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Dropping Linux Helped Restore Corel Profitability
basotl writes "Newsforge is reporting that Corel attributes part of its financial comeback to dropping Corel Linux and its Linux office suite. Though they are not currently offering products for Linux, they are interested in prospect in the future." From the article: "Looking back, Brown describes the decision to drop Corel Linux as 'a successful strategy for Corel and an early step toward the refocusing of our business. At the time we knew that Corel's core focus was moving away from the operating system to concentrate more on our application offerings, and this would almost certainly have an impact on the level of service we could afford to customers and users of Corel Linux.' Nor, as a company struggling to regain profitability, was Corel inclined to try to develop the GNU/Linux market by continuing to support WordPerfect for Linux."
Yes. Corel did release their own distribution of Linux called Corel LinuxOS. Suffice to say it was not Corel's most successful venture.
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From what I've heard, Xandros has been profitable the past couple years. They just released Version 4, Home Edition last week and a server product a few months before that.
Corel had not only a Linux distro, but also their WordPerfect Office and Photopaint Linux apps as well. These apps are not sold or supported by Xandros.
I tried it out back in the day. I was at college and had free bandwidth and time to burn. It pretty much was the precursor to Xandros and Linspire(Lindows). Its main focus seemed to be on providing a uniform UI experience, which it did fairly well for the time period.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
oops, slahsdot removed the arrow in the parent's title...
The Corel Linux product was sold to Xandros Inc and became Xandros Linux.
From the Wikipedia Article: He survived an investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission
:(
Uh, that depends how Wikipedia defines "survived". If it's defined as being reprimanded and fined (with his holding company, for only half a million dollars) for insider trading, then yes, I guess he did "survive" it. This slimebag's questionable trading right before the stock tanked caused Corel (and it's nice WordPerfect Suite) to be hampered for years. To quote the OSC:
Mr Cowpland is before the panel because of an egregious error in making a trade without disclosing knowledge of a material fact. [...] This panel however, is of the view that, had this conduct taken place after the amendments to the Ontario Securities Act in April 2003, [...] the sanctions ordered by this panel may have been much more severe.
[...]
[64] The respondents will pay $500,000 to the Investor Education Fund.
[65] Pursuant to section 127(1) (8) of the Act, Michael Cowpland is hereby prohibited from becoming or acting as a Director of a reporting issuer for two (2) years from the date hereof.
[66] M.C.J.C. Holdings Inc. [Cowpland's holding company which he sold his shares from] and Michael Cowpland are hereby reprimanded.
[67] Pursuant to Section 127(1)(2)(a) and (b) of the Act, M.C.J.C. Holdings Inc. is ordered to pay $75,000 to the Commission in respect of a portion of the Commission's costs with respect to this matter.
Time to insert another {{dubious}} into Wikipedia
They did release it (altough using Wine).
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4589
Check out my cross-platform apps
Sorry, wrong distribution.
Caldera Linux had tetris during install, but Corel Linux did not.
Actually, I think the disappearance of Caldera (SCO) Linux at around the same time (more or less) was probably a much bigger factor. ;)
Corel Linux was based on Debian, and as a member of the Debian project, I must say that Corel had some...unusual questions for us during that time. There was definitely something of a culture clash between the people working on Corel Linux and, well, everyone else involved with Debian. Still, I think it was an interesting project. Not something I'd want to use, but interesting.
The key bindings issue is easy to explain -- they wanted to retain what their DOS users already knew. Part of the idea of WordPerfect for Windows (and WordPerfect for OS/2) was that little to no retraining would be necessary to move from the DOS version up to one of the GUI versions -- all of the keystrokes and keyboard templates users already had would continue to work. This was important, because there were some big professional areas that used WordPerfect heavily, including the legal profession. Secretaries were heavily trained in WordPerfect, and it was the only wordprocessor many of them knew. If WordPerfect Corp. (and later Novell) simply re-wrote it to do things "The Windows Way", Microsoft in a sense would already have them beat.
Not that Microsoft had to try very hard. Let's face it -- at the time of the WordPerfect transition, not a lot of companies had experience with GUI development. I don't know what happened inside WP/Novell, but the GUIs for the first WordPerfect for Windows and OS/2 were pretty bad from what I remember. And they were buggy as well. Many of those people who were so heavily invested in WordPerfect that they wouldn't switch to anything else continued to use the DOS version. I knew people who were still using WP 4.2 all the way into the mid-to-late 90's, because it had all of their templates, and was what they knew. However, by then they were a minority -- most other people had switched to MS Office, and suddenly it was the package that the average secretary was well versed in, and expected to be installed on their computers for them.
And as you say, Microsoft used underhanded methods as well. They have been known to use secret, undocumented Windows APIs to get a leg-up on the competition and provide better overall integration into the Windows experience. And I'm sure there were many corporations who enjoyed both cost discounts for bulk-liscensing Office at the same time as Windows for all their systems, while at the same time having a single source of support (and a single contact to bitch at when things don't work right) for both packages. Plus, of course, there is the situation where WordPerfect (and later Novell) didn't develop a spreadsheet program or basic database system, ala Excel and Access -- if you needed such functionality, you had to source it from elsewhere.
In essence, looking back WordPerfect got caught up in a perfect storm, and itself has become the OS/2 of word processing packages.
Yaz.
Microsoft did get a controlling stake at Corel and shut its Linux division down.
.NET.
Hardly. The shares Microsoft bought were non-voting shares. It's a bit hard for a non-voting shareholder to control a company, you know.
And there was nothing about Linux in the accompanying agreement, which was mainly to do with Corel continuing to support Microsoft technologies like VBA and
The funny thing is Microsoft threatened to sue Corel for using a spellcheck in its office suite claiming they have a patent on it.
No, the patent in question was on the method of displaying squiggly lines under misspelled words. Which is of course equally silly, but it demonstrates exactly how little fact-checking people like you bother to do before they start spreading anti-Microsoft FUD.
So tell me again Microsoft never used its patents to sue a competitor.
Oooh, a non-sequitur! Since when did threatening to sue someone equal suing them?
(And even "threatened to sue" is a wonderfully vague phrase in the mouths of a hater like you; I can't find any references to tell me what really happened, but it could mean anything from "announced a lawsuit" to "observed in passing that Corel technology might possibly infringe a Microsoft patent".)
Well, first and foremost, some flipping documentation would be nice. When I go into the "Help" menu in Inkscape, I get a basic keyboard reference and some links to online tutorials. What I want is a reference that actually describes the options and tools available.
Okay, so here are some random features I use every day in CorelDraw that Inkscape appears not to provide:
I can't be bothered to look further, as it's already clear that it does not even come close to satisfying my requirements at this time.
Which is really not surprising, because Inkscape's own developers have made it perfectly clear that they are not interested in competing with CorelDraw and Illustrator. They are setting out to make the best SVG editor for Web graphics, not to compete in the commercial publishing world. I don't know why people are so desperate to make out that the program competes in markets it's not even intended for.
Replying to myself = bad, sure, but I think I must clarify what I meant when I said Inkscape does not support CMYK, before some fanboy tells me about the CMYK tab in the colour selection dialog box.
Try using that tab to specify the standard colour Pantone DE 321-3 C (C60 M90 Y100 K30). I can't. It keeps changing the values I've already input. This is, so far as I can tell, because Inkscape stores RGB internally and does not even attempt to support any other colour model; so when I input a CMYK value, it converts my input to RGB, then converts it back to CMYK to show me. Oops, it's not a clean round-trip conversion. So some perfectly standard colours are completely impossible to specify in Inkscape.
This alone makes Inkscape completely useless for anyone working for print rather than the screen. Equally, it's not a problem in the slightest for anyone working on web graphics, which is why it's not a problem with Inkscape at all, because Inkscape is aimed at the web market not the print market.
I was one of the unfortunate soles we purchased a copy of Corel office for Linux, and it was absolutely unusable. It would typically run for maybe 15 minutes before crashing, sometimes completely locking up the system. Clearly, it was a great example of where the marketers were way ahead of the programmers, and as a result a poorly integrated version of Corel Office for windows bolted to WINE was released that was at best software in the alpha stage.
One the flip side, Corel Wordperfect for Unix actually worked pretty well...I think I still have a copy of it laying around somewhere. Of course, with the availability of Openoffice 2.0, it's hard to imagine any future release of Corel office for Linux garnering any support from the user community at all.
Xandros is the continuation of Corel Linux. The company was formed by the Corel Linux OS people who formed the company after Microsoft made Corel "an offer it can't refuse" and Corel shutdown its Linux operation. I had an rpm of Wordperfect 8 that came with Caldera Openlinux. It later installed fine on Red Hat and Mandrake after installing the libc5 libraries.
Corel is a Canadian company based in Ottawa and founded by Dr. Michael Cowpland back in 1985. He was a flamboyant combination of computer scientist and entrepreneur. The company became a great success in the late 80's with Corel draw but into the nineties it began to falter. It tried to expand its product base by buying Wordperfect. Cowpland then came to the view that way forward was to become the major Linux commercial software company. The Corel Linux distribution was developed and and WP and Corel Draw were ported to Linux. As I remember it they also developed the interesting Netwinder Linux based network appliance.
The company faced increasing financial problems, probably more part due to financial mismanagement than due to the Linux division. Michael Cowpland was forced out after MS made an offer to inject a large amount of money into the company. Corel dropped Linux and Cowpland was later charged with insider trading. I think in the end he made a large multimillion dollar settlement the largest in Canadian history for insider trading.
Xandros with the only successful spin off from its Linux division.
And don't forget that Corel also dropped all its Mac support at around the time it dropped its Linux support.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Both cases Microsoft bought something like 25%.
In Apple's case, it was more like 6%:
$150,000,000 / (127,949,220 * $19) = 6.1%
Corel has no future. Corel is dead. Corel died when Micheal Cowpland resigned over that ridiculous insider trading fiasco. They haven't even been in the local news ever since, and people have all but forgotten Wordperfect and more importantly Corel Draw, two products that were the bread and butter of computer professionals in the 80's and 90's. Back then, MS Office was "the buggy one", the inflexible one.. well MS Office hasn't evolved all that much, certainly doesn't appeal to power users the way Wordperfect did. Corel Draw was a vector powerhouse with innovative features for its time, but they just kind of sat on it and let it rot, then sold off the smaller, interesting products to Metacreations so the company could "focus" on their "flagship products". So where are they now ? What did they do with all that focus ?
I clearly remember back when everyone was buzzing with Corel Linux gossip, a lot of us thought it actually had a chance in the marketplace. Linux on its own is useless, it's an operating system kernel; an engine. What good is an engine if it can't do any tangible work ? Corel Linux, on the other hand, was a complete system that included what was still the #2 office suite in the world - Wordperfect Suite, right up there nose to nose with MS Office 98 (which sucked donkey balls). Suddenly small and large businesses could adopt a Linux distro that catered to their needs, and most importantly had corporate support behind it. Ottawa is a government town, if Corel had played it cards right and converted some of the federal departments to Linux, at a time when desktops were still running Windows NT 4 (or even 3.51), they would have dealt a firm blow to Microsoft's canadian dominance, and possibly launched a series of ripple changes in the industry by lowering development costs and more importantly fostering tighter integration and security within corporate networks. Ask any mid-sized IT admin and the biggest cost in any server room isn't the hardware, it's the licensing. Give them a Linux they can actually present to THEIR boss with confidence and a massive name like Corel backing it, and you might actually get that P.O. approved.
Corel screwed up. They turned themselves into a sweatshop, and now they're just a blip on the radar. It's 8 years too late to do anything about it now.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The first Wordperfect for Linux was native. I think it was based on Wordperfect 6 but was quirky like many other Unix apps. It was even based on Motif.
Wordperfect 8 was reqlly quite nice. It was major improvement of Word97. Quattro Pro was equal to Excel97. The Corel Presentation software was adequate and compared favorably to Powerpoint97. The problem was Outlook and Access. Then Office 2000 came out and Wordperfect 10 was not as good as Wordperfect 8. Unfortunately, Wordperfect 10 was ported to Linux using winelib. The problem wasn't that it was ported with winelib. It worked virtually identically to Wordperfect 10 running native on Windows. Corel even gifted the Wine project with lots of code from their research in suing winelib to port. (Remember that this was back when Wine was BSD licensed so this was soley out of the goodness of Corel's heart, or propaganda to earn OSS advocates good graces.) The problem was that it was all binary and would not play well with newer versions of Linux, particularly new versions of GLIBC.
Corel released some updates so you could get it to work for a while, but I doubt you could get it to run now on any newer distro.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life