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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."
Four years ago, Corel shutdown their OSS site and now they are seeing a return to stability. While it is debatable whether their OSS division was the direct cause of financial hardship, it certainly seems to have been a factor.
:)
It would be good if Corel made a return to OSS, but I don't think it'll happen any time soon. If it does, I don't expect it to be nearly the same scale. Then again, GNU/Linux is expected to take over the world in 10 years, so who knows
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How can anybody base his ordinary software on Wine. Wine is an emergency solution which should only be used to bring your desperately needed third party product to run on Linux for a limited time but never ever to sell your product. Any Wine application is still an ordinary Windows application following the Windows design and UI guidelines.
Just go back and look at the discussion about Google's Picasa here at Slashdot. No sensible person is satisfied with it, all it achieves is showing Google's incompetence to produce real Linux applications. Releasing a Wine solution just shows that Google capitulated from being able to build ordinary Linux applications.
Yet Corel doesn't do better than Google or any of the other vendors who don't sell Linux applications, they all don't know how to do cross-platform development efficiently. It's completely understandable that none want to pay for a second development line for a platform which hasn't more than a few percents market share. But this isn't needed if you do your development in true cross-platform development fashion (see wyoGuide).
But may we throw stones at the commercial vendors when we, the OpenSource community don't do better. Beside Mozilla and to some extend OpenOffice there isn't many true cross-platform application either. Please don't say an application is cross-platform when it builds or runs, it's only cross-platform when it's also used. That means when an application is sellable or is able to get above 10% market share.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
IIRC, Corel Linux is the "most incompatible" Linux ever, in the sense that you can't simply get a tarball or an RPM of a package and install it your own. You are dependent on Corel's package offering. This implies that Corel needs to repackage all supported packages, which is a lot and consequently having very very high development expenses. Needless to say, I think this decision made Corel goes down. I think it may serve as a lesson to other companies who want to "embrace and extend" Linux.
Don't you remember the Corel Linux informercials? A half-hour informercial extolling the virtues of Corel Linux and explaining how Corel was setting up the perfect alternative to Windows.
I'm not making this up. If I recall correctly it ran many times on ZDTV back in the day. That and the Cue Cat one were my two favorite dotcom bubble infomercials.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Corel was, for years, led by Michael Cowpland. An interesting fellow, he seems to always be looking for the "next big thing".
So here he was, director of a vendor of commodity products, (mostly, Word Perfect and Corel Draw!) looking for the next big market surge. Corel didn't have what it took to catch any "next big wave".
But, they kept trying anyway. Remember when Corel was going to port a Java-Office suite?
But, in any of these efforts, it doesn't seem that Michael was willing to "put out" what it took to finish it all the way through. The Java-Office turned out to be buggy, and terribly slow. The Corel Linux was pretty, but buggy. I tried it, and liked it at first, but usability problems plagued Corel Linux, so I only ended up using it for a week or so before switching back to RedHat. (and never looking back)
Of course, it worked out well for Michael - he lives in lavish luxury - but Corel sank like a stone in kerosene.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
...if they released Corel Draw for Linux.
Inkscape doesn't live up to the needs of the market. There is simply NO good vector drawing program for Linux. Meantime there's a great office package and lots of distributions. Corel can't hope to make much profit with such a competition, but pushing Corel Draw they would pretty much leave the others behind.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I have used word perfect since WP 4.2 in the bad old DOS days, I skipped the whole windows thing, ran WP on OS/2 and then switched to Linux in about 1997 and started using word perfect for unix and then WP for Linux v. 7 and then v. 8. I fell in love with version 8. When Corel announced they were going to port their office suit to linux, I signed on as a Beta tester, and bought the first release.
However, the office suit was a port using wine, and it stank. Not only was it difficult to install and unstable, it worked just like the windows version. This was very unfortunate, as one of the beauties of WP 8 for Linux was its integration with X. you open a new document and you get a new window on the desktop. In the wine port, everthing happens within the original window.
It was with great sadness that I gave up on the new office suit and returned to WP8. We still use it in our office today.
Bottom line is that Corel had no chance of success with their wine port, because it was a dog and would always be a dog. It would have been much wiser to stick with and develop WP8 for linux. By the way, I understand they still sell WP8 for use with Unix, such as SCO unix, but it is very expensive and takes special libraries to run. It probably would not take much effort to recompile WP8 against up to date libraries and sell this fine program for use on Linux. The fact that they don't has probably more to do with agreements reached with Microsoft when they bailed out the company than any technical or financial reason.
Wow, I guess nobody remembers all that went down back then. I suppose it *WAS* a few years ago. I have boxed retail versions of all of these sitting here:
/etc/printcap file's properties, it didn't play nice with window managers (in particular, KDE's kwin, where you couldn't get windows to take focus properly). It wasn't compatible with the way most distributions had configured XFree86 because it tried to install its own proprietary TrueType font server, which fought with xfs for the same port and didn't simply try to set and add to the fontpath a new port. The launch scripts it used were poorly constructed and required hand-editing on many systems to get them to work right. The installer itself didn't work on a percentage of Linux systems.
/etc/printcap, install update, edit X font settings) were frustrated because so much of the press around the product was *horrible* because it simply didn't work as advertised *yet* and it was clear that if they'd just waited and continued development until it was stable, they'd have beaten the rest of the market to a growing Linux customer base and at the same time made available a desperately needed product.
- CorelDRAW 9 and PhotoPaint 9 for Linux
- WordPerfect Office 2000 Deluxe for Linux ("Deluxe" version came with Paradox for Linux)
- WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux
- Corel Linux (several versions)
This was ~6-7 years ago now. There were no real top-quality application suites for Linux at the time. Linux had been riding the "dot com bubble" wave, but it had meant lots of investment in the OS and distros, not nearly enough in applications. The buzz was that all Linux needed was a good set of applications to grab a big chunk of OS market share, and amongst the Linux user base, there was a lot of drool for a good set of applications that would "finally" let people get all of their work done on Linux.
There was no OpenOffice yet, GIMP was far behind where it is today, and the body of KDE and GNOME applications was much smaller.
Corel had announced that they were working on Linux versions of their major applications suites and abandoning the beta Java-based versions of the major suites that had been floating around (yes I downloaded and tried WordPerfect Office for Java, it did exist). Reviewers were waiting for copies and the Linux news sites were watching with excitement for the first "big name" consumer applications to come to Linux. WordPerfect 8 for Linux, a native X application, was already available as a free download for the personal version and was driving interest for the "modern" versions of the complete suite and for the CorelDRAW suite as well.
Corel could have done very well and beaten everyone else to the game in the Linux market.
Instead, they released bad software. WordPerfect 2000 for Linux came out first and was, to put it simply, so frustratingly close to a usable product that it pissed you off. The box (I have it here) says that it is "Compatible with every major Linux distribution." I ran it under Red Hat. You could see the "full fledged powerful big-name office suite" everywhere in the product--it looked and worked just like the Windows version--except it didn't work. It was crash-happy, didn't integrate with anything except one version of LPRng and a very narrow subset of the
Corel released one update which solved some of these problems, but the initial buzz was horrible--probably 80% of the buyers, who were dot-com-bubble-era Linux converts ("the next big thing" newbies), couldn't get it to run right and the solutions were often second best (here's how to edit your X configuration... here's a text-mode installer for you instead... here's how to edit the launcher script so that it doesn't crash on launch). Those of us who did know enough to get it running (fix
Once you got it running correctly, it was near-excellent, but with showstoppers. I wrote two books and and a pile of papers with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux and used the MS Office import/export filters he
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
As a former Corel investor, this whole thing is bullshit. Corel dropped Linux and still wasn't anywhere near profitable for years afterwards.
Corel Linux was a symptom of a problem a lot of companies faced that time, that a buzzword compliant release of a product few wanted or needed was a great way to get attention on Wall Street.
Corel's problems go all the way back to 1996, when they bought the word processor that Novell had been running into the ground. Has anyone ever used the last Novell WordPerfect for Windows? It's not a pretty sight. The only value left in WordPerfect was the name, and Novell had already done major damage to it. It took Corel years to have anything resembling a usable Office-competitor.
Things got so bad that Microsoft had to pour millions into them to keep them afloat for the sake of avoiding anti-trust.
When Burney came on board, he pissed away so much money on marketing, it's only by the grace of the quality of their developers that the company survived at all. They made a few nice acquisitions to their imaging portfolio, but then came up with crap like Deepwhite. Their marketing department was dreadful. Does anyone else remember the controversy when the box art for one of their major imaging programs... a program that's supposed to be designed for advertising companies for Godssake, had emblazoned on it that the box art was made using Adobe Illustrator?
The rescue of the company came when they started getting smart and selling a trimmed down WP suite to OEM makers to pack-in with their new systems. Their imaging software was starting to recover a little from the Adobe fiasco. Then Vector Capital came along and snapped up the company at an almost insultingly low price.
I had just gotten hit with MS's WGA nagware in the past week.
:)
At that point I realized I had to make a decision, either send money to MS and stick with Windows. Or start getting serious about Linux.
The software available for Windows is pretty sharp, but the OS is a rotten foundation. I've spent a lot of time wiping and reinstalling, fighting trojans, and being tech support for my friends and family.
The Linux Desktop (Gnome or KDE) are getting more polished every year, but still not at the quality of Windows. Same thing with the software. But most developers won't write for linux if the people aren't there.
So I went and bought Xandros 4. Purchased. With cash. Yes, there are distributions that are good and free, but won't become a first class Desktop system for free. And I'd rather Xandros and Crossover Office get my money instead of MS.
There are many of you that can't afford to purchase software or OSes of any sort, fair enough. But if you have the money, and you use Linux, you should seriously think about supporting software companies that support Linux. That is, if you want to see Linux grow out of it's nitch.
I suppose starting a software company that supports Linux would be good also.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
If you call acquiring JASC then yes they have offered many new products. Paint Shop Pro is now a Corel product, and is a program I would LOVE to see ported to Linux. :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I had just gotten hit with MS's WGA nagware in the past week.
At that point I realized I had to make a decision, either send money to MS and stick with Windows. Or start getting serious about Linux.
So let's get this straight. You are pirating windows, but you have the money to go out and buy Xandros?
I like Red Hat. They've done a lot for linux, and a lot for the community.
They invented RPM, and many distros are based off of Red Hat.
They've also done a lot to make linux less scary to companies. Companies like dealing with an organization like Red Hat, because it gives them some reassurances. I'm not knocking the volunteer stuff-- but if linux was entirely a volunteer endeavor, I don't think you would see companies like IBM interested in it. Having organizations like Red Hat helps give the community the critical mass it needs to stay self-sustaining and free.
I use Fedora at home, and also at work. If you don't like the distro, don't use it. Simple as that. No need to spread FUD.
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