Dropping Linux Helped Restore Corel Profitability 245
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."
Come again? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Come again? (Score:4, Informative)
Corel Linux -- Xandros Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Corel Linux became Xandros Linux (Score:3, Informative)
The Corel Linux product was sold to Xandros Inc and became Xandros Linux.
Re:Corel Linux became Xandros Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Corel's failure is Xandros' success (Score:2)
Re:Corel's failure is Xandros' success (Score:2)
Profitable, perhaps, but Good? Have you ever tried to migrate an entire office from Windows to Xandors? Ever looked at their 'application' installer, which requires registration to install their hanful of 'premium' free gpl'ed and DEMO apps? Its a sham. The ONLY use for Xandros is the ability to join it to a domain and verify you are actually logging in under a domain under the initial login screen.
Cheers.
Re:Corel Linux -- Xandros Linux (Score:2)
Photo-Paint 9 for LInux was and remains a free download. Corel Photo-Paint 9 [softpedia.com]
Re:Corel Linux -- Xandros Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
At that point I realized I had to make a decision, either send money to MS and stick with Windows. Or start getting serious about Linux.
The software available for Windows is pretty sharp, but the OS is a rotten foundation. I've spent a lot of time wiping and reinstalling, fighting trojans, and being tech support for my friends and family.
The Linux Desktop (Gnome or KDE) are getting more polished every year, but still not at the quality of Windows.
Re:Corel Linux -- Xandros Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
At that point I realized I had to make a decision, either send money to MS and stick with Windows. Or start getting serious about Linux.
So let's get this straight. You are pirating windows, but you have the money to go out and buy Xandros?
Re:Corel Linux -- Xandros Linux (Score:3, Informative)
So let's get this straight. You are pirating windows, but you have the money to go out and buy Xandros?
Re:Come again? (Score:3, Insightful)
and that's sayin' something.
Re:Come again? (Score:2)
Also, you could play tetris while you were installing the operating system. I wish Xandros would put that back in...
Re:Come again? (Score:2)
Re:Come again? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Come again? (Score:2)
Both the install and desktop was far slicker, and better put together then anything else at the time. Unfortunately it had a few not so good points too, like not having a collection good gui administrative tools. Making others like Mandrake a better choice for beginners. And the worst problem was from it's Debian heritage, it was based on
Re:Come again? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not making this up. If I recall correctly it ran many times on ZDTV back in the day. That and the Cue Cat one were my two favorite dotcom bubble infomercials.
Still Exists? (Score:2)
That's one company that is going nowhere at record speed!
-M
Re:Still Exists? (Score:3, Interesting)
N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sensible chap.
Another lection... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:2)
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:2)
However, if
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:2)
At the time of the release, Word didn't completely own the word processor market; it had most of it, but mainly from WordPerfect swit
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:2)
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:2)
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
Wordperfect 8 was reqlly quite nice. It was major improvement of Word97. Quattro Pro was equal to Excel97. The Corel Presentation software was adequate and compared favorably to Powerpoint97. The problem was Outlook and Access. Then Office 2000 came out and Wordperfect 10 was not as good as Wordperfect 8. Unfortunately, Wordperfect 10 was ported to Li
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:N.B. This isn't anti-Linux... (Score:2, Interesting)
However, the office suit was a port using wine, and it stank. Not only was it difficult to install and unstable,
Microsoft's meddling (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Dropping Mac support too (Score:3, Informative)
Payoffs... (Score:2)
Article is a schill of Microsoft. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Article is a schill of Microsoft. (Score:2, Informative)
Hardly. The shares Microsoft bought were non-voting shares. It's a bit hard for a non-voting shareholder to control a company, you know.
And there was nothing about Linux in the accompanying agreement, which was mainly to do with Corel continuing to support Microsoft technologies like VBA and
The funny thing is Microsoft threatened to sue Corel for using a spellcheck in its office suite claiming they have a patent on it.
No
Re:Article is a schill of Microsoft. (Score:2)
Re:Article is a schill of Microsoft. (Score:3, Informative)
Both cases Microsoft bought something like 25%.
In Apple's case, it was more like 6%:
$150,000,000 / (127,949,220 * $19) = 6.1%
Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I use a Mac daily and certainly appreciate niche markets. But the fact remains that a product catering to a niche may not always be as profitable.
Re:Makes sense (Score:2)
A company that targets a niche market may have less opportunities to make lots of money than one that targets the mass market.
And there may be more opportunities to make lots of money. Corel was targetting both M$Windows (mass) and Linux (niche).
Obviously this is not always true. However, it is going to be a serious consideration for some companies when choosing a platform/market/whatever.
That's a one-sided way of looking at it. Mass, commodity markets have more and bigger competitors. Niche market
Financial liability (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Financial liability (Score:3, Funny)
That's what I heard 10 years ago. I think next Friday is the D-Day.
Re:Financial liability (Score:2)
It was yesterday, you just missed it. [slashdot.org]
Re:Financial liability (Score:2)
This is a good point. People often seem to expect that FOSS is always a good venture for a business; it may not be. FOSS businesses have to handle themselves in a very careful way, and they have a business model that is a bit innovative and different.
They seemed to be not quite
Re:Financial liability (Score:2)
WTF? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Of course. Slashdot started in 97 (back when Corel was relevant), and the icons haven't changed since.
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
(Actually, Linuxcare got a story [slashdot.org], the first in 5 years, last month...maybe this is a start of a comeback for disused Topics. The big question: when will we have a new "story" in Geeks In Space [slashdot.org]?)
A Wine-based version ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like they don't care that much about linux for these kinds of applications.
If they were utterly unable to produce "real" linux applications, they wouldn't have released Google Earth 4 on Linux, and it wouldn't run better than in Windows.
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
Google doesn't release SW on Linux only to get users and customers, they also release them for their image as the white knight. Yet Picasa quite obviously hurts this image. Besides I bet Google Earth for Linux is a complete new development tree, meaning they have paid for it twice. Google may be able to do that but others have to earn money with their products.
O. Wyss
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
Or just willing to do so. If I remember, Google Earth started as a employee personnal project (remember, Google employees can spend 20% of their work time on personnal project, even Open Source).
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
Because the Windows design and UI guidelines aren't actually that bad, and it's not like there's a single consistent UI that people expect their X11 applications to use. Seriously: if they move to native X, should they be using GTK, QT, Motif, or some other (presumably lighter-weight) toolkit? Why not use winelib as an X toolkit? It certain
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
True. Also on Linux there's more or less all kind of UI design used, so when everything is different it doesn't feel that uncommon. Yet it's exactly this "not possible to become familiar" which is the top inhibitor of the Linux desktop adoptions (see http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005. pdf [osdl.org]).
O. Wyss
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't correct. I didn't work on the Picasa port very much but had access to its internal development for a while. I can't give many details for all the usual reasons, but I hate to see Wine trashed like this in public.
The first thing you should know is that we did actually have a GTK2 based version of Picasa up and running at one point. I wrote a bunch of patches to give it some simple native UI that followed the GNOME HIG. It was still running on top of Wine but had some dialog boxes/windows and the file picker using GTK2 and not Wines own versions. In the end it didn't make sense to roll with that for this version, but there's no fundamental reason why a Wine based app should look or feel different to a native app. If you want to port your app to Linux and have it look and feel like the most native open source program there is, it can be done. Just ask for it. Most of the programs ported using Wine don't have this because, well, the companies paying for the work didn't really feel it was worth the time and cost.
This is clearly not true, many people have written positive reviews of Picasa for Linux. Remember that this is an app that largely uses its own UI toolkit anyway, so it doesn't look native on any platform, not even Windows. It certainly has nothing to do with "incompetence" - the fact that Picasa has far, far more OS-dependent features than Google Earth was a big reason, so a lot more time would have to have been spent rewriting its features like screensaver/movie creation, blog integration, photo upload, file monitoring, and probably more I've forgotten. Picasa does a ton of stuff. Google Earth was also already based on Qt whereas Picasa was not.
The sad truth is that Win32 is so deeply embedded in most apps that they will never be natively ported. Ever. Once you have seen the code to many well established commercial/proprietary apps, you will accept this fundamental truth and see things in a different light. To be portable, an app usually has to be written that way from the start or a huge amount of work will be involved to make it so later. Work that is hardly ever economic to do.
It's for this reason that Wine is crucial. It got a bad rap due to the very old WordPerfect port but that was then and this is now - modern apps that run on a commercially supported Wine (most of which are not consumer apps so you won't encounter them) are rock solid and fast. Usually they don't look native because rewriting the entire GUI of a complex scientific application or internal accountancy package just makes no sense at all. But again that's not some fundamental thing, it's just a matter of economics.
Re:A Wine-based version ... (Score:2)
Oddly Enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oddly Enough... (Score:3, Informative)
Corel Linux was based on Debian, and as a member of the Debian project, I must say that Corel had some...unusual questions for us during that time. There was definitely something of a culture clash between the people working on Corel Linux and, well, everyone else involved with Debian. Still, I think it was an interesting project. Not something I'd want to use, but interes
What would really help Corel... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4589 [linuxjournal.com]
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh gawd no. Corel borged my favorite company, JASC, and as a result Paint Shop Pro* has gone off my list of must-have programs. They've ruined it.
*The only graphics program I've ever seen with an even smarter UI than PSP was an icon editor named Microangelo. It was a little jewel of a program -- for example, with most other programs when you use the color picker you have to go back and pick your paintbrush (or line tool, or floodfill) again. Microangelo would
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2)
Too bad PSP8+ was turned into an uninspired Photoshop clone, complete with too long loading time and horrible interface. Maybe we could
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2, Interesting)
Could you substantiate this claim? What exactly does Inkscape not do that makes Corel draw irreplacable in your eyes? (That way I can get it added
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, first and foremost, some flipping documentation would be nice. When I go into the "Help" menu in Inkscape, I get a basic keyboard reference and some links to online tutorials. What I want is a reference that actually describes the options and tools available.
Okay, so here are some random features I use every day in CorelDraw that Inkscape appears not to provide:
I can't be bothered to look further, as it's already clear that it does not even come close to satisfying my requirements at this time.
Which is really not surprising, because Inkscape's own developers have made it perfectly clear that they are not interested in competing with CorelDraw and Illustrator. They are setting out to make the best SVG editor for Web graphics, not to compete in the commercial publishing world. I don't know why people are so desperate to make out that the program competes in markets it's not even intended for.
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:4, Informative)
Try using that tab to specify the standard colour Pantone DE 321-3 C (C60 M90 Y100 K30). I can't. It keeps changing the values I've already input. This is, so far as I can tell, because Inkscape stores RGB internally and does not even attempt to support any other colour model; so when I input a CMYK value, it converts my input to RGB, then converts it back to CMYK to show me. Oops, it's not a clean round-trip conversion. So some perfectly standard colours are completely impossible to specify in Inkscape.
This alone makes Inkscape completely useless for anyone working for print rather than the screen. Equally, it's not a problem in the slightest for anyone working on web graphics, which is why it's not a problem with Inkscape at all, because Inkscape is aimed at the web market not the print market.
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2)
However, it is possible that we might eventually be able to support specifying spot or process colors via SVG's icc-color() construct (which SVG allows you to specify alongside an sRGB color) -- we've just got to do a lot of architectural work first (the begi
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2)
* Layer effects
* Proper exporting to PDF, eps, etc. (try exporting with the alpha channel intact! Solution: export to a raster format then convert elsewhere. Ugh.)
* an intuitive layer palette
* Nested layers (this comes in VERY handy)
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2)
I believe alpha channel for PDF export has been fixed for 0.44, though there are still some rough areas like text handling and font subsetting that need to be addressed. We can't really do alpha in EPS since Postscript doesn't support it, and in fact the problem with our original PDF export was that it used EPS as an intermediate representation.
With regard to layers, 0.44 has also introduced a layer palette and UI support for nested layers (the underlying codebase has supported nested layers since la
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2)
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:2)
As far as documentation goes, we do have a manual [tavmjong.free.fr], but I can't blame you for not knowing about it, given there's no option for it in the help menu. We need to decide what we're going to do with it really -- integrate it in the app, or shell out
Re:What would really help Corel... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course YMMV.
I *HAVE* CorelDraw for Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
- 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
Why not give up? (Score:2)
They lost the train (Score:5, Insightful)
I miss their graphics apps (Score:2, Insightful)
And don't even get me started on the state and direction of GIMP these days.
Corel was floundering -- Linux wasn't the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [popularmechanics.com] (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.
Re:Corel bit off more than it could chew (Score:3, Informative)
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 w
Ideas to help the bottom line. (Score:2)
Corel either wanted the magic pixie dust of Free software to automagically fix their dumbass business model or they were looking to get some blackmail money from Microsoft. They got the money and dump Linux like a hot potato.
Importance of staying focused (Score:2, Insightful)
fud: Guess who? (Score:2)
I didn't rtfm, but was Laura Dildo mentioned in it?
Corel Office for Linux was garbage (Score:2, Informative)
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
Complete Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
What future ? What profitability (Score:2, Informative)
they cant compete (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not really surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not really surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Not really surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, that depends how Wikipedia defines "survived". If it's defined as being reprimanded and fined [gov.on.ca] (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
Re:Not really surprising (Score:2)
Competition? What competition?
Tell me which OSS projects had the maturity of Word Perfect and Corel Draw in 1999.
Re:Not really surprising (Score:2)
For the rest of the world who wants to just think about the document they're creating and not what happens behind the scenes, abiword was probably as good as it got.
Re:Not really surprising (Score:2)
Re:Not really surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
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 switc
Re:Not really surprising (Score:2)
Re:One of the Most Incompatible Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't think of a lot of Linux distributions that don't embrace and extend.
Re:One of the Most Incompatible Linux (Score:2)
"Embrace and extend" is a technique used (notably by Microsoft) to destroy something.
Re:One of the Most Incompatible Linux (Score:2)
Did you sign a NDA just to test someones applications? Assuming that you got binaries and not source code so that you could build yourself.
Re:One of the Most Incompatible Linux (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Corel Linux's Best Feature (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, wrong distribution.
Caldera Linux had tetris during install, but Corel Linux did not [linux.ie].
Re:Commercial software is needed in Linux (Score:2)
Of course, you conveniently ignore the fact that availability of source and freedom to redistribute without buying licenses is why many of us use Linux and the BSDs in the first place. Since those are vitall
Agree: developers need a Return on Investment! (Score:2)
I agree that, with the adequate-to-good quality Zero Cost Software (0$S --that first character is a zero) often distributed with Linux, there
Hmmm... Lets's See... (Score:2)
I've been given a Corel Draw Document (.cdr) as cover art for (charity) music CD... They accept... Illustrator...
I don't know the first thing about any of this, but I do know that Illustrator files end in ".ai", so I googled thusly:
Converting
The first hit I got was to this discussion from about three months ago:
Convert CDR to AI or EPS [brandsoftheworld.com]
It sounds like Corel Draw can export to either AI or EPS, so I'd say that you would want to call up the people who burned the original CDR file, and ask