Corel Ousted From Public Life? 214
gagy writes "Ottawa's Corel Corp. has been showing signs of weakness in the past few years, and looks very likely to be bought out by Vector Corp, at which point it will become a privately held company. A Toronto Star story spells out the details of the deal, and takes a brief look at the history of Corel." We mentioned Corel's deal with Vector last month.
Corel (Score:5, Interesting)
Corel's office actually had less support incidents of problems with the actual software, on the other hand, it was a pain because everyone was used to MS office and didden't understand the different GUI hehe.
http://funstuff.digital-bless.com/ [digital-bless.com] - Funny stuff.
Sad to see it finally go (Score:3, Interesting)
Vector Capital (Score:5, Interesting)
CorelDRAW is still the best illustration package available for PCs today, bar none. Illustrator doesn't hold a candle, IMHO. (This from a guy with many years of experience with both packages in a professional setting).
Re:What a fall. (Score:5, Interesting)
They killed WordPerfect. They let the entire graphics line die. They nearly killed the company when they put a big stake in developing a home computer which ran Java natively. They seemed to always have their heads too far into the future while their products stayed too far in the past.
In short, it is absolutely amazing they stayed alive this long, depite complete and utter mismanagement. Good riddance to bad garbage.
Re:Sad to see it finally go (Score:5, Interesting)
One nice thing about WP is that the file format, AFAIK, hasn't changed since version 6.1. Create a document in WP11, open it in 7, and viola, it opens. Word can't even do backward compatibility, try opening a Word 95 doc in Word XP. It'll open, but you'll most likely have to reformat. Because o the file compatibility, the Wordperfect import filter for Openoffice.org is coming along very nicely.
First Bundle, First Old-Version Discount (Score:4, Interesting)
"... [Corel] became the first software company to bundle more than one program into a package. It also became the first to discount older versions, making them accessible for the more thrift-conscious consumer market."
Re:Corel, you will be missed (Score:5, Interesting)
They had a set of great graphics/design tools, a wordprocessor with a decent user base and a decent Linux distribution. With the right management (visionary, willing to further the boundaries) they could have been a great company. But they decided to go conservative, keep selling their boxed products and use a few OEMs, kill their linux development and surrender to the
Long live Corel, I would have wanted to have heard a lot more from them, but they had their shot and panicked.
Why not MS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Corel (Score:4, Interesting)
There's still opportunity here... (Score:3, Interesting)
The Corel Touch of Death (Score:5, Interesting)
Corel has a strategy of buying successful products and turning them in to obscure POS's. Here is just a short list off the top of my head of products they still offer:
- Fractal Design Painter (Amazing Program)
- Kai's Power Tools
- Wordperfect
- Bryce
I believe there are also a bunch of excellent products that were acquired and abandoned. If I remember correctly Kai's Goo (easy to use image editor) was extremely popular before digital cameras were common and another product called photo soap was pretty decent too. The "Kai" line of basic image editors and easy effects for the masses could have been insanely successful if Corel didn't touch it.Re:Does it really matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
When we had trouble with Wordperfect 8, Corel was there by our side, offering every bit of help, giving us beta service packs, and doing everything they could to resolve our problems. We finally traced it to a fux0red MFC DLL (Microsoft issued), and Corel quickly gave us a fix.
Wordperfect 9 was a solid product, mostly the result of their quickly responding developers. They fixed bugs as they found them, and for the most part didn't create any new ones.
Wordperfect 10 was touted to be the most compatible with Word XP. Tried it, they're lying. Documents with even minor complexity don't convert well. I posted several troubled docs to the newsgroup, other users who claimed XP support was there couldn't open them either. I contacted Corel support, they were friendly but not very helpful.
About a month ago I was troubleshooting printing issues with CorelDraw 11. Not only is this program not worth the upgrade, when I tried to contact support I couldn't get a good answer from anybody. The Knowledge Base has shriveled into a steaming pile of crap, and the only good support left is in the newsgroups. I was finally able to trace it to the print driver thanks to some good folks there, but Corel offered me nothing.
Probably due to layoffs, Corel has been forced to produce a lackluster product and shoddy support. Microsoft won that round, their last remaining competitor is pretty much a non-threat.
Nah... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Corel Touch of Death (Score:1, Interesting)
I disagree with your assertion that Corel extorted anyone, but you're right about the buggy releases. Like you, I started with Draw! version 3 and found it an extremely nice program to use. Then came version 4, and they might as well have kicked me in the jimmy for all it was worth -- talk about crap software!
Also, I'd like to correct you on the 'last good Draw! release'. The last good Draw! release was version 9. It's (mostly) unbloated and includes a few fairly useful utilities.
MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL -- Draw! 9 is a veritable swiss army knife for pre-press operators. It will open most (if not all) of the popular raster or vector image file types, will render better postscript than Adobe Illustrator, and is generally the most useful thing you can have on your computer if you're using a PC in the pre-press world.
I'll be sad to see it go. I much prefer Draw! over the alternatives: Freehand and Illustrator.
Re:What a fall. (Score:3, Interesting)
According to another post here [slashdot.org] a group of Corel people claim that Microsoft arranged this whole farce to bury the company so you weren't that far off the target. The only difference is that MS seems to have their lackeys buying the company to avoid being sued. And to protect Office marketshare of course. I don't what Sun would do with Corel, although WP might have some useful code to contribute to StarOffice. But is Sun serious about StarOffice in the long run?
Re:Corel, you will be missed (Score:3, Interesting)
If there's a lesson here it's one where the management of a public company can be threatened and bribed to do Microsoft's bidding in order to keep their jobs a little longer while everybody else loses. Mr. G. W. Bush should be real proud of his appointee John Ashcroft's laissez-fair approach to antitrust violations.