot of people actually use their products. The last company I worked for used corel office on over 1000 clients while the rest ran MS office...
Corel's office actually had less support incidents of problems with the actual software, on the other hand, it was a pain because everyone was used to MS office and didden't understand the different GUI hehe.
http://funstuff.digital-bless.com/ - Funny stuff.
Word Perfect was an awesome product. I still use it sometimes too. Any hope of open source type port of Word Perfect? I'm guessing probably not. But you can always hope.
I am about to put my Word Perfect CD-Roms next to my WordStar floppies and Ami-Pro disks. Actually who really cares? Corel has not just hurt Word Perfect, but their other graphics tools just aren't good anymore. If they had spent more time working on Word Perfect and less on porting everything to Java, this might not have happened. How can Intuit survive Microsoft and not these other companies?
By this time next month, software maker Corel Corp. will most likely be a step closer to being a privately held company -- and a step further from the often glaring self-directed spotlight that it was known for during much of its public life.
On August 20, Corel will hold a special shareholders meeting in Toronto to consider an offer on the table from U.S. tech buyout firm Vector Corp. for $1.05 (U.S.) a share -- a far cry from the $14.75 the company went public at on the Nasdaq in 1992 and nowhere close to its peak of $57.59 a share reached in December, 1999. Corel split its stock twice -- two for one in November, 1993, and three for two in October, 1994.
Vector already holds 22.89 million shares of Corel -- about 20 per cent of the company -- which it took off Microsoft's hands earlier this year. Corel's board has agreed to accept any Vector offer for the rest of its outstanding shares at anything higher than $1.10 a share. In exchange, Vector has agreed that it won't oppose another outside bid that values Corel shares at anything above $1.25 a share, though few expect another bidder.
If no one else steps up to the plate and the deal goes through, it will mark the end of the independent existence of one of the PC industry's longest-lived companies. It will also mark a nondescript end to a chapter of a company that has been anything but.
"Corel was certainly known and still is, but not always for the best of reasons," said one Wall Street analyst who used to cover the company.
From its boastful claim as a thorn in Microsoft Corp.'s side to its flashy founder being accused of insider trading and resigning from the company he built from scratch, few in notoriously conservative Ottawa will likely fret witnessing the company's slow retreat away from its self-orchestrated circus.
Indeed, Corel has had its share of moments and misgivings. There was the time the company announced its quarterly earnings, but failed to mention it had switched its reporting currency to U.S. dollars from Canadian. Several analysts, including Morgan Stanley star analyst Mary Meeker, dropped coverage in disgust that very day.
There were also more than a few grandiose products that failed to deliver, including forays into video-conferencing systems using specialized operating systems, a special kind of business-orientated Web cam and even a personal digital assistant, or PDA, to name just a few of the many products that never made it out of Corel's inner sanctum and onto the production line.
And there was all the personal gossip about founder and owner Michael Cowpland and his less-than-demure wife's lavish lifestyle, including their oversized home in the upscale Ottawa neighbourhood Rockcliffe Park, their luxury cars, their lavish parties and Marlen Cowpland's notoriously outrageous outfits, including one million-dollar-plus number worn to a Corel reception made of leather and gold.
Yet in its 18-plus years, Corel's products became a must-have in the retail and business graphics software market and a household name -- at least for anyone who watches the Ottawa Senators play on their home turf. Cowpland made millions of dollars, generated thousands of jobs in Ottawa and around the world and put Corel on Silicon Valley North's map, if not always in terms of revenues, then certainly in terms of profile. Indeed, despite its reputation for being more talk than action, Corel contributed to the development of more than a few pieces of software that made producing professional-looking graphics better and easier and lit a firecracker under the competition that ultimately carved out a niche in an otherwise cutthroat and product-heavy industry.
"If you look at the resume of almost any graphic artist today, it will likely say two things: PageMaker from Adobe and CorelDraw," said David Wright, a software analyst with BMO Nesbitt Burns who has covered Corel's financials for more than 11 years. "The graphics tool industry was fuelled by the creation of the suite market and the bundling
is a vulture capital firm. This should be good for them. They already have a history with Corel, having bought Microsoft's shares at 56 cents a piece, taking a 20% stake in the company.
CorelDRAW is still the best illustration package available for PCs today, bar none. Illustrator doesn't hold a candle, IMHO. (This from a guy with many years of experience with both packages in a professional setting).
My journal has hot
Not that having fewer distros would really be a bad thing, but inquiring minds want to know!
I can't blame Corel. If I were being punched in the stomach every 7 seconds I'd want a way out too.
I've always liked wordperfect as well as Corel Support for Linux. First company to bring a commerical wordprocessor to Linux IIRC. Was good but now times are moving on..
Good luck corel whatever the future might hold
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
"Corel Ousted From Public Life" is a poor choice of words. "Ousted" means "To eject from a position or place; force out." Nobody is forcing anything. Vector is simply making a tender offer.
And when a company goes private it doesn't disappear from "public life." Its ownership merely changes hands.
Insert witty sig here.
Corel was doomed from the moment they went into competition with Microsoft with WordPerfect.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Two interesting firsts, from the article:
"... [Corel] became the first software company to bundle more than one program into a package. It also became the first to discount older versions, making them accessible for the more thrift-conscious consumer market."
-kgj
Good to see that they lost their shirts on their Corel stock. Maybe that's why they never handed out dividends. Pricks.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
However, if htey become private (closed), it's likely to put a stop to their linux activities.
Closed companies have generally been less receptive to Open Source (VA Linux, IBM, and Red Hat are all public companies). The threat of shareholder lawsuits is usually enough to make sure public companies use Linux to save money, and adopt Open Source ideals. Private companies, sadly, often end up being microsoft-only shops.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Tubgirl link. You've been warned.
your all gay
i think you mean - "you're all gay"
not "all your corel are..."
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
If things continue on this exponential curve of stupidity, then Adobe should be bought out by Phillip Morris sometime in October.
Hey, why NOT have a Photoshopped image of Liza Minelli smoking her life away on the box?
I always wonder why they were not bought by MS because CorelDraw is a nice vector drawing program that is used by a lot of people to make pictures with that are then incorporated in a Word document. MS could have had WP and Draw in one nice package.!
-- Cheers!
Now you know why we are great lovers.
The Corel name, and product line, still have reputation enough to make the company a huge asset IF the right buyer comes along and makes good management decisions. Despite the popularity of OpenOffice among private users, most companies aren't going to adopt it, and Sun is having little success in marketing the professional sibling, StarOffice. WordPerfect, Corel Draw, Quattro Pro, and other apps still have good commercial name recognition and respect, and were a company like HP to come along and buy and distribute it, the Corel line could have a fighting chance. HP is already distributing Corel software with it's home-market PCs. If they were to do a true port to Linux of all the Corel line, it could really kick-start the Linux business desktop. And I mean a REAL port, not the Wine-dependant crap Corel was distributing years ago. And if someone like HP were to buy them, the Corel Linux distro wouldn't be a bad idea for a return either. Corel Linux had some nice features, and was Debian based. Much better package management that way. IBM wouldn't be in the market. They've already got one office suite, and are developing another Java-based suite. Sun has StarOffice. But with Corel going REALLY cheap, maybe they could be presuaded to buy anyway. Dare I hope that Apple might even have an interest? Probably not. Outside of the venture capital crowd gunning for it, a company like HP would be Corel's best hope of making a big return. The competition would certainly nice.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Software company Corel was found dead in its Ontario home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss them - even if you didn't enjoy their work, there's no denying their contributions to popular culture. Truly a Canadian icon.
That was a big part of the old Anti-Trust lawsuits. When they included IE with Windows, Netscape went through the roof. MS just has to bump up the price of their upcoming versions of Windows, and throw in product X. Consumers are thrifty, and will likely not want/need another word processor, graphics editor, tax filing program, etc. The only way for your product to survive is to beat Windows itself, and that won't likely happen for a LONG time.....or just make games instead ^_^
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
I think there's always been a better option to Corel's programs. They were always some kind of second choice. Perhaps it's just me?
Martin
Corel has a strategy of buying successful products and turning them in to obscure POS's. Here is just a short list off the top of my head of products they still offer:
- Fractal Design Painter (Amazing Program)
- Kai's Power Tools
- Wordperfect
- Bryce
I believe there are also a bunch of excellent products that were acquired and abandoned. If I remember correctly Kai's Goo (easy to use image editor) was extremely popular before digital cameras were common and another product called photo soap was pretty decent too. The "Kai" line of basic image editors and easy effects for the masses could have been insanely successful if Corel didn't touch it.Hmm, I hope Ottawa isn't that notorious... I mean, sure, we're a government town. But if you look at the sheer number of festivals and celebrations that go on over a year in the Ottawa region, you'd think those politicians never get any work done (well, maybe you think that anyway).
We have the Jazz Festival, the Blues Festival, the Fringe Festival, the Chamber Music Festival, Winterlude, the Tulip Festival, the Hot Air Balloon Festival, Canada Day... and that's just off the top of my head.
I like living in Ottawa.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
I'm sure if there was any validity to this claim Sun would be getting their pants sued off by now. Is this the effect of SCO? Is every loser company going to start BS claims and legal maneuvering against competitive open source projects?
Here is what the real stratjakt is about.
4 72 996
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=71604&cid=6
Still don't get it? Here's a clue. He's NOT a member of Corel management.
Gee, no wonder the product didn't do better with such forward thinking plans:
"massive undertaking", "synnergizing our product lines", "escalating the sales curves."I suddenly feel like I'm reading the Dilbert archive and not Slashdot. Are you sure this wasn't supposed to be moderated +5 Funny?
{ - Generic Guy - }
Troll highlighted (screw formatting):
By this time next month, software maker Corel Corp. will most likely be a step closer to being a privately held company -- and a step further from the often glaring self-directed spotlight that it was known for during much of its public life. On August 20, Corel will hold a special shareholders meeting in Toronto to consider an offer on the table from U.S. tech buyout firm Vector Corp. for $1.05 (U.S.) a share -- a far cry from the $14.75 the company went public at on the Nasdaq in 1992 and nowhere close to its peak of $57.59 a share reached in December, 1999. Corel split its stock twice -- two for one in November, 1993, and three for two in October, 1994. Vector already holds 22.89 million shares of Corel -- about 20 per cent of the company -- which it took off Microsoft's hands earlier this year. Corel's board has agreed to accept any Vector offer for the rest of its outstanding shares at anything higher than $1.10 a share. In exchange, Vector has agreed that it won't oppose another outside bid that values Corel shares at anything above $1.25 a share, though few expect another bidder. If no one else steps up to the plate and the deal goes through, it will mark the end of the independent existence of one of the PC industry's longest-lived companies. It will also mark a nondescript end to a chapter of a company that has been anything but. "Corel was certainly known and still is, but not always for the best of reasons," said one Wall Street analyst who used to cover the company. From its boastful claim as a thorn in Microsoft Corp.'s side to its flashy founder being accused of insider trading and resigning from the company he built from scratch, few in notoriously conservative Ottawa will likely fret witnessing the company's slow retreat away from its self-orchestrated circus. Indeed, Corel has had its share of moments and misgivings. There was the time the company announced its quarterly earnings, but failed to mention it had switched its reporting currency to U.S. dollars from Canadian. Several analysts, including Morgan Stanley star analyst Mary Meeker, dropped coverage in disgust that very day. There were also more than a few grandiose products that failed to deliver, including forays into video-conferencing systems using specialized operating systems, a special kind of business-orientated Web cam and even a personal digital assistant, or PDA, to name just a few of the many products that never made it out of Corel's inner sanctum and onto the production line. And there was all the personal gossip about founder and owner Michael Cowpland and his less-than-demure wife's lavish lifestyle, including their oversized home in the upscale Ottawa neighbourhood Rockcliffe Park, their luxury cars, their lavish parties and Marlen Cowpland's notoriously outrageous outfits, including one million-dollar-plus number worn to a Corel reception made of leather and gold. Yet in its 18-plus years, Corel's products became a must-have in the retail and business graphics software market and a household name -- at least for anyone who watches the Ottawa Senators play on their home turf. Cowpland made millions of dollars, generated thousands of jobs in Ottawa and around the world and put Corel on Silicon Valley North's map, if not always in terms of revenues, then certainly in terms of profile. Indeed, despite its reputation for being more talk than action, Corel contributed to the development of more than a few pieces of software that made producing professional-looking graphics better and easier and lit a firecracker under the competition that ultimately carved out a niche in an otherwise cutthroat and product-heavy industry. "If you look at the resume of almost any graphic artist today, it will likely say two things: PageMaker from Adobe and CorelDraw," said David Wright, a software analyst with BMO Nesbitt Burns who has covered Corel's financials for more than 11 years. "The graphics tool industry was fuelled by the creation of the suite market and the bundling of complimentary tech
I'd *really* like to see another company like Fractal Design or Metacreations pick it up and run, run, run with it.
The curse of word perfect lives on...
I'm sorry to hear that you've wasted your time as an "upper mid-level management member" ('member' as in penis?) at Corel. But then when I read your past posts like this one, it becomes really clear to me why Corel couldn't manage its way out of a paper bag in a competitive marketplace. They apparently hired junior high-school kids as managers.
Corel, via WordPerfect office, has been pretty instrumental in the emergence of low-cost PCs. The OEM price of this package is insanely low (around $10 +/-) which lets the PC manufacturers sell at a lower price point than they could if they equipped the system with Microsoft products.
Dell, HP/Compaq and Sony all ship Corel/WP Office with their low-end consumer systems due to the cost advantage.
I suspect that this might be a motivation for someone in the VC community to consider buying them. Low-cost PCs are a growth market.
What now? Corel/Vector sueing Transgaming/CodeWeavers and Wine for misappropriating IP in Wine? Wouldn't surprise me now that ligitation seems to have "earned" a legimitate place in IT business models.
Look, I used Corel software for ages, and, frankly, the way their software worked (after they rewrote for Windows) I am not gonna miss them!
WP 5.1 - arguably the best WP for DOS ever written
WP for Windows - a disaster from the first release; I went through 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, and 7.0 before I finally threw in the towel. Bugs were never fixed and all the features they added just brought in more bugs. What I found really frustrating was the great number of nifty new ideas that were just so poorly implemented (case in point: tying graphics to a specific paragraph with their little push-pin. I wasted half a day discovering that you had to pin it to a paragraph two before the one you actaully wanted it associated with!)
Corel Draw - what a wonderful concept, what a shitty implementation! Corel Draw 3 was usuable, but crashed often. I still use it for simple BW stuff to include in technical papers. Corel Draw 5 - disaster; I just couldn't keep the fscking thing running! Why did they release this? Finally, around Corel Draw 9 they got it right! Too late!
Good riddance to bad rubbish!
Not to mention that they burned a lot of goodwill in the Linux community (one of the few viable non-Microsoft markets) when they abandoned their Linux line.
/etc/printcap file to get them to print to it. These problems that I was sure would be fixed within weeks of release in a service pack are still here years later.
When Corel released WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and Corel Draw/PhotoPaint 9 for Linux, there was an incredible marketing push. I got samples. I also got Tux plush toys, balloons, beach balls, "Corel Linux" stress cubes, posters and other branding-oriented products sent to me.
I was one of the individuals to decide to pony up $$$ for some trial installations of WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux and Corel Draw 9 for Linux, thinking that these were bigtime apps. The initial release was somewhat (incredibly, you found as time wore on,) buggy, but with service packs already available for the Windows version and assurances that the Linux product line represented a major long-term investment by Corel, I was reasonably confident that the product was viable.
Well... As the weeks turned into months and still no service packs at all, the Corel Office for Linux newsgroup filled up with more and more dissatisfied people wondering about the crashing, the incompatibilities with LPR, and a million other little bugs that had yet to be addressed.
Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace. There has never been so much as a peep out of corel about them since the initial product launch and marketing push. To get anyone at Corel on the phone who even admits that such products ever existed is damn near impossible. The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.
And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!
In Red Hat 8, they're still unstable, they still sometimes simply error out when you try to save a file you've been working on (can you say "lost work"?), more obscure parts of the programs still tend to crash them or display broken dialogs, and you still have to run a second font server and hand-massage your
In Red Hat 9, the programs don't install at all. There's a fundamental incompatibility with NTPL. If you grab the Red Hat 8 libraries and use them with an LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you can get the apps to install and run, but they don't save or spool print jobs at all no matter what you do, and they have a tendency to simply turn into runaway processes at the slightest irritation.
And to add final insult to injury, we've recently discovered that about 75% of the files created by the Linux versions of WordPerfect Office 2000 can't be opened by the Windows versions of Corel's products. Old files created with these apps are very orphaned.
I'll never buy Corel again for any reason! And I've heard from other people using Linux in varied environments that who also spent $$$ on the Corel licenses that feel much the same way. They could have ruled the Linux world if they'd stuck with it. Instead, they screwed many thousands of decision-makers who won't ever want to smell them again.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Was that a joke?
Painter originally was a Fractal Design product up to version 5, then is was owned by MetaCreations up to version 6 I think, then and finally bought by Corel and published by them since.
I believe that both Fractal Design and MetaCreations are dead, dead, dead.
Though I agree with you about that first thought, I hope painter goes somewhere, it's too good a product to just let die.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Ottawa?!
COOL?!?!
does not compute ... mpute...
..c
...
does not compute
does not co...
dos..mpu...
not
NO CARRIER
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I got CorelDraw for Linux ... old glib compiled etc.
:)
Hopefully now things will improve
A blog I run for the wealth
It is probably a good thing OpenOffice.org has abandoned that integrated desktop UI that the original StarOffice had. If they felt like improving it they could have run afoul of this patent held by Corel: US Patent No. 20030090519
This patent might be something those KParts and Bonobo-UI guys would want to look at, in case this Vector company or someone that buys them goes the profit-by-IP-lawsuit route.
Hint: read the claims and description. The abstract is rather useless.
DCMonkey
A very sad situation. Someone high up in the company told me that Michael was writing the ads himself. The ads killed any chance of selling Corel Draw, which at one time was a hot product.
What's really sad is that WordPerfect is a better product than MicroSoft Office and few people realize it. It's cheaper, it's easier to use and it makes PDFs. But I think things are getting better for WordPerfect recently than worse. At least vendors like Gateway, Compaq and Dell are bundling these in their consumer and lower end models to cut costs for both themselves and their customers. This can at least help them survive. Also, I think in Corel's case it's good that they might go private. That way management can make decisions and not be at the whims of the market. Yes it's VCs but VCs are more predictable than the market.
Yeah! HP has dumped MS-Works suite with Corel Office:
o ry 3
http://www.xenky.com/news/news_20021108.html#st
The story I heard was that MS told WordPerfect that OS2 was the next big thing and WP should concentrate on getting their software ported to OS2. Then MS blasted both IBM and WP by making MSWindows 3.0 the big thing, and MS already had MSWord for Windows ready. MSWfW became the killer app for Microsoft Windows: more people would type "win" to use Word than they would for Solitaire. Back then, you killed Windows as soon as you were done with Word because it was a memory hog, and you needed to do most of your work in DOS apps.
So both the didn't adapt to Windows fast enough and MS's intrinsic lead in the technology base were plans of the evil genius.
In WP's defense, MS had only destroyed about 10 companies at that point, so nobody really believed MS thought of themselves as the snake in a mouse farm.
---
the law firm I work for [is] using Wordperfect 5.1 for DOS
I think it is great that some companies realize that software is meant to accomplish a task. If the current software does what is needed, there is no reason to look for different software, even if it is disguised as an upgrade. You learn to work around bugs in the software. You learn how to use it. A new version may waste some time for the upgrade, but it also means everybody must learn new commands, and learn new workarounds.
Legal secretaries with any experience are more productive using WPForDOS than anybody using MSWord for Windows. I saw WPForDOS running on a Pentium 200, and the software was extremely fast. The user was an retired lawyer, so his typing speed was probably around 50wpm, but he never had to wait for the software to do anything.
I think we will start seeing software last longer. Applied to RedHat, 7.1 had a 500 connection limitation, 7.2 was buggy, but 7.3 could last forever. I think RH noticed this, which is why RH followed MS's lead and announced that old versions must die.
- I really hope Linux users never feel they need to upgrade because of support issues caused by their distributor. I have not read about security holes in the kernel. Patch the applications WHEN A PARTICULAR SECURITY HOLE OR BUG AFFECTS THE SERVER; otherwise leave the software alone. A minimalistic approach to upgrades should keep the users and the company happy.
---
This is Slashdot: everything is MS's fault.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
" you danced with the devil and now you have to pay the price"
interesting, Apple also takes money from the great satan, and has an even more propreitary nature that the beast from the rainy state...and we all drool over ourselves...
So when they finally go under, well just rehash you quote.
zack
I'd say that pretty much all the real functionality was in it by version 6 (I'm hard pressed to find anything important missing from WP6 that is in the latest verison, save automatic underlining on misspelled words) and that Corel merely added a few features to give them an excuse to release new versions.
Anyway, the writing has been on the wall for years now..
HAHAHAHAH too late to sell now. Fun to watch it go down the drain. Only have a coupla shares anyway.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Today's market cap for MS is $289 billion.
Normally you need to pay a premium to buy out a company, so it is out of reach for everybody
But according to a stock analyst friend, MS stock price is in a "declining right triangle". Stocks must "break out" of the triangle before it comes to a point. The "breakout" becomes greater when it happens closer to the point. The triangle has a 5 year base, and the point is sometime in the second half of 2004.
MS's actions (high dividends, split, giving software away to make it seem popular) to keep the price up are actually going to make the breakout be bigger, because the breakout will happen closer to the point.
BTW, it is a good time to sell. Unless you convince yourself that the breakout will be upwards, $27 is about the highest it will go.
I need to ask my friend how big the breakout will be. He will not commit to which way the breakout will happen, but statistics can estimate the size of the breakout given a date.
This is Slashdot, so let us assume that the breakout will be to a lower price. I cannot think of anything that could breakout to a higher price: announce a big win, release another product - these events have already happened and did not cause a breakout.
The release of OpenOffice2, plus a few months to prove it is not buggy could set it off in NOV. Or JAN when the new budgets are approved. I believe it will happen around FEB when all the new migrations are annnounced.
I will be optimistic and say that the stock stabilizes at $3. That puts the market cap around $30 billion. If it keeps declining, MS could be a candidate for a buyout.
But who would buy it whole? Their cash cows will be disappearing, and the most of the divisions are unprofitable. Intel, IBM, and Cisco are the only other IT companies with market caps over $100B. Each is a hardware vendor, and owning the Windows OS would hurt their company. (Well, maybe IBM would buy them as revenge, but that would be more emotion than strategy.)
I believe that the divisions will be sold off individually over the next 5 years. With decent management, there is the possibility that some of them could become profitable. And the price will be right.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
The last release of Paradox (v10) actually *removed* features that were in Paradox 9. Rather than fix the problems in them, they just killed the functionality outright. That's just a joke. People still use that database for their work. I don't know who I feel sorry for more, Corel or those stupid enough to still invest money and time in their products.
Corel's been a walking corpse for some time. I'm just glad someone's going to finally get Corel to realize that it's time to crawl in it's grave and call it done.
Paradox is dead, Long live Paradox.
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
The truth is if you are seen to be a competitor to MS then you are on the hit list, unfortunately Corel went right to the top, along with AOL, and Netscape, who's next Adobe? No if some one takes over Word Perfect and makes a really great all in one Unix/Apple/Linux/FreeBSD version I will gladly pay for it, and I am sure there are many others who will also. There is no reason why WordPerfect, Corel Draw etc. cannot remain proprietary, but they had better be good.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Cost me almost $300.
We still use applixware at home because
-- ac at home
Corel is being buried alive, and at breakneck speed, by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and a former MS executive who, incidentally, also worked for the McKinsey consultancy firm which validated the post-MS investment strategic U-turn. Under the deal all Corel products would be privatized for a measly $30M. Corel shareholders - who've also pushed for Linux support long and hard - hope to canvass enough NO VOTES to scrap the deal but the raiders are tilting the rules in their favour.
It all went horribly wrong after the Linux powerhouse merger agreement between Corel and Inprise/Borland was derailed three years ago. We understand that Borland (in which MS had a shareholding stake) had valid reasons for pulling out under the agreed terms, but the combination would still have made perfect sense. Corel founder and CEO Mike Cowpland was soon ousted and CTO Derek Burney was named interim CEO. Conveniently soon afterwards Burney's half-acquintance, Microserf Tom Button, gave him a call and invited Burney for a visit at the MS campus and before we knew it, he had signed a $135M investment deal with MS, accompanied by an incredibly one-sided Alliance deal in which Corel had all the commitments and Microsoft basically none. In his debt of gratitude, Burney even promised not to sue MS over any anti-competitive tactics that MS "may" have used in their MS-Office offensives. Next Burney drew up a new strategy based on those commitments - again incidentally killing all Linux efforts and reducing emphasis on anything competing with Microsoft - and submitted his ideas for "validation" by McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm with strong culture of alumni networking.
Naturally, McKinsey also happens to have a long-standing and very intimate business relationship with Microsoft as consultants to their strategic planning. It should therefore be noted that Robert Uhlaner, the McKinsey executive partner who had been working as a consultant to Microsoft and who had "led the West Coast Corporate Finance & Strategy practice, supporting the firm's technology clients on strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), alliances, and premerger planning", was given a top executive position at Microsoft in February 2003, in which his aim is to "increase strategic alignment between the Microsoft's finance and business groups". That pretty well sums up what happened to Corel between the Microsoft investment and disinvestment, in just 2½ years! Questions arise as to what involvement Mr. Uhlaner had, officially or unofficially, with the Microsoft-supportive strategic advice given to Corel in late 2000 and early 2001, or with Vector's friendly and private purchasing of the Corel shares Microsoft held, which happened almost immediately after his arrival to Microsoft.
From 2001 onwards Corel milked the increasingly-abandoned WordPerfect Office for revenue while toiling away on its dotNET descendant. Staff was getting laid off as a three-year turnaround plan was revealed to be centered on a dotNET-based enterprise system for massaging corporate data and delivering it in realtime to any type of devices through extensive use of XML and SVG graphics. Corel even bought SoftQuad and Micrografx t
Even so, Wordperfect is still the best word processor out there. From reveal codes to draggable margins (7.0+) to such simple things as justify all, Wordperfect does so much no other word processer can. When I have serious desktop publishing needs, I still seek out wordperfect, difficult though it may be to find.
But such is the way of proprietary software. It comes, it goes, and we can only mourn its passing. Why is it that Wordperfect's clearly superior ideas haven't appeared in OSS word processors? Is the OpenOffice team unfamiliar with WordPerfect?
Let us remember Wordperfect, and let us bring that memory into our own work now.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
If this was a US company being ripped apart by a foreign monopoly the press would be all over this story! I must wonder if things were a bit different if Corel was based in Europe instead of Canada.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Their desire to be bought that is, you do it by sueing IBM for something totally ludicrous like violating your copyright, on things you don't own. :-D, :-P
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
You should have sold earlier before the tax cut. The capital loss deduction would've been worth more.
There was also Word Perferct for Unix and VMS.
And it was the better solution for host-terminal
systems.
Unfortunately their open offerring of WP 8 for Linux
didn't included non-GUI version, but I was quite
impressed with performance of GUI version.
It works on 20Mb 486 for few users simultaneously,
i.e. it ate no more resources then wordprocessing
deserve.
Unfortuately, it didn't support Russian locale,
although WP 5.1 for DOS have very descent Russian
localisation.
Also, Quattro Pro 5.0 was best spreadsheet ever
released.
Word - Tools - Options
Under 'view' you can hide/show as many or as little of the formatting codes as you want.
Fast-forward to 2003... The products are orphaned. They have been removed from the Corel Web site without a trace.
It's certainly true that they've been orphaned, but WP8 for Linux Download Personal Edition remains available at a large number of sites, listed in my WordPerfect for Linux FAQ. You can also find PhotoPaint9 (Winelib) tarballs, here and there, if so interested.
The open-source linux.corel.com site that contained Corel's WINE tree is gone.
Substantially all of the former linux.corel.com Web site remains mirrored on http://corellinux.com/. The Corelwine fork remains maintained, for now, by Michael Torrie at http://students.cs.byu.edu/~torriem/.
And no service packs for the Linux versions of these programs ever got released!
Torrie's third-party updates to Corelwine, the Fontastic server, and other support code are said to make WP9 for Linux almost acceptable, although I find WP8 generally superior in fundamental ways. Valentijn Sessink has contributed a third-party fix to the Filtrix date-rollover problem, and there are numerous Corel-issued fixes to little bugs at http://corellinux.com/.
Your point generally is well taken: The corellinux.com site even enshrines Corel's lastingly broken promise to post an "Update coming soon for Corel WordPerfect 8 for Linux/UNIX import/export filter issue", which failure Sessink eventually worked around for the user community's benefit without Corel's help. However, I just wanted to point out that many problems can be fixed to a significant degree, despite Corel having cast the entire thing to the winds.
Library-support problems for WP8.x on modern Linux distributions can be fixed, given varying amounts of determination. In extreme cases, you can install all needed libs from a tarball available for that purpose. My FAQ has details.
I suspect you'd find WP8.x much less frustrating than the lamentable WP9, especially if you acquire a copy of the WP8.1 Personal Edition -- the best release by far of WP for Linux -- still sometimes available (on eBay and other places) bundled as part of Corel Linux OS Standard or Deluxe Editions.
But the long term answer is to realise that proprietary codebases are prone to being here today, gone tomorrow, and to realise that AbiWord 1.9.1 is starting to look awfully good and cannot suffer that same fate. (OpenOffice.org Writer 1.1 beta 2 is useful, too.)
Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com
Copeland and Microsoft should have been more then enough to sink Corel.
Loyal users kept them afloat by paying their outrageous upgrade prices hoping that Corel would eventually give up on their ADD business strategies and focus on their true strength... graphics products
Corel should return to Linux development but only with their flagship products, no Corel Linux or any other distracting product, just their core products on Linux.
Linux is the next NEW thing and the big players including like IBM and MS know it and MS will do everything in their power to stop it and kill it in it's tracks.
Corel and its users and its shareholders have an opportunity to truly lead the charge for change and should.
For now it remains to be seen if they have any innovative gas left in the tank
Corel has been a publicly held company and many people own their shares. Now a venture capital firm is buying them out at $1.05 US per share.
Does anyone know how shareholders are typically compensated when a public company goes private?
Does the brokerage charge fees as if the shareholder traded?
On the day of the sale, does the shareholder just get cash put into their brokerage account equivalent to the last listed value of the shares?
Personally I have had many good experiences with wordperfect 5.1. Once you know some basic keys (f3 and f7), then it is a very useful program. It hasn't got much eyecandy, but then again who needs that.
Skip the openoffice page and go straight to the real action libwpd.sourceforge.net
It is being developed by Will Lachance and Marc Maurer for Abiword 2.0 (and OpenOffice too, and KOffice hopefully), I believe there are already Abiword builds with WordPerfect support already available. WordPerfect support will definately be included in Abiword 2.0
I am sure developers willing to help or testers who can break it would be appreciated.
last post?
I have never regretted my speech,
but I have frequently regretted my failure to speak.