Aw crap.
May 18, 2000 10:09 AM   Subscribe

Aw crap. You *know* their Linux initiative is going to take the blame for this, right...?
posted by baylink (12 comments total)
 
"As the most noticeable software company in Canada, Corel is practically a national icon. Getting some money to get through the current crunch will not be a problem."

A national icon? Please! Corel shined back in the mid-90s, when CorelDraw 3/4/5 were being sold simultaneously at different price points. SInce then, it has been all down hill. They tried to go up against Microsoft with a second-rate office package, and more recently have jumped on the Linux/OSS bandwagon. They have yet to market a truely great product.

Their boss, that Copland fellow, is under insider-trader investigation for, I believe, dumping a bunch of shares right before Corel announced crappy finalncial results.

The Inprise deal fell through because Corel stock has gone into freefall, so there was no way for them to pay Inprise.

Thier Linux distribution may be good, but it will never get anywhere. The company is doomed. Maybe one of those over-valued Linux companies could buy them out, and open-source all their software (wordperfect, quattro pro, paradox, coreldraw, etc, etc) on all platforms (Linux, Windows, etc)?

posted by Calebos at 10:56 AM on May 18, 2000


I agree with Calebos completely. There's no reason whatsoever their linux distro should take any kind of blame. If not for the linux distro, and rumours surrounding it before it's release, Corel would've bellied up over a year ago.

If anything, the linux initiative is the best possible chance they have of pulling themselves out of the mess they're currently in.

I just hope if they do end up going bankrupt, they open up & GPL the source to the rest of their office suite. ordperfect & the rest of the components have been passed between so many companies in the past few years, Corel would have to PAY someone to take ownership.

If they open it up, then a very real MS Office killer suddenly gets to be played with by some excellent developers (and of course, some really poor ones, but that's what's so great about open source :-).
posted by cCranium at 11:31 AM on May 18, 2000


er... 'ordperfect' = 'Wordperfect'


posted by cCranium at 11:32 AM on May 18, 2000


I agree - Corel has been pretty much dead for a long time now. The Linux thing was a desperation strategy, and even their Java play a couple years ago was pretty transparently an attempt to capitalize on the buzzword of the moment.

The thing about Corel is that they own nothing and have developed nothing original. Even CorelDraw was based almost entirely on licensed tech from other folks. That's why, when Adobe finally came into the Windows market in a big way, they were left high and dry. #1 their products absolutely couldn't compete in the professional market, #2 they didn't own their own tech so they couldn't move very quickly in other directions in their key markets.
posted by mikel at 11:52 AM on May 18, 2000


Someone will buy WP, at least: it's the default word processor for most of the American legal profession (especially those in the Department of Justice, I presume).
posted by holgate at 12:28 PM on May 18, 2000


Well, if they buy WP, they'll probably get ownership of the rest for free.

Although look at the track record WP's had recently... Corel (which, admittedly was dying, if not dead, before they bought it), Borland before that (again, at the very leaset desperate for a money-making project).

It's starting to become the Macbeth of software...
posted by cCranium at 12:34 PM on May 18, 2000


Maybe it's just me, but I *greatly* preferred Draw to Illustrator and Freehand. Admittedly, it had it's share of bugs, but still...

Now, I could take or leave Paint.

*My* question is: what the hell's gonna happen to Ventura?
posted by baylink at 1:06 PM on May 18, 2000


I pretty much am guaranteed to suck at any vector-based graphic manipulation software, so I never really got into Draw.

And I think the last time I used any corel drawing program was well after my first exposure to Photoshop, which I find much more intuitive than any other drawing application I've encountered, 'cept Gimp, but the last time I tried the Win32 binaries of Gimp, they blew up my comptuer.

Good lord I'm rambling. Sorry. :-) If I had a point, it's officially gone now.
posted by
cCranium at 1:28 PM on May 18, 2000


Vector-based stuff always messed me up, too.

Beware of the Gimp on Windows! When I uninstalled it, it took the records of all other installs on my computer with it, so now I can't uninstall (properly) anything, which makes it impossible to install some stuff, too.
posted by daveadams at 1:53 PM on May 18, 2000


I have no idea where that bold came from. There's not even a tag in the source.

Rambling, bizarre bold tags and not even able to spell 'computer' properly.

I think maybe it's time I just shut up for a while.
posted by cCranium at 2:04 PM on May 18, 2000


There wasn't a slash in your Gimp link close tag.
posted by dhartung at 2:53 PM on May 18, 2000


ah. damn. thank you, I was getting mightily confused.

(why bold and not a big huge link?)
posted by cCranium at 2:58 PM on May 18, 2000


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