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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.
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.
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.
Openoffice.org has a small branch (wp.openoffice.org I think) of developers working on it. WP offers a few features (reveal codes of course) that are slowly being added into Openoffice.org.
One nice thing about WP is that the file format, AFAIK, hasn't changed since version 6.1. Create a document in WP11, open it in 7, and viola, it opens. Word can't even do backward compatibility, try opening a Word 95 doc in Word XP. It'll open, but you'll most likely have to reformat. Because o the file compatibility, the Wordperfect import filter for Openoffice.org is coming along very nicely.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
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.