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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."
Its saying that a company with desktop applications isn't going to make a profitable business selling those applications on Linux, nor should an application company sell its own OS as a core focus (they aren't big enough to be MS).
Sensible chap.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Corel Linux just really seemed like a "me too" product and it never seemed clear why it existed.
I think they were doing it for the same reason everybody else was. If you got decent enough traction started with your distro, you were in a better position to start charging decent rates for support and such. Suse and Redhat had better luck, and there might not be as much room for competition at that level as we might think (at least, not at certain profit ranges). As for the word processor, I think they were hoping to bring a relatively mature software suite to market to compete with the OSS projects that were there. Considering that MS was (and is) likely to never bring Office to linux, it seemed like a good idea. I'm curious how this will pan out in the future. Open Office is improving and is still free. It might not be worth the effort if they're not swift enough or make the feature set a slam dunk over OO.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Of course, Microsoft had nothing to do with it when they threw money at Corel, and when Corel stopped making WordPerfect for Linux, they promptly divested. /cough/spit/
Corel Linux was a mistake, when they could have simply continued to sell WP for Linux (I still have the boxed set for 8.0!). It's not like they didn't have an existing code base that worked in X.
As much as I like WP, if they come up with yet another Wine based WP instead of native, I and a lot of others will simply stay away in droves.
--
BMO
Does none remember that Corel was bought by Microsoft? Does Microsoft not have a controlling-interest in Corel process and operations? So they dropped their Linux offers and claim to have regained value, yet have not the common courtesy to refer to Linux as a service-oriented technology? Sure Linux is a liability if the company doesn't use it for a profitable purpose. Business-101 isn't what Corel needs, because it is evident propoganda Microsoft directs through its subsidiaries it buys into. This is no different than how Microsoft inducted SCO to harass and issue false titles and false claim to Intellectual Property owners in competition.
without prejudice
A company that targets a niche market may have less opportunities to make lots of money than one that targets the mass market. Obviously this is not always true. However, it is going to be a serious consideration for some companies when choosing a platform/market/whatever.
Disclaimer: I use a Mac daily and certainly appreciate niche markets. But the fact remains that a product catering to a niche may not always be as profitable.
Corel did stop on the half way. If the had partnered with some other companies (big software producers, hardware vendors...) they could have succeeded. Or if the put work and money to an existing distributions and projects like WINE.
It's more like they don't care that much about linux for these kinds of applications.
If they were utterly unable to produce "real" linux applications, they wouldn't have released Google Earth 4 on Linux, and it wouldn't run better than in Windows.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Like Ubuntu?
I can't think of a lot of Linux distributions that don't embrace and extend.
Take off every 'sig' !!
and that's sayin' something.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
With Free applications getting better and better the chance to sell word processors and graphics applications on the Linux platform is vanishing. Corel Draw and Word Perfect could have made a big difference years ago, but now they are irrelevant. Corel (and also Adobe) failed to acquire a profitable market. Now it's the time for audio applications, but I suppose ISVs will wakeup in a few years just to find out there is already some open source Cubase-killer.
Check out my cross-platform apps
If only CorelDraw, PhotoPaint, and Painter were available for Linux. CorelDraw is still my favourite vector package and I hate all of the ones available for Linux, especially because they're so gnome-ie. Xara might turn out good, though, even with the horrible GTK file dialogs.
And don't even get me started on the state and direction of GIMP these days.
The Farewell Tour II
Corel's problem was that it lost pretty much all focus somewhere around the mid 1990's. Their strength was with CorelDraw, but by the mid 1990's they were trying to sell a mini Linux computer called the NetWinder (I remember playing with one of the developer units -- they were actually pretty slick little machines, which IMO weren't matched until Apple released the Mac mini), bought out WordPerfect, tried their hand at a pure Java Office Suite, and tried their hand at their own Linux distro. In effect, they had no sense of cohesion -- they seemed to be trying their hand at any crazy project that came around.
Linux wasn't the problem. Linux just happened to be one of the many things they played with during this time. At the same time, they let their original core business stagnate, allowing other competitors in the graphic software business to catch up and surpass them while they wasted resources on all of these other projects.
Part of the "problem" to my mind was Corel's original intent: to be Michael Cowpland own personal research labs ("Corel" == "Cowpland Research Lab"). From a technology standpoint I have to applaud them for the things they tried to do -- the Java Office suite wasn't as bad as many people made it out to be (the beta generally ran well on my OS/2 box at the time), and could have been a vehicle which could have (and I suspect did) push improvements in Java's areas of deficiency at the time. The NetWinder was a really slick and ultra-portable Linux computer that ran on an ARM processor (we had one of the development units at an ISP I worked at in the mid 90's that we were thinking of selling as co-located servers; sound familiar?). Their Linux distro was decent and capable. But in the end they spread themselves too far, and couldn't really find (or build) markets for these products. Their core business got chewed up by the likes of Adobe, Microsoft already had a lock on the Office and OS segments, and in the end only hobbiests were interested in an ARM-based Linux computer that had limited natively compiled software available for it (you often had to build the software you wanted to run that wasn't included with the system yourself, at least in the early days -- great for hobbiests and techies, but not exactly a recipe for mass-market appeal. However, I am still of the opinion that the NetWinders failure was really that the concept was ahead of its time). And a Java-based Office suite didn't interest much of anyone from a commercial perspective (although many of the parties involved in the push towards thin clients were very interested in the outcome of code of this sort, and I personally think that it's only a matter of time, although in the end AJAX may be a better solution than Java (ref: Google Spreadsheets)).
Linux just happened to be one of Corel's targets. I don't think Linux itself had anything to do with Corel's problems -- it just happened to be one of the things that distracted them from their core business, and never did in any way that earned them any real market distinctions. Corel's problem was a lack of focus and spreading themselves way too thin while virtually ignoring what made their mark on the industry in the first place, allowing their competition to surpass them.
Yaz.
This is a great example of how corporations do better when they stay focused on their core strengths. There are many reasons why Adobe does so well vs. Corel, the primary one being quality. Adobe builds great products because they are focused. Adobe never tried getting into the OS business; it is completely unrelated to their area of expertise. A viable business cannot be everything to everybody and should be very careful when expanding their product line. My company builds collaboration software. That's it, nothing else. It will be a long time before we think of building anything else.
This isn't correct. I didn't work on the Picasa port very much but had access to its internal development for a while. I can't give many details for all the usual reasons, but I hate to see Wine trashed like this in public.
The first thing you should know is that we did actually have a GTK2 based version of Picasa up and running at one point. I wrote a bunch of patches to give it some simple native UI that followed the GNOME HIG. It was still running on top of Wine but had some dialog boxes/windows and the file picker using GTK2 and not Wines own versions. In the end it didn't make sense to roll with that for this version, but there's no fundamental reason why a Wine based app should look or feel different to a native app. If you want to port your app to Linux and have it look and feel like the most native open source program there is, it can be done. Just ask for it. Most of the programs ported using Wine don't have this because, well, the companies paying for the work didn't really feel it was worth the time and cost.
This is clearly not true, many people have written positive reviews of Picasa for Linux. Remember that this is an app that largely uses its own UI toolkit anyway, so it doesn't look native on any platform, not even Windows. It certainly has nothing to do with "incompetence" - the fact that Picasa has far, far more OS-dependent features than Google Earth was a big reason, so a lot more time would have to have been spent rewriting its features like screensaver/movie creation, blog integration, photo upload, file monitoring, and probably more I've forgotten. Picasa does a ton of stuff. Google Earth was also already based on Qt whereas Picasa was not.
The sad truth is that Win32 is so deeply embedded in most apps that they will never be natively ported. Ever. Once you have seen the code to many well established commercial/proprietary apps, you will accept this fundamental truth and see things in a different light. To be portable, an app usually has to be written that way from the start or a huge amount of work will be involved to make it so later. Work that is hardly ever economic to do.
It's for this reason that Wine is crucial. It got a bad rap due to the very old WordPerfect port but that was then and this is now - modern apps that run on a commercially supported Wine (most of which are not consumer apps so you won't encounter them) are rock solid and fast. Usually they don't look native because rewriting the entire GUI of a complex scientific application or internal accountancy package just makes no sense at all. But again that's not some fundamental thing, it's just a matter of economics.
Everyone is forgetting that Corel was in the toilet for years before they tried linux anything. It was an attempt to regain strength and market share. They did it horribly half assed and it bit them in the butt hard. Nobody wanted the mess they made of wordperfect and corel draw for linux because they sucked and were slow as hell.
Corel was insignificant before they tried their linux bumrush and they are sill insignificant. Their largest inroad was legal forms with wordperfect and more and more are switching to MS daily.
in 1998 everyone was waiting for the last nail in the coffin for Corel, they have been dead for nearly a decade, the corpse just has not stopped moving.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.