Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
Kenneth Cowpland was the ultimate death of that company. They were following the embrace, extend and extinguish philosopy, unfortunately they never realized that it was the competition that they were supposed to extinguish, and not themselves.
They killed WordPerfect. They let the entire graphics line die. They nearly killed the company when they put a big stake in developing a home computer which ran Java natively. They seemed to always have their heads too far into the future while their products stayed too far in the past.
In short, it is absolutely amazing they stayed alive this long, depite complete and utter mismanagement. Good riddance to bad garbage.
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
As I see it Corel lost a huge chance when they sold their whole Linux division to work with Microsoft on .NET.
.NET platform.
They had a set of great graphics/design tools, a wordprocessor with a decent user base and a decent Linux distribution. With the right management (visionary, willing to further the boundaries) they could have been a great company. But they decided to go conservative, keep selling their boxed products and use a few OEMs, kill their linux development and surrender to the
Long live Corel, I would have wanted to have heard a lot more from them, but they had their shot and panicked.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
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.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.