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Corel trades NetWinder division for stake in HCC
Norm writes "Corel has agreed to transfer ownership of Corel Computer NetWinder to Hardware Canada Computer (HCC) for a 25% stake in their company. The article is here. Does anyone know anything about HCC? I hope this is good news. Maybe they can make the Netwinders cheaper. "
Update: 01/21 03:03 by S : This
open letter to netwinder.org participants clarifies that
netwinder.org is not part of the transaction.
Once again, Corel has backed out of one of it's grandious promises to deliver something it doesn't understand or know what to do with. This simply confirms once again that Corel makes promises on things it can't deliver. Next up: WINE support and Corel Office on Linux under Wine, what a joke!!!!
I bet they are out of biz within a year...
Well, they got a 25% share of the company, which is no small amount.
Corel, to my knowledge, has been a software company for a long time.
My guess is that they have done this so that they can get people who know hardware to manufacture the boxes. This is probably another case of hiring someone who knows how to do the work better than you do.
I seem to remember HCC releasing a Voodoo1
graphics card a couple years ago for like $170
when every one else was charging $250+. The
only reason I remember was because I live near
Detroit and was thinking about driving to Canada
and buying one to save shipping and handling.
Whether or not that translates to lower Netwinder
prices, who knows?
Dan
This is sort of good, because it means someone with more hardware facilities will be producing and pushing these things. Also, I wouldn't worry about Correl's abandonment of the Netwinder platform as long as they keep their %25 of the company.
The only problem I can see is that now there will be only 1 VAR selling this platform, rather than several. The best way to make a new platform take off seems to be to have more than one source to buy it from. The lower the source is on the food chain, the better. Ideally you would have several companies producing motherboards and chips, and use off the shelf hardware for everything else. The next best thing is to have several manufacturers, then several VARS. As it is, I can't imagine the other VARS will be eager to buy from their competitors to push the platform, and I don't see that it has any direct competition to keep the manufacturing costs down.
I wanted to buy some stock in Corel (COSFF). Can anyone recommend some online stock brokerages? I hear an awful lot of complaints about E*trade's slowness.
Yopu can find the HCC web page at www.hcc.ca.
In summary they are Sun SPARC clone maker based out of Nepean, Ontario (an Ottawa suburb).
I hope they can do well with the NetWinder product.
It will be the only hardware networking company producing any decent products in 5 years anyway.. everyone else will either be bought out by Lucent or Cisco.
Some of you guys are saying this is good because the NetWinder will now be managed by someone who knows what they are doing.
If they never knew what they were doing, how can anyone put confidence in the hardware? Did they choose the right processor? Was a lack of any external drive connection other than a parallel port really the right move? I really wonder now.
Even if they knew what they were doing, it seems like rather weak support to me on behalf of Corel, selling their product off before even half of the promised models are released. Hardly the best business move.
I've never heard of HCC before, and their
web-site bores me to tears. HSC is different
and is/was selling some nice voodoo cards
without addin software for a good price.
Hardware Canada Computing has mostly been a strong Value Added Reseller, pushing Unix workstations from Sun, SGI and HP.
More recently they seem to have built some stuff of their own.
Products don't just move themselves - you have to have capable people who can distibute and sell them.
I always wondered how Corel expected to move their hardware. Now I have my answer. This doesn't seem like bad news to me.
Mike Greaves
... and what they have in them really makes em look somewhat NOT WORTH $1000. Really I can buy a CyrixM2 233 w/ 2.1gb hd etc no monitor for $399 Canadian or K6-2/400 w/Mthrd and some trimmings for $500. Why should I pay mucho money for an ARM CPU in a fancy box.
That conversation would not last 4 minutes with me.
Sure, hundreds of speculative investments will do better than Corel. Thousands more will flop. If I wanted to gamble, I'd head to Vegas.
I see Corel as a reasonably stable investment. It's stock is worth enough that the company's stock value can't be torpedoed by the Slashdot Effect. Can't say that about most "Internet" companies.
yep, that's why selling the NetWinder to a company whose business is hardware is a wise move. only a hardware company can reasonably hope to sell this stuff at competitive prices. a software/hardware company will fall victim to "Apple syndrome", where the hardware and software people cannibalize each other.
With a HD, dual NICs, Audio, Video, video capture? For *how* much less? And you just completely lose the cuteness factor! How is that crappy PC-clone case going to help get you laid? What are you smoking?
I am using DLJ (www.dljdirect.com) quite happily. Apart from an announced (but still annoying) maintenance downtime of a few hours every other months, they are pretty good. Some of their good features become available if your account balance is over $100,000 (\approx 22,000 COSFF), however. :(
You can actually play with their site to see if you like it. Response times are not stellar, but better then E*trade (I was told). Note that I don't have personal experience with any other American broker.
Anyone that thinks they will save on soundproofing has not had a netwinder on his desk. I'm sure it will be solved someday, but right now these things are loud.
Motorola PowerPC G4 + multi processor option == about 1.5 the power use of Netwinder. Then you have OpenFirmware, AltiVec (if they are allowed to sell it outside US), bigger cache, a better margin after Intel bought StrongARM maybe.
the NetWinder, CATS, SHARK NC can be slow when:
1: you compile code -O2, gcc -O2 on arm32 *sic*
is not faster than a 90 mhz Pentium.
2: accessing disk (IDE harddisk swapping)
maybe just put in 128M ram, FireWire, USB, and a Ultra SCSI-2 IBM anti-shock harddrive..
3: extensive floating-point math, it has no FPU,
but what do you pay for a StrongARM???
Yes, posting as Anonymous Coward because I work as a Sysadmin for a medium-sized technology company in the Ottawa area, and we deal with Hardware Canada all the time... unfortunately.
Some of the worst support I've ever experienced.
I hope that they do better with the Netwinder... *sigh*...
What will the 7 watt consumption save a US user
over the course of year of full 24 hr uptime?
sweeeet! this looks like a great package...with a real file manager included.
Go corel!!
($69.95 at corel's site; $49.95 at offsite retailers like www.linuxcentral.com)
---
John
Thats some of what they pay for with 25% of their shares. They also probably pay big money for the leads and contacts with potential OEMs that Corel has been able to get, and which HCC - given that they're less known than Corel (at least outside Canada) - would have a difficulty reaching.
Actually a pentium chip only draws 1 or 2 watts while idle. Power usage depends a lot on what software you're running.
No one will buy NetWinders with that crap !
I think they do know what to do with things, but
somebody (or everybody) is just a bit schizophrenic,
that's all.
I've seen and used a NetWinder, and it wasn't all that
that bad. The only real problem with it is the lack of
FPU, but all in all it ran pretty well.
You're better off buying YAHOO, sure Yahoo isn't worth anything whatsoever, and they don't produce a product, and it works entirely off the bigger fool theory, but Corel is a shell of what it used to be. You would be stupid to buy either actually. Buy MSFT, sure they're an evil company throwing around weight, but betting on the underdog instead of the schoolyard bully doesn't make a lot financial sense.
Schwab, but it's $30 a trade. Of course, it won't take a day to get a trade done and if you can't afford $30 you shouldn't be in the market anyhow.
And soon after that, nobody will buy a CD WITH KDE.
Look at it from a more serious perspective -- KDE is an immediate solution to a problem (i.e. we NEED a desktop environment that does roughly what windows does). This is not the most efficient desktop to have -- and better designed things will come along. That said, I am not an advocate of either KDE, GNOME OR WINDOWS -- both reek of bad UI design and underlying architecture at the moment.
The AC somewhat above me mentions that KDE has a
bad UI design. I am very interested in his/her
opinion how to improve this. Please contact me.
Waldo Bastian
bastian@kde.org
_I_ don't think KDE has a bad UI design...
but with software nothing is perfect - I think the Mac KDE 1.1 is looking incredibly sweet. I'd like modules/panel to work more in WindowMaker.
you suck buddy. BAD!!!
and what about a download of platforms beside Linux/i386?
Think you can compile for other linux architectures? I have _no_ i386 machines...only:
Linux/PPC, Linux/Alpha, Linux/ARM, Linux/SPARC
computers (if you make them people, WP8 can also run them on BSD Lite operating systems..do it!)
Corel has backed out of having to pay attention to a hardware platform that was outside of their core competency. They are still connected with that platform, but they don't have to think about it anymore.
Corel has had a serious commitment to Unix since they purchased WordPerfect (which has had a Unix version since at least version 4) from Novell. Their commitment has gotten stronger with their announcement last year promising Linux support for all of their software lines.
Corel has already followed through on their first two promises, producing an excellent version of WordPerfect 8 (and pricing it lower than originally promised), and starting their contributions to the Wine project. I think Corel Office and Corel Draw under winelib will come soon (under budget but behind schedule). I see no indication that they are slacking on any of their promises, much less backing out.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
:(
damn, we've got this incredible pile of trade-rag garbage in the office, and that's probably the only publication on earth with either "info" or "world" in the name that we don't have . . .
If you don't mind filling out a long form, and killing lots of trees (it's a large format weekly magazine), you can subscribe for free. Here!
----
Open mind, insert foot.
focusing itself on software and not trying to do both software and hardware. 25% is a large enough investment to encourage the company to continued to deliver software for the Netwinder. I see this as a good thing assuming HCC is a half-way decent company. Just my guess.
It means that serious manufacturing and support of the Netwinder can begin, now that a company whose business it is to do these things specifically is behind the Netwinder.
Corel seems to me to have completed the *development* of it, and handing it over to another company for broadscale manufacture and marketing seems like a very wise bit of business sense.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
>Maybe they can make the Netwinders cheaper.
Mabye they can put more than 2MB VRAM in these machines and start selling them in Europe.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Back in the early '90s, they were the top SGI sales company in the National Capital Region...that is, Canada's National Capital.
...Still would love to have a Crimsion Reality Engine at home...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Posted by Gromek:
Doesn't this just beat all... at least we can hope for better support, faster developements times and a RedHat release sometime soon. I'd certainly hate to see some company take the NetWinder down...
Hope Corel knows what they are doing...
The NetWinders are cute, but expensive for general use. Maybe HCC can develop a market for them. If HCC is really doing that well, they can push them on their own customers at least.
In the meantime, assuming Corel keeps the Linux ports going, you can bet that they'll support the entire Linux community and not just their own boxes. With all the momentum behind Linux now, they'd be foolish to give up. This is the year when they might see some real return on their Linux investment.
... Ami.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Corel just announced quarterly profits of .10 a share. If they make some money through HCC, it could look even better next quarter.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
In the current dead-tree issue of InfoWorld, there is a full-page for the Netwinder. Looks good.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
It's about time they dumped that thing. Microsoft did the same thing with Softimage but Softimage remained viable with Avid while HCC isn't exactly going to go global with Netwinders.
Lets face it the major hardware thing that Corel had was Linux based. So if HCC wanted it it meens that they wanted to buy into Linux. In specific this may be good or not, but in general it is good. It means that people are putting more faith in Linux from a point of view of buying companies etc.
--Zachary Kessin
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I think I remember from the netwinder development list that you can put either 2 or 8 megs of VRAM on the thing (but not 4).
oh no. not again. There really is more to the world than just x86.
The Netwinder is SMALL.
The Netwinder uses VERY LITTLE ELECTRICY.
The Netwinder has TWO ETHERNET PORTS.
It fits in my tiny home office.
It saves me money on my power bill.
It makes a perfect gateway for my home network to my cable modem.
By the way, contrary to others post, the Netwinder uses:
7 watts average
15 watts maximum
At 6:10 PM there was a teleforum with the heads of Corel and HCC. It wasn't that interesting but here's a few facts that I hadn't heard before:
Corel has sunk about five million Canadian dollars into the Netwinder.
There are 63 employees at Corel Computer. It hasn't been decided what will happen to them but the Corel CEO said that there is already 200 openings in the rest of Corel so nobody should worry.
Corel sold about half a million Canadian dollars worth of Netwinders last quarter with sales accelerating rapidly.
The release of the LC will probably be delayed by a month as a result of this deal.
That's all I can remember right now.
I agree Corel not beeing a software company, therefore it makes sense to spin of hardware division. On the other hand we should pay some attention, cause nobody realy seems to now wo HCC realy is.
So far I consider this a good news.
I will say this only once.
Corel is NOT stupid. So here is how I translate this move.
1 : Corel is weakened and hurt. Simply put they are bleeding so badly they can't shove the netwinder into the sub $500 category as much as they would like to.
2 : HCC is a fast growing and strong STARTUP.
3 : The best time to own stock in a such a company is in the minutes before it makes it's IPO.
4 : Linux is the biggest buzz of 1998 and it looks to be bigger in 1999. How big ? Think Internet in 1997.
This combination of factors suggests that if HCC goes public in the summer with the Netwinder as it's flagship product and Tox on all it's adds the stock will fly into the stratosphere.
Look at how companies that are LOOSING money make out at IPO time when they are all the rage. This is a profitable company with a strong product line and all the buzz you could want. End result. That 25% stake will make Corel shareholders rich again within 2:27:34 after it goes public.
HCC on the other hand will ride the wave and crank out Netwinder for $499 and under and introduce a notebook line ( 30hour battery life is not impossible ) to make us all happy.
End result ? Even RMS. would call this a good thing(R). ( He owns that trademark )
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I've been dealing with them for years! They're right down the road from Cisco here in Ottawa. They sell Sun clones, Sun's, HPs, SGI's too I think, as well as all manner of hardware. They also have a growing relationship with Network Appliance (www.netapp.com).
-- I speak only for myself.
I really hope it flies, but I'm worried what
loosing the Corel brandname might do to the
NetWinder and how HCC is going to cooperate
with our community.
I agree. This might be bad news if Corel was REALLY doing poorly - they're not - so this can only means they're letting the kid grow up.
:)
Corel holding onto netWinder would not be best for the platform. Everyone associates Corel with Draw! and cheezy shovelware they used to toss at us.
The negative and divisive AC postings are probably the usual culprits at Mickeysoft (no wonder NT 5 is going to be over 4 years late...)
I can't wait till I can demo a NW at CompUSA or somewhere local... they look neat!
Didn't know there was a /. fight about Corel stock before... but I tried to tell my coworkers (that have the money) to buy when it dropped to just over $1. No one did.... C'mon, some of you know the drill. "That freeware weenie thinks he knows about stock, too..."
;)
Wish I woulda had the money. Heck, a $300 buy woulda made me enough to BUY a NW
looks like corel had to throw its shareholders a bone, but too bad it was with the only thing going for them...
Out of business within a year?
Gee - I seem to remember people saying the exact same thing about Apple. In fact, Apple has been 'going out of business' for about 15 years now, according to pundits such as yourself who for one reason or another wish it were true. Now, Apple's stock has quadrupled and their marketshare is finally growing again. They're not quite out of it yet, but they're 10 times better than they were 2 years back.
I don't know much about Corel other than that WordPerfect for DOS sucked hardcore (which wasn't their fault), but I can say this: It sounds like they're on a turnaround. There's a certain group of people out there who just love to point to one company or another and decree that it is 'already dead' or 'as good as dead', and often eat their words within a couple of years.
...Of course, you rarely see them admit such mistakes.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
25% stake in a pretty fatty hardware company for a product that that didn't take that long to develop and wasn't that hard to do (they ported a bunch of source that was already written)sounds like a good business decision. I don't think this indicates that they will stop developing for the netwinder or for Linux in general, it just means that they want to be software and not a hardware company...
They didn't even do all the porting. See Russell King's ARM port, from which Corel's Linux is derived.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The recommended solution is to put your Netwinder in the vertical position (using the stand). This will keep the machine MUCH cooler and the fan will not turn on as often.
Doing this has made the 10 Netwinders we have _much_ quieter.
-dave0
--
-dave0
Hardware/Software company Corel was like Pepsi-Taco Bell.
Whay that's bad? Look my recent comment in Samovar awards for January ( follow link in subject ).
That's the vertical marketing problem - not always very good.
Andrew
Acorn invented the ARM (originally Acorn Risc Machine). Then DEC got it. Then Intel got the ARM from DEC. Intel is now talking about its plans for SA2xx.
See http://www.arm.com/Partners/Intel/. Seems that Intel has StrongARM, but not ARM, as you wrote. That page seems to describe StrongARM as something ARM Ltd licenses to Intel.
I miss Meept.
I don't understand why the first responses are negative, about Corel giving up on Unix or losing out.
It sounds to me like Corel just spun this hardware operation off to another company. This makes perfect sense - Corel is a *software* company, hardware is not their expertise. Turn the hardware business over to a hardware company, and in exchange own a big chunk of that company. Then Corel can go back to focussing on software.
This sounds like very good news for Corel and the Netwinder to me.
Nope.
ARM own the StrongArm; it was originally designed for the Acorn RiscPC. It's just that Intel have paid ARM for a non-exclusive right to poroduce the StrongArm family of processors.
I live near to some very vocal Acorn advocates.
They make decent software, but have an inept marketing staff and the most hideous packaging of any company with its distribution reach.
They try to sell powewrful, high-end software at bargain prices, providing family users with software only a trained professional can use and preculding themselves from being taken seriously by IT buyers.
Now they take an admittedly odd fit--computers from a software company--and strip it of the one thing that made it promising: a brand with broad name recognition.
I don't know how high HCC's profile is in Canada and elsewhere, but here in the US, I'd wager Cobalt and VAResearch are more widely known, and that's faint praise.
Being known as the best-known vendor for SPARC clones and an up-and-coming player in the Canadian IT services world may be lucrative, but it's not a promising position to be in if you're looking to make a splash by selling workgroup-scale servers and thin-client desktops built around an offbeat CPU.
I hope for their sake HCC is getting some experienced direct-sales and channel marketing people from Corel in the deal, and that if they don't get to keep the Corel brand on the boxes, that they have a US$20million war chest on hand for an all-out brand-awareness campaign in the likes of InfoWorld and, yes, PCWeek.
Though I may change my mind as things progress, I suspect I'm taking Netwinders of my short-list for the 4 single-CPU servers I need in the second quarter.
Yes, at $1200 Canadian per NetWinder, that's about 400 NetWinders.
In any case, the product is not bad for what, USD$3.3 million in R+D? That itself is an eye-opener. Starting from an open-source base and opening the project in both directions to the community clearly had benefits other vendors will doubtless find impressive.
To their credit regarding the LC's non-appaearance thus far, nobody has ever succeeeded in packaging a user-manageable, truly turnkey general-use Un*x desktop for users without any Unix background.
Even with KDE, there's a lot of glue (and new/better control panels with a unified UI) that needs to be written to pull this off right, so it can and should be expected to take longer than the server machines have. This is something any vendor has to understand needs to be done right on the first try, lest it get deservedly savaged like the original Newton.
I think Corel is not stupid, they made some money and they are re-estructurating their activities. Less resources on NetWinder means more on software, their primary line of work. We can expect a cheaper netwinder, and a more competitive Corel. Looks like a smart move to me.
Is Corel not interested in Netwinder anymore?
-Andrei
I just wish I had the money to put into Corel when I saw the first /. post on the subject!
Corel is recovering, and as a stockholder, I personally see this as their best opportunity to mass-produce the netwinder.
...i just wish they kept the Corel name on it. NCC isn't a "good" name. (Corel is a familiar name, just in a different context...)
my $0.02
So will the change bring us the RM (SCSI Support) version a little faster?
There are *hundreds* of stocks that will blow away any gains Corel will make this year...the only reason you would buy that stock is for purely sentimental reasons.
There are *hundreds* of stocks that will blow away any gains Corel will make this year
...the only reason you would buy that stock is for purely sentimental reasons.
Then you should be buying a little of all of them.
Or because you follow a long-term investment strategy like Motley Fool proposes. Of course, if you want to play stocks like gambling instead of like an investment, you can go for risky short-term gains like you seem to advocate.
Buy stocks of proven companies that make products you understand. Keep those stocks for a long time. Buy lots of different stocks instead of lots of one stock.
Do all that and you'll come out OKAY while people like Cassius are begging for spare quarters.
How much you will put? I will take.. ;)
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Don't want to me-too, but this is the only reason making me wait for later versions. 1024x768x64k is not enough. I don't even go that low on my 15" monitor.
3fer
Corel Computer has always 'done their own thing' wrt Corel. This is just rearranging the chairs, so to speak. There would be real reason to be worried if they had claimed that they were going to port WINCE to the 'winder or some other insane nonsense. This announcement only shows that there is substantial interest in the little buggers outside of CC.
The GST takes a good 3 months or so to be refunded. That and your purchase needs to be over $50 CDN, and no less than a total of $200. More hassle than it is worth.
However, some people must find deals up there -- Getting 1.50 CDN to $1 US ain't bad. My friend that works up at the border for an importer has never been busier -- Americans are importing about 200 cars (new and used) a day!
Matthew in Seattle
If you drove to Canada, wouldn't you have to pay the 7% Goods/Services Tax, plus the 8% Provincial Sales Tax? That would add $25.50 to the cost, although UPS or FedEx could 2-day something like that for under $20. Or is Canada anal about making mail-order vendors charge sales tax? No flame, it's less than a 10 buck difference, just curious since I mail-order a lot of stuff but have never ordered anything from Canada before.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Nah, I didn't forget, I just never knew about the GST refunds for foreigners. If I were to call up a Canadian business and mail-order something (I'm in the US), would they add tax to my price? That's the nice thing about ordering things off the net, at least in the US -- no sales tax. And no, I certainly don't think it'll remain that way, 'cause greedy little socialist lawmakers are gonna start screaming for their share soon enough. *sigh*
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
On the other hand, I've been trying to get someone at Corel to sell me a Netwinder for about two months, and they don't answer their email. Maybe HCC will.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
Unfortunately, I'm several time zones and an expensive phone call from Ottawa.
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
Uhm... Corel has had a hardware division for years and years... Corel Computer used to design SCSI solutions, but ASFAIK it was entirely geared towards OEMs - not end users, so I don't think any of their solution were sold under the Corel brand.
At least it shows that Corel management know a hell of a lot more about what they're doing than most of the people whining about Corel on Slashdot...
Corel stock is also doing great now... So why not cash in on both in one sweep? I'll be buying Corel stock too... They're finally starting to make money again.
Damn you :-) Well.. I'll buy some Corel stock real soon now(tm)... Just waiting one some of my consulting fees to come in :)
How do you know? Considering Corel was one of the best performers on both TSE and NASDAQ last year (THE best on TSE). And that is even including a rapid decline early last year - all of the gain they had came from september and out.