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.

Comments

What a fall.

[nightsweat]

From WordPerect's market dominance to getting bought out by a graphics package maker to this.

Maybe the law firms will think about converting now?

Re:What a fall.

[Trigun]

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.

Re:What a fall.

[Jeremy Erwin]

WordPerfect corporation was bought first by Novell, and then by Corel, by which time WordPerfect was already losing out to Microsoft's products.

Corel, you will be missed

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Corel, you will be missed

[molarmass192]

Corel sold out to Microsoft. The only reason they ever even got a cash offer from MS was because they had a Linux product line that was a drop in replacement for MS OS/Office, notice how quickly afterwards it was withdrawn. I appreciate their work on WINE but other than that, good riddance, you danced with the devil and now you have to pay the price. Let this be a lesson to anybody would thinks MS is their white knight. Does anybody here remember Sybase?

Re:Corel, you will be missed

[bigjocker]

As I see it Corel lost a huge chance when they sold their whole Linux division to work with Microsoft on .NET.

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 .NET platform.

Long live Corel, I would have wanted to have heard a lot more from them, but they had their shot and panicked.

Re:Corel, you will be missed

[Otter]

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.

If anything, that was the problem with Corel. They were so fixated on avenging themselves on Microsoft, they jumped on every bandwagon that came along -- Java, Linux -- with no regard for whether it would work or if anyone would buy it. Apple, in contrast, survives because Steve Jobs and the corporate culture have an attitude of "What can I make that will be good and that people will pay money for?" not "How can I screw Microsoft?"

Sun, are you listening?

Re:Corel, you will be missed

[panaceaa]

Corel was constantly chasing the latest "hot" technologies without ever letting their products mature and becoming marketable. Your reference to the change from Linux to .NET is a great example. But ever since Corel Draw became obsolete, Corel spent large amounts of time and money developing hype-driven products.

The first blunder I remember happened when Java was super hyped-up by Sun. With great fanfare, Corel ported Word Perfect to Java. Corel later cancelled the project, right when it was gaining market traction, seemlingly because the Java hype calming down. Around the same time, Palm sneaked on the scene with their much-hyped PDAs, and Corel announced it would create a PDA running Java (which never made it to market).

The bubble moved on, and in around 1999, Linux became the hot technology. Corel created a Linux distribution and ported Word Perfect to Linux. Only a few years later, Corel cancelled both projects and announced it's amazing new idea to create products for .NET. I can only imagine their .NET products will share the same fate.

I have no sympathy for Corel's demise. Ever since Corel Draw became a cash-cow, Corel never attempted to create products people actually wanted (to pay for, anyway). They chased hot technologies instead of customer's needs. I can't believe so many people, especially people on Slashdot, took the hype to heart and actually believed Corel would follow through on their announcements.

Corel

[MC68040]

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.

Vector Capital

[Surak]

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).

Re:Sad to see it finally go

[Lxy]

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.

Poor Headline

[windowpain]

"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.

RIP Corel

[larry bagina]

For those that don't know, Corel used WineLib to recompile thwir Windows Wares under linux. They also contributed a fair amount of code and bug fixes to Wine.

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.

The Corel Touch of Death

[asv108]

Well good riddens as far as I'm concerned. I started using Corel Draw! at version 3, it was revolutionary program for its time especially since for awhile it was the only decent package that ran on a PC. If you think MS has a lousy upgrade path, Corel use to extort its Draw! customers with unnecessary upgrades and buggy released. Coreldraw 6 was probably the last good draw release, while release 7 was the best for photo paint. Photo paint 7 was given a higher rating that photoshop 4/5 at the time by most magazines, but most photo shop regulars were wise not to switch or ran macs anyway.

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.