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Corel Goes Private
prostoalex writes "Ottawa-based Corel, known for its CorelDRAW, WordPerfect, Painter and Bryce products, has been acquired by Vector Capital Corp. for $124 mln. with the intent to get de-listed from Nasdaq and Toronto stock markets and go private. 80% of shareholders approved the deal, according to the story. At certain points of its corporate history Corel was a Linux vendor and even partially owned by Microsoft. Microsoft paid $135M for 25% of the shares, so Vector Capital paying $124M for 100% stake looks like a pretty good deal." It's been over a month since this was first announced, but it's actually come to pass now.
"Microsoft paid $135M for 25% of the shares, so Vector Capital paying $124M for 100% stake looks like a pretty good deal."
Microsoft paid that in 2000, the year when anyone with an understanding of Frontpage Express could get zillions in venture capital.
$124 million in 2003 however is a fair whack!
Now that Corel is no longer under the whims of stockholders they can actually get to making a really good product and focus on other platforms and finally declaired that they loss the Windows Market. Including a Good modern version of WordPerfect for linux (Not that crappy windows emulated version) and I hope they will be more Mac friendly.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Corel's attitude is now irrelevant.
What is that attitude of Vector Capital, for whom Corel is simply now an owned brand?
I think you might find that it's very different than Corel's traditional point of view.
KFG
While I agree that your suggestion would be nice, I wouldn't hold my breath. The fact is that, even if Corel is not answering to shareholders anymore, they are still a for profit company and will do their best to generate profit.
Corel tried the Linux route, producing their own distribution and a few Linux native versions of their apps. That endeavour failed miserably and they abandonded the effort completey, similar to their plan to port all their apps to Java.
Having already failed in the Linux arena and "wasted" millions of dollars in the process, Corel is unlikely to revisit what was for them a boondoggle anytime in the near future. Frankly, I do not know where Corel is going to go. In all likelyhood they will develop for the most pervasive platform but, they are unlikely to make inroads against MS Word with Wordperfect and PhotoShop seems to have a firm grip on the would be Draw market. They need a new product and I'm not sure they know what that is.
Maybe we can pull another blender or two, and buy Corel Draw, Word Perfect, etc.
They were willing to sell Corel Linux so maybe they will sell some of the other stuff they were working on.
I highly doubt Corel will do what SCO did, The blender company didnt do that.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Considering Microsoft pays about one billion dollars each time they lose an anti-trust lawsuit, $124 was nothing. They got to shut down a Linux distro and crippled Word Perfect, the then dominant comercial text editor and main competitor to Microsoft Office, Microsoft't big cash cow. It was a predatory practice and Corel decline in value of 75% reflects the result. 75% is much greater than the decline of other IT firms with as much going for them. Corell lost that value because Word Perfect lost it's market share, market share it could easily have maintained with it's Linux distribution. Lawfirms still use Word Perfect and they cry out for stable software underneath it. Had they been given that platform, they would have eaten it up and proved the value of a comercial Linux distribution five years ago as well as it is proven today. By purchasing 25% of Corel, Microsoft pushed back Linux competition five years, prevented an anti-trust lawsuit and gained all the fruits of predatory behavior. It saved them a minimum of a billion dollars and much more in lost sales revenue.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Vector is motivated a lot by the SCO situation. It's generally known that they plan to start leveraging lawsuits of a similar nature against OSS projects, backed by the amount of work and code they put into the WINE and KDE projects.
So, by purchasing a company with experience porting software to free they could establish a distro and port all their other stuff to free and save themselves that many coppies of M$ dependence and development costs? What could be better for specialty software than that?
The direction Microsoft took Corel when they bought 25% of them and shut down their Linux work was obviously and disaserously wrong. Corel has continued to lose market share, even in government work where it once ruled. Hell, they used to rule the comercial text editor world. They did not lose out because Microsoft made something better, they lost out because Microsfot made Word Perfect into an expensive Windows only additional purchase most people would not make. They OS/2'd them, making Word Perfect more expensive than Word in all cases. That's easy to do when you own the platform and sell everyone else required libraries.
There is still a market and it seems obvious that Linux is the way to go. Those who remember Word Perfect want it back on a stable platform. It will cost less for Vector to do things this way and customers will get more of what they want.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I still have a copy of v1.2 of Corel Linux. I never understood why it never caught on as a desktop linux. If they had done a good port of WP Office, I truly believe it would have been a Windows Killer.
I used it as an X-server when I was learning about X-terminals (using Slack on the clients). If it hadn't been for the fact that Debian changed dpkg, effectively breaking Corel's version, I'd still be using it today probably. Oh well, Debian works great, just not as nice for desktop work.
I thought about trying Xandros, but have hesitated, since Debian fullfils (sp?) all my server needs.
Best of Luck to Corel, I hope beening owned by VC doesn't ruin them completely. I have fond memories of Corel Draw.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
In the 1980's you had VAXen, some ran VMS, some ran UNIX, and then you had workstations, SUN, Apollo, SGI (largely UNIX although Apollo was some kind of its own thing): expensive hardware, vendor lock in, only thin source-code compatibility between generations (SUN going from Motorola to Intel (briefly) to SPARC), expensive operations (your grant needed to hire or share one or more "bearded programmers" to operate them and write custom software for them).
Then you had PC's and DOS -- the rootstock of Windows. PC's were like PDP-11's and DOS was like RT-11: low level, cheap, lab computers that an engineer or scientist could hack up their own software to control an experiment. PC's were looked down upon by the CS department-academic computing department establishment as "not real computers", and engineer and scientist types looked at academic computing department types as arrogant so-and-so's who wanted to siphon money out of one's grant. PC's were the second wave of what the Apple-II started -- computers for the masses and liberation from the computer elites.
With PC's you rode the wave -- cheap clone computers, cycles of binary-compatible Intel processors, every imaginable type of hardware (A/D and D/A to control those lab experiments), shrink-wrap software, third-party development tools (MS compilers always blew chunks: Borland's Pascal and later C and C++ was in another league, and you had language choices while UNIX seemed to offer any language you wanted provided it was C or later C++).
And then came Windows. You could ignore Windows 3 and 3.1, but by Windows 95 and NT 4, it was pretty much rammed down your throat. But around that time, the choices were pretty much switching over to the Mac, and the closed-hardware Mac lacked all of the hardware add-ons from Data Translation, and expensive workstations were getting replaced with cheap PC's, so programming for X/Motif wasn't even on the table). If you could live with the performance limitations of Visual Basic, you had an easy way to develop apps; if you wanted performance you had to wade through volumes of the Windows API, but having done that there was kind of a reluctance to learn that much over again to do GUI's on other systems.
So this Linux thing comes along and on '86 hardware as well. And then Bill is Bill: what he had been doing to clone computer makers all along he starts to do to the "little guy." Ghosting over a copy of Windows to a clone you put together from parts for your lab was no big deal until all this fanfare of a crackdown in the form of activation. The University buys a mass MS site license so we all switch from Word Perfect to Word, and this summer the University drops the site license because MS tightens the screws on the terms, and we worry that the BSA is going to bust down the door to our lab.
I have been looking over my shoulder, and I have looked at Java, and I have looked at Linux/Gnome/KDE. Our grant funding is way pared back in these tough times, and we are down to 20 percent share of one UNIX programmer who could care less about setting up a Linux box for the lab, and our engineer guy who is a digital-logic design genius has been thrashing around for over a year trying to get a Linux box up and running but doesn't have the time to swap network cards and fool around with getting drivers.
And just as Java was supposed to make big inroads on the desktop by now, the same was true for Linux. The Engineering library had put in a raft of Linux boxes, but I guess none of the engineering students knew what to do with them that they have all been reverted to Windows.
My engineer logic-design pal and I have talked about how a Linux box would be a good as a Windows box if to the user the thing were just a GUI
Painter is hands down the best natural media out there for any platform. personally if I want to actually create something from raw pixels I will use painter, photoshop just cant even hold a candle to its brushes and papaer sets, photoshops for manipulation, not painting.
My Wife creates over 80% of her work in it, which is some pretty amazing stuff, the most often asked question is "is that digital, no really you did that on a computer?"
I for one would not be able to to such nice weathered textures in such a short time without Painter, long live the king!
Word DOC format is not a standard. It is a proprietary format that requires you to own Windows to open them properly. Same with Wordperfect WPF files.
;') I am hoping when (crossing my fingers) the new PPC Amiga OS 4 comes out, the new Corel owners give some thought to coming out with Wordperfect for the Amiga again, and porting CorelDraw suite and Bryce over to it.
PDF, at least, has a free reader available. And isn't RTF an open standard? Somehow MS mucks that up, too, an RTF of the exact same text and formatting saved from Word is twice the file size as one saved from Final Writer from my Amiga. Hey, got in my obligatory "I miss my Amiga!" post!
BEGIN RANT
I get so sick of everyone sending me Word DOC files, assuming I have MS Word. The size is bloated, and loading across versions is buggy so even if I had Word installed I might not see it as intended if I don't have the same version as the sender. Oh, and let's not forget Viruses. Everything MS touches seems to be a Typhoid Mary.
END RANT
Come on, Linux users. Let's fess up at something...how many of us have actually BOUGHT commercial Linux software? A show of hands, please?
Ahh, just as I thought. All 3 of you.
While some people have actually PAID for thier distros, most have not.
"Pay? Are you INSANE? I can just download it".
I've never paid for Linux software. I confess. Every distro I've ever used, every piece of Linux software I've ever installed has been cost free. Either I downloaded it, got it in the mail, or got in a book of some kind. The closest I've ever come is shipping and handling in the addition to the 5 bucks or so the CheapBytes CD cost me. How much of that money do you think went to the distro, hmmm?
My point in all of this is that commercial software outfits want to make money, and the dot com boom is over, ladies and gentlemen. No more crap about how free market exposure will somehow lead to profit in the future. Let's take Corel's expierience with their Linux offerings.
Corel Exec: "So how much money have we made from our Linux software? Distro and apps combined?"
Marketroid: "It's phenomenal! We've got millions of downloads! A LOT of people are using our software! We're getting huge mindshare here!
Corel Exec: "Ok...so, how many people have paid for the software? What's our profit margin projected to be?"
Marketroid: "Profit? Oh, no money's coming in right now. But this is giving us great mindshare, so we'll have tremendous profit opportunities in the future!"
Corel Exec: "That software costs a lot to develop, even with help from volunteer open source coders. What are we supposed to pay OUR coders with? Mindshare?"
Some people are going to roast me for this, but we've gotten used to free, and we even have a nasty tendancy to TRY to discourage use of commercial Linux software if theres an alternative. Whenever someone recommends StarOffice for small business usage, there's the inevitable flood of posts going "Why? Just use OpenOffice. You don't have to pay for that".
These people that have bought Corel know this as well, and the difference this time is it's THEIR money on the line, not the cash of faceless stockholders. Until we actively embrace, and PAY for commercial Linux software on a large scale basis, there's not going to be much of it available at all.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel