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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."
There was a Corel Linux?
Summation 2
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.
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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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.
oops, slahsdot removed the arrow in the parent's title...
The Corel Linux product was sold to Xandros Inc and became Xandros Linux.
We have a Corel icon?
Great Intellect...
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
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.
...Corel dropping their Linux distro also improved the average quality of Linux distros! Everybody wins.
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.
Like Ubuntu?
I can't think of a lot of Linux distributions that don't embrace and extend.
Take off every 'sig' !!
...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"
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
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
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.
Sorry, wrong distribution.
Caldera Linux had tetris during install, but Corel Linux did not.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
Hard to compete with "vi" editor?