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Corel Without Cowpland?
Marillion writes "In
this op-ed piece, Edmonton Sun columnist Greg Michetti speculates what life without Corel CEO Michael Cowpland might be like, due to the alleged securities violations filed against him by the OSC. " Michetti raises a curious point about the cult of personality of computer company CEOs, and how they influence their company. What does everyone else think will happen with Corel, regardless of the outcome of the Cowpland charges?
Scenario 1: Interm CEO of Apple finishes up his 'temporary' stint, then goes on to save corel.
Scenario 2: Steve & Co. buys corel and finally makes a decent Office Suite for Mac to compete with Bill's crap, also makes a Windoze suite, and becomes the driving force to destroy Bill's empire.
To those who want to point out to me that MS owns part of AAPL... they don't. MS bought $150M worth of non-voting shares, which can be sold at any time after August 2000. It was a desperate move by Apple in desperate times. They no longer need MS to survive, and expect Steve to start badmouthing Bill again the first chance he gets.
Apple + Corel = Serious Trouble for MS
(I should go take my Ritalin now...)
Reality has a liberal bias
Historically:
/. Readers were afraid of change, none of us would be using OpenSource, involved with computers, or all the other quickly changeable things that makes up a 'nerds' life.
Small proprietorships do not survive the change of CEO most of the time.
Small companies who can't write out a blank check for the CEO have a hard time surviving the change.
Big companies regularly change CEO's and the only people who care (for a time) are the shareholders.
Corel is *NOT* the same company it was 5 years ago. Or 10 even.
The same can be said for Borland, who's CEO 'qualifies' for 'celebrity' status.
Corel will CHANGE because of a different leader. They may contract, expand, or be bought out. But they will change. And if the collective "we" that is
I woudn't worry about Corel. If OpenSource is correct, if Unix is correct, there will be people making office suites for Unix. And graphic apps. So, if Corel drops the ball, another will pick it up. The bigger threat to *ALL* the software writers is *WHEN* (not if) all major applications classes have OpenSourced BSD/GPLed/blah blah licensed software. (Word processors, spreadsheets, etc la) Then, the support staff for the products will carry the authors. (This was the case years ago. You leased hardware, and a staff of programmers came along with the machine. The programmers were 'free')
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
For those of you wondering about Mrs. Cowpland, you may want to take a look at canoe's slide show. Click back a couple to see the famous $1 million dollar outfit. Also, take in this piece about her personal designer- the one who suggested the whole gold breastplate/15K diamond thing. Wow...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
In _Built to Last_, which discusses this subject quite a bit, it relates that companies with cult-of-personality leaders often thrive at the cost of the development of the company as a whole. Corel, minus Cowpland, might be better off without him becuase the company would be forced to operate as a team, reinvent process, and promote from within...making it a stronger company.
# for x in `find '.' -name "*.c" -print`; # do perl -pie "s/==/=/ig" $x; done
Cowpland is Corel.
Gates is Microsoft.
McNealy is Sun.
Ellison is Oracle.
These world respected organisations would not be where they are today if it wasn't for these "personalities".
I disagree strongly, at least in the case of Sun. Sure, Scott is the visible front-man for Sun, a role that he relishes and which suits his brash style - But what Sun is is by no means Scott's vision alone, or even his principally, although he is a key player.
In fact, it's probably quite safe to say that Scott sees his job more as carrying out the vision than defining it. Sun's vision per se (the technical aspect) is far more a product of Bill Joy, John Gage, Eric Schmidt (CEO at Novell for a while now, but his imprint is still on Sun), Greg Papadopoulos (Eric's replacement as CTO), James Gosling and Bud Tribble.
I've worked at a lot of companies, but never seen another where such a strong community of seriously capable people is setting the direction. Scott has the visibility - that's his role - but don't forget the other driving powers behind Sun. I don't think the other companies mentioned above have nearly the strengths that Sun has in comparable roles, which is one of the things that makes sun truly different from nearly every other company in this business.
In most cases, strong CEOs are very controlling. (Quick, who's Ellison's #2?) The interesting thing about Scott is that he (and Sun) really doesn't operate that way...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
You obviously don't live in Ottawa. Here, everyone knows who he is and they either hate him or love him. Him and his wife (especially his wife) are always in the papers for their famous "flamboyancy". The Corel Draw Gala's are always covered.
Most of the employees love him. They refer to him "Mike". It's really no different than the "CEO cult" in any other tech company.
I used to work for Corel Corporation U.S., back when there was still a Corel U.S. to work for. Last March the company sent out the quarterly earnings summary, and I just happened to notice that, financially, the company was just half of what it was a year before. This helped me decide to take another position at a different company, in spite of the assurances of my team leaders at Corel.
Employee morale was already at an all time low, but folks failed to see the inevitable. The WordPerfect Suite 9 install was being moved to Ottawa, where there were only three developers working overtime on it. These guys were soon burned out, looking for jobs elsewhere.
Two months after I left, Corel shut down what was left of the old WordPerfect campus, leaving only a small skeleton crew on contract for a few months to tidy things up. It was a necessary move for Corel; they just couldn't afford the over-paid legacy WordPerfect crew anymore, but the decision has pretty much been the death knell for the Corel Office suite.
Which is why I believe they grabbed onto the Linux trend, as an alternate source of revenue and a chance to start anew with a fresh product.
As for the allegations that Dr. Cowpland has been involved in illegal business practices, I would not be surprised if they did turn out to be substantiated. Most former employees of Corel would probably feel the same way, I suspect.
Dr. Cowpland may be rich and smart, and he certainly wouldn't have any qualms about going to any length to make an extra buck.
I think it's a little too early to talk about what it will be like without Cowpland leading Corel. At this point, he hasn't admitted to any wrongdoing, nor has he been convicted of such. False accusations are made all the time, and this could possibly be one of those unfortunate situations. Naturally, the evidence that we've seen thus far doesn't look too promising, but it's possible that he could clear his name in this situation. I would hate to have his name ruined based on assumptions and rumors before we actually hear the facts.
--
Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net
There isn't exactly a cult of personality built up around Cowpland, is there? Before all this I'd never heard of the guy, and I read a few of the trade rags. You'd expect to hear about him somewhere! Isn't it about time for a new CEO at Corel? Compaq got rid of their top guy and weren't doing nearly as badly as Corel. If Corel took their current business plan, got rid of Cowpland, hired a competent CEO, and followed through, there's a chance they could do very well, and I don't think it would hurt their image at all.
Ok, So I see posts of Corel being better off without him, and I see fewer posts of Corel being better off with him. I say neither, because I don't know who's up on deck. This to me is the critical issue. If Cowpland leaves Corel for whatever reasons (I'm being nice), the big question is: Who takes over?
This can make or break Corel.
When IBM lost Akers(sp?) it was a Good Thing(tm). Mainly because Gerstner(sp?) took over. Of course it was hard to get worst than Akers, but Gerstner was able to bring IBM back and not make things worse. Now, this may be a different story because of the circumstances behind Cowpland, but how the business does, will be determined by who runs it.
--- Old IBM Joke: How much dirt does it take to bury IBM? One Aker.
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I think Cowpland is the one who pushed for Linux -- of course, he was
briefed by others who pushed the option, but in the end, the final decision
was his.
I am scared that if the Corel CEO (? Cowpland is CEO, right?) is, er, "removed"
from Corel, that the someone else that would take his place would axe
Corel Linux and the WINE efforts "because it is not our core business"... That
could explain why they're rushing Corel Linux out the door.
Why am I saying they are rushing it? I'm a beta tester and IMO, their Linux
is nowhere near where it should be. This is a _high profile_ product whose first
impression will overshadow anything they do afterwards. If they bring it out too
early, people will only see a very incomplete product with still quite a
few bad design decision showing. And, to boot, with no application that is
_integrated_ with the environment -- unless I'm on drugs (or cafeine deprived,
I have not yet finished my first cup), cut-n-paste between WP8 and KDE apps
does not work. That's just one example.
Remember what the target market is for Corel Linux and what said market will/would
expects from a Linux distro.
Corel and the Linux world needs for Corel Linux to be a finished, polished
product. I'd prefer that they'd just do a DEMO at COMDEX and ship it in december
or even january instead of shipping an unfinished product that could have bad
PR consequences on the unwashed masses.
Personally, I think they should at least wait for Potato (the next version of Debian,
their base distro) to come out -- and see if they can't help with debconf, which
seems to be a post-install configuration utility/standard so that they can have the
smootest software install/maintenance "infrastructure" for all those new users
coming from the Windows world.
Corel brings us the chance of having a Linux distro where people *paid attention
to details*, where people building it know that it has to be used by *real people*,
not propeller heads, that have to work in "the real world" where M$ rules (ugh...
cough!) and with Windows-centric users. Corel has the chance of creating a
product that could fit right in and let its users be productive ASAP.
But they might blow that chance by rushing the product... Hmmm, I wonder if this
is not Cowpland saying "bring the product out so that the source can get out before
some other jacka** deepsixes it!"... Once the source is out there, what would prevent
others from recuperating it and integrating it in their own distros???
Corel has some serious organizational problems to solve, problems that dwarf the issues surrounding Michael Cowpland. It's bad that he is in trouble because it means potential chaos for Corel's management--however, this problem is small in the big picture.
The big picture is that Corel is in for a major rethinking of the way they make money, a major restructuring, a lot of confusion, and if they screw any of it up, death.
As a proprietary software vendor Corel's organization is wholly unsuitable for the kind of business they are proposing to move to. The company is set up to create and sell high margin software, and they're losing that market no matter what happens.
Their core business, wordprocessors and drawing packages, is rapidly becoming a commodity market. There are many competitors, and some of them are free. This will never be a high margin business again.
Their new business, creating and selling a Linux distribution, will also never be a high margin business. The cost to enter this market is near zero, there are many existing competitors, and any John Q. Public has all the resources and money needed to set up a new one. Put it this way: Debbie and Ian did it, so can anyone else.
Free software projects are mean and lean. They include just as many people as the project can support financially--each involved only to the extent that the project can support them. People who make a living developing free software rarely back a single project--they get involved in anything and everything, widening their area of expertise so that they can earn a reasonable living as a consultant.
In other words, the free software world is a network of co-operating individuals, each motivated by shared interests, and shared needs. Groups come together and then vapourize as needed, to complete whatever work needs to be done.
A proprietary software company is very different, it's a strict hierarchy with managers at the top telling the employees at the bottom what to do. Employees rarely move from one project to another. When such companies adopt more "open" office policies, the result is still immensely structured compared to the reality of a typical free software project.
Companies like Mozilla, Red Hat, etc., are not structured like a traditional company. They have developers out in the field, working on all sorts of things. They try really hard to be like a free software project--and even still it isn't clear whether it can work.
Corel is so very far from that way of doing business that they are in for some huge turbulence in the next while. There is a good chance they might not survive.
Cowplands troubles are, by comparason, totally irrelevant. They should not distract anyone from the fact that Corel is a business built around one business model, now trying to switch and work around a different model.
Free software is a contradiction of proprietary software, and any company that makes a switch from one way of doing business to the other has to resolve that contradiction.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
So, regardless of the action by the Ontario Securities Commission, why hasn't this happened already? Because Corel, along with companies like Nortel, Newbridge Networks, and Hummingbird Communications, are considered technological crown jewels of the Canadian economy. Therefore, any major changes to their operating structures must be evaluated in terms of their political impact to the nation and the region where they are based.
A company the size of Corel simply would not have the political clout or the economic impact to stay in the position it is currently in, if it were based in the United States.
We can say all we want about the prescience of Corel to invest so much of its R&D into the Linux platform, but this would not be happening to the extent it is if the acquisition of the WordPerfect technologies from whomever held them last had played well in the Wintel market.
I guess the next question is, does the Linux community have as much at stake in this as the Canadian business establishment and the Ottawa region does? I would say that the Linux community does not have as much at stake, because we have StarOffice and Applix, and these are both viable office application suites for this platform.
In terms of what Corel should do at this point, it depends on how much weight they give to maximizing the value of the company to its shareholders and to the relative value of the stock before and after this announcement. The savvy move, from a shareholder value standpoint, would be to hire a new CEO with a history of turning around major technology companies. However, the company's ability to do that would be influenced heavily by the willingness of the Federal and Provincial governments to allow major changes to be made.
A new CEO could also end up benefitting the Linux community because the Linux effort (perhaps combined with the WordPerfect intellectual property) could be spun off into its own company. This would probably result in faster progress toward usable products than if things remained as they are today.
Not knowing what the WordPerfect suite looks like from a code standpoint, I would seriously consider opening the source code up, were I the new CEO. However, the viability of that strategy depends heavily on how simply the WordPerfect code is written.
Such a move would also be perilous because it would face the same issues as Mozilla has faced. Even with a good license, developers probably would not flock to it.
In any case, I am not sure how Corel expects to make any money from its current Linux investments, unless it expects to receive licensing revenues from hardware manufacturers that embed their product line in next generation network appliances that would replace PCs as we know them.
-- Dave Aiello