Corel had a chance of a lifetime handed to it on a silver platter – support OpenDocument and take an immediate lead in the charge to supplant MS Office. They’ve decided to stick their head in the sand instead, according to Andy Updegrove.
Corel had a chance of a lifetime handed to it on a silver platter – support OpenDocument and take an immediate lead in the charge to supplant MS Office. They’ve decided to stick their head in the sand instead, according to Andy Updegrove.
Hasn’t been fairly obvious for the last few years that Corel has absolutely no idea what it’s doing. The only good product left at Corel is Painter and they got that from MetaCreations. I don’t even know why they bother with WordPerfect. I wish someone would buy them out and do something worthwhile with their software, like donate it to the open source community.
Corel can rot. They ruined Painter after buying out MetaCreations — now they have bought JASC and will proceed to destroy Paint Shop Pro. You can already see the change of focus from quality to glitz in the recently released Paint Sho Pro X.
<blockquote>Hasn’t been fairly obvious for the last few years that Corel has absolutely no idea what it’s doing. The only good product left at Corel is Painter and they got that from MetaCreations. I don’t even know why they bother with WordPerfect. I wish someone would buy them out and do something worthwhile with their software, like donate it to the open source community.</blockquote></br></br></br>We don’t need it now. We got OpenOffice!! COREL is just trying to stay alive at this point. I mean, they were at the helm when Linux was just taking off but now people don’t even remember COREL had a linux distro.
Once you actually use WordPerfect, and actually use the Reveal Codes feature for working with formatting codes in large documents, you’ll realise that none of the other wordprocessors out there are usable.
If you’re a student and have ever had to write a report that must be 3-5 pages, and have written a 5.5 page document, you’ll appreciate the Make It Fit feature.
WordPerfect also has one of (if not the) best spelling and grammar checkers. The ones in Office are horrendous.
I used to hate WordPerfect. Then I got a really good deal on WordPerfect Office 2000. Since then, I can’t stand using OpenOffice Writer, MS Word, AbiWord, or KWord. Can’t speak for the other apps in the various office suites as I rarely use them. But there simply isn’t a better wordprocessor out there than WordPerfect. IMO, of course.
Support by MS is infinitely more relevant than Corel’s, but somehow people don’t see it as a tragedy that MS hasn’t committed to it.
Reading a previous article by corel on betanews (If I remeber correctly) I thought the same thing. SHAME ON YOU COREL. After dropping Linux support they decided to kill themselves. Instead they should have supported Linux/BSD/Solaris/Zeta/AOS/Morphos or at least a subset of them.
Cooked!
Word Perfect WAS the defacto standard for every legal office I’ve ever been too from 1994-1998. I don’t know if things have changed, but I doubt it. Legal offices aren’t exactly thrilled to convert all their old data.
A lot of companies have old documents from Word Perfect. Hell I learned to type on a computer with word perfect for DOS.
Their business management team needs to wake up and work on some new products or find another way to grow their business. They’ve been losing market share non-stop since the late 90s among all of their products.
I blame Michael Cowpland and co. All this guy cares about is stacking more Ferraris into his garage, and racking more jewlery and plastic surgeries onto his wife. I am sure many people (at least in Canada) have heard about some crazy things this guy has done, and about his famously lavish lifestyle. Serisouly, Corel could have been 1000x the company it is today. But they are less and less relevant by the day. I guess having an diot CEO and a completely incompetent management team without a hint of foresight will do that to a company.
Wikipaedia – Cowpland left Corel in August 2000
Yeah – he messed up the company with his lavish spending and dubious business ethics, but he was behind the Corel Linux strategy – which stood a chance of succeeding.
Since he left, the MS investment in Corel has made it little more than a facade for MS interests
“True North proud and free”
Corel guys really deserve their destiny (bankrupty)
bhhenry, can you describe how they ruined Painter? I think Painter is beyond anything I’ve ever seen – anywhere. And has improved since the old days with MetaCreations.
Painter 7 was an iffy release, though (IMO). But that was a while back.
A pathetic non-competitive stance from a company with no leadership and no vision.
It’s a fitting demise for a #2 company that’s pure number two anyway.
Corel already tried to sell one thing no one wanted to buy: Linux.
Why should they try to sell something new that no one wants to buy: openDocumeent?
Business is about selling things that make a profit, not about being a pioneer.
Actually business has little to do with turning a profit. Most companies are not profitable. The main goal is to acquire capital. It does not really matter if it is positive or negative (debt). You do not honestly believe that most companies are accountable to their shareholders? When was the last time you ever had any real input over the direction of a company (your investment is too diversified to have any significance). The only concern for most companies is to make sure that the “majority” of the top shareholders are happy.
Further, it often is not about selling products but ideas and concepts that are formulated in patent based schemes. If the can not be trademarked but the method of delivery can be.
A lot of businesses are now owned by “institutional share-holders”, things like pension-funds and (more controversially) hedge-funds. These can afford to buy 30% of a company, and 40% of it’s supplier, and 35% of another company with a shareholding in the original company.
They wield enormous power in business circles.
The fact that individual shareholders have very little power, does not mean that shareholders in general have none. And in the wake of the financial scandals of 2000, and disgust at the “golden-parachutes” handed out to under-performing executives, shareholder activism has been at an all-time high, and sometimes successful. It should be noted, though, that the most successful examples of shareholder activism has been when a fund with a significant minority share has motivated the smaller shareholders to support their ideas for the business and overrule the board.
This article discusses one example: http://www.cfoeurope.com/displayStory.cfm/2383150
Futher, amassing capital is a strategy played out in a minority of firms, usually by under-performing, overly paid, and excessively isolated CEOs.
Companies must make a profit to survive in the long term. They must over a return on investment to their shareholders, and share-prices are still vulernable to poor results. Hype and acquisitions can benefit a share-price in the short-term, and in companies where CEOs get stock options, you sometimes see such misguided tactics for a short-term boost in the share-price (so CEOs can sell their stock). However such incentives were fell out of favour during the Enron et al. scandals, and so boards of directors are now concentrating on the mundane business of turning a profit, as they should.
The fact that you still see some truly idiotic decisions made with regard to up and coming IT companies should not be taken as typical for business as a whole.
You sound like your education has been confined to Slashdot.
Businesses that don’t make a profit go out of business, They cease to exist.
Why should they try to sell something new that no one wants to buy: openDocumeent?
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts wants to buy software supporting the OpenDocument format. The European Commision seems to be taking a similar position. There are a lot of Governments and agencies out there worldwide that are looking to the OpenDocument format as a way ensuring their ownership of their own documentation. They have money and are prepared to spend it on supported software if it meets their needs. Commercial corporations are likely to follow this trend .
Corel had a chance to give MS some real competition here but they chose not to. They don’t want to annoy MS, it might use some of its anti-competive illegal methods to pressure OEM’s to stop installing WP. We all know the pressures MS puts on PC manufacturers – Michael Dell whistling in the air and twiddling his thumbs in reply to a question about pre-installed Linux sums it up.
One small state and a wobbly EU isn’t much of a market, especially since it’s all hot air so far. What politicians giveth, politicians can take away. Why should Corel bet the company on the assumption that Mass, and the EU will actually buy commercial products?
Corel’s obligation is to make money, not to give MS “real competition”, ot ot be an OpenDocument pioneer, or to advance the pet ideology of people who have no intention of buying any Corel products in the first place.
Every time some corporation has sense enough not to commit suicide by taking up the FOSS cause du jour, it gets berated by people who don’t even realize their ignorance is showing.
OpenDocument makes sense to me, but expecting businesses to support it at the risk of losing money is arrogant folly.
Please enlighten me and explain how Corel would be commiting suicide by supporting OD. Thanks.
A lot of people and organizations prefer to pay to get quality programs and support. Just look at Opera. There have always been free alternatives and IE was even included in Windows installation, but people still bought it.
If I were in a company that wanted to use OpenDocument, I would seriously consider WP if they supported it. Quality, stability and support is worth paying for.
You can get support for Open Office on forums, mailing lists or hire consultants to support or implement the features you want if you can’t get someone to do it for free. But it’s much more convenient to pay for a product from a company that exists to develop and support their own product. Quality is worth paying for.
Corel’s obligation is to make money, not to give MS “real competition”, ot ot be an OpenDocument pioneer, or to advance the pet ideology of people who have no intention of buying any Corel products in the first place.
I would recommend Corel products if they supported OpenDocument. That is, as one option of many, they would be in the running.
Without OpenDocument support, I can not recommend Corel products unless they are ideal for narrow situations.
Who am I?
* I specify systems for banking, document processing, and video archiving systems. Before the development starts, I say what the goals are.
* I have and have had customers that include national banks, US State and Federal governments, and large multi-national corporations.
The data handled by each of these systems is largely in flat files or XML with blobs of associated data, and usually (though not always) including hardware specifically designed to house the database; sometimes there is no ‘database’! (Crazy, but true!).]
A standardized XML schema that does not have patent issues, is backed by a standards group (OASIS), is in the queue to be an ISO standad, … is a good thing.
What does Corel bring to the table here?
[Note: No, the core systems do not use desktop single-user software. The core is all custom work or built on open source (for the generic parts) and closed source (for narrow requirements only). The reports and everything attached to it for output, though, does heavily rely on single-user software as only 1-20 people require the output of those small apps.]
I’d recommend it, too. I’m not arguing that Corel made the right call here. I don’t know, because I can’t see into the future. I’m arguing that Corel, or any other also-ran vendor, who moves into the OpenDocument market will be overwhelmed by MS as soon as MS decides that’s a viable market. Does anyone really believe that Microsoft won’t “embrace” this technology, too, as soon as it had legs?
I’d recommend it, too. I’m not arguing that Corel made the right call here. I don’t know, because I can’t see into the future. I’m arguing that Corel, or any other also-ran vendor, who moves into the OpenDocument market will be overwhelmed by MS as soon as MS decides that’s a viable market.
OpenDocument eliminates document formats as a lock in. It doesn’t prevent other lockins.
As document lockin is a real big hammer to use against current customers leaving, MS will not support OD for years even if they have a full-fledged working converter integrated into Word and Excel and Powerpoint.
Does anyone really believe that Microsoft won’t “embrace” this technology, too, as soon as it had legs?
They could do it, and throw patents into the mix.
A macro could be created to strip out that nonsense, though, so there are likely ways to deal with this type of corruption.
wobbly EU isn’t much of a market,
As an EU citizen I am insulted. As a market the EU is bigger than the US (BTW the US doesn’t have the biggest of everything, China has the biggest population, Russia has the biggest land mass and the EU the biggest market)
Corel’s obligation is to make money, not to give MS “real competition”
Corel sells Office suites, Microsoft currently dominates the office suite market, in order to make more money on its product it needs to give its competitor real competition (i.e. including a feature for which there is increasing demand and which that competitor refuses to offer). This is a market opportunity to make more money.
Every time some corporation has sense enough not to commit suicide by taking up the FOSS cause du jour, it gets berated by people who don’t even realize their ignorance is showing.
Your ignorance is showing. If you had read about the history of Corel you would realize that it is a company that is in the process of committing suicide. By not entering into the Market for software supporting OpenDcument it is going to have what little market it has left, wiped out by Sun with StarOffice and IBM with Workplace who will get the growing market for supported proprietary software that uses the OpenDocument format.
I know the size of the EU market, but population alone doesn’t determine profit potential. Exactly how many of China’s residents are in the market for OpenDocument?
In any case, any business that bets the company on the decisions of “wobbly” politicians — of any country — is foolish. Political decisons don’t create markets.
Corel may sell office suites, but anyone looking to buy one could be excused for never hearing of them. As you said, MS dominates that market, and will for the forseeable future. I don’t see a ghost of a chance of anyone giving them serious competition. Projects like OOo will have marginal impact since they’re trying to give away Office clones to people who already own the real thing.
Whether or not Corel commits suicide by avoiding OpenDocument deopends on my acceptance of your argument that StarOffice and Workplace will ever be anything but marginal products. I don’t think so.
OpenDocument makes sense to me, but expecting businesses to support it at the risk of losing money is arrogant folly.
How would they be losing money? Companies make money by selling upgrades to their existing programs. Upgrades often include support for new file formats – take a look at how many programs just added support for PDF. Adding support for OD is just adding one more new feature to the list of new features for the next version of program X. It certainly won’t cause them to lose money, but it has the POTENTIAL to earn them money.
Adding capabiity is an expense, as is providing support for that capability. Presumably, Corel weighed the amount of that expense against the amount of anticipated profit from the inclusion of OpenDocument.
In a small company like Corel, bringing on just one addtional staffer to handle OpenDocument coding and integration with their existing codebase, plus the evaluation and testing, might easily cost more than projected profit stemming from the addition of OpenDocument capabilities.
Changing an existing product costs money. If that’s more money than you expect to make a a result of those changes, why do it?
“A small company like Corel”? I know they’re not exactly Microsoft, but they’re not 5 guys in a basement either. They’re a fair-sized company and I’m sure they could afford the necessary expenses of implementing OD support in WordPerfect. Considering it once had a pretty sizeable chunk of the office suite market, this could make it a serious contender to Star/OpenOffice in any market planning to switch to OD. But then you’ve already written off half the planet as a nothing market so I guess that doesn’t matter. They should just continue to fall into obscurity and irrelevance.
>>,,,you’ve already written off half the planet as a nothing market …
Apart from a few speciality shops in the U.S., I’ve never seen any Corel products displayed for sale in any store, anywhere. In my own professional experience advising on six and seven figure software puchases, Corel was invisible, completely unknown to decision makers.
If the other “half the planet” is indeed a market for Corel, then perhaps they considered the expense of marketing and supporting their products there before making their decision.
Look, this is simple: Rational business people do not decide to sell something if they believe they will lose money doing that. Presumably, you think Corel could make money on OpenDocument. It appears they disagree. (Since some have alluded to it, they’d also be foolish to embrace OpenDocuments if that threatened a forthcoming infusion of cash form Microsoft. Why should Corel commit suicide in the name of free software?)
ehm
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/2409/1/
Typically wankers! Bitching and moaning about something and not doing anything about it. Why don’t you send an e-mail to Richard Carrière, general manager of Office Productivity? Why not e-mail Amish Mehta, Chairman of the board, and express your dis-satisfaction? While you are at it, please do tell them how many of their products you own, or were intending to buy.
Erm, typical wanker, bitching and moaning about people who have legitimate complaints, while trying, in vain, to imply you are somehow superior. Yes, everything in the world is perfect, no one has the right to casually discus their dislikes about anything.
I’ve never understood the internet fad of acting like it’s a moral outrage for people to express dissatifaction with something.
I think the point that was being made is not that this is some Internet fad to complain. Hey we all do it and enjoy it from time to tim ;-). It is easier to complain to a group of like-minded people, than it is to express a sound argument based on reason, which is what started this thread. Their is a sence of tribal instinct here. We all kind of get along and have similar views.
OSNews is my default home because I feel it does a great job of helping present news that matters for folks like us (enthusiasts), who want to develop the industry in a safe, fair manner. Dissent is good, but bitching an moaning isn’t helpful. So take the advice and present a case to Corel. I think that is some of the best advice I have seen posted here in weeks.
Corel is a great company and they make great stuff. Lets not attack them at their core because we disagree with insinuations implied in an interview snapshot. I wish Corel would adopt ODF because I WANT to return to WordPerfect. I think that if they miss this moment, OOo will certainly not. And you can bet that MS Office will join ranks as soon as the threat is imminent. Until then, the infighting will ensure it never becomes a threat. And MS folks can peruse these threads with amusement.
No sense crying over spilt distro. Playing the blame game is easy, now build something.
#2, I doubt it. Perhaps in terms of money, but selling a product for money, that people under 25 never have heard of, when you can get a similar product for free will not work in the long run, standard document format or not. Adopting the standard would be a sure way to icrease the exposure to the market.
It doesn’t matter how much money you make on your product. What counts is the installed base. Over than last ten years I never seen one single installation of Word Perfect. It is mostly Microsoft and some occasional Star/OpenOffice. To be specific, it is mostly old Microsoft versions. Meaning you don’t sell office suits on features anymore. Things like interoperability and support becomes much more important. That could have been Corels ticket to remain in the market, if they had decided to jump on the ODT train quickly (i.e. before Microsoft does).
Given that OOo is very similar to current versions of MS-Office, OOo will be a perfect upgrade path once Microsoft ends support for current Office versions as their new MS-Office 12 is a very different animal and will require a lot more expensive training than switching to OOo or StarOffice.
On top of this the #1 market player will do everything to avoid ODT to keep their customers locked in. As a result the press will be full of articles on Microsoft vs Star/OpenOffice. In that media noise Corel will have very hard to make its voice heard. Even to Microsoft this will be a very hard battle to win.
Just remember how IE won the browser market from Netscape by being free and easily accessible. In the case of OpenOffice 2.0 it is not only easy and free as in bear, it follows open and free for all to implement standards. Standards that are or most likely will be government requirements in many parts of the world. Even without ODT standard compliance
OpenOffice/StarOffice have allready managed to get almost twice the marketshare of Microsoft Office 2003 with the previous version of their product. Now they have even better offerings in OOo 2.0 and StarOffice 8. Better in terms of speed, better in terms of ability to open other file formats, better in terms of usability, and lastly better in terms of standard compliance.
Given all this, I would be very surprised if OpenDocument ready software havn’t well over 50% of the market in five years from now. Corel would have much better chance of being part of that if they were early adopters.
In 1999 Corel was putting out WordPerfect v.7 which ran natively on Linux. At this point they also still had a significant piece of market share for it – especially attorney’s offices used WordPerfect because of its superior features for formatting and editing legal documents. Corel massively f–ked up. The came out with v.8 of the Office Suite for Linux in 2000 and it was a complete piece of shit that needed Wine to run. I sometimes think that Microsoft covertly got them to do this in order to tank the number one potential competitor to Word at the time.
At the time, just as Linux was really popular in the news, Corel could have capitalized on this and made a big push in the Linux market with a strong product. I bet many attorney’s offices could have been convinced of using Linux on the Desktop had the support and motivation been there to do so. But, as it stands, Corel completely had their heads in the sand…
I believe you got your versions wrong. I have Wordperfect Office Pro 2000 for linux, which is a version 9, using WINE. I loved it, but it ran like crap. I’d have to say the only piece of software I have ever bought.
Version 8 of WP was the native one. Ran great.
I am simply surprised that people who take the time to blame Corel and Mike have no idea as to what goes on in there. Corel did take a lot of investment from MS in the year 2000 to save itself from shutting down and it only makes sense that they would not support OpenDocument (against MS).
As for Mike’s lavish spending, it was his company and he worked hard to get it where it got to. I am sure he, more than anyone else, has the right to do whatever he wants – unless you are a shareholder, otherwise you can shut up now.
“I am simply surprised that people who take the time to blame Corel and Mike have no idea as to what goes on in there. Corel did take a lot of investment from MS in the year 2000 to save itself from shutting down and it only makes sense that they would not support OpenDocument (against MS).”
You are saying with moderated words that Corel sold your soul to the evil MS and, in exchange, must be loyal to your “master” forever 🙂
I think MS will inject again some dollars to mantain Corel alive. Sun and OpenOffice.org will decrease even more the Corel’s market share.
“I think MS will inject again some dollars to mantain Corel alive. Sun and OpenOffice.org will decrease even more the Corel’s market share.”
Why should Microsoft invest more in Corel? The only reason they did it the last time was to make sure that they could claim they had competition to fend off accusations of beeing a monopoly.
Today Sun and OpenOffice fills this function. No need to spend on Corel.
I’m curious about the real market share figures of office suites around various parts of the world. Who collects that info? It would be pretty hard to collect it, I’d imagine, with Sun and others offering free downloads and nobody really knowing how much is in active use.
But still, it would be interesting to look at some stats (even if only download stats from Sun since version 1), as a general guide (which is all collected stats can be, really).
Is Microsoft Office (say, version 2000 to present) 95% around the world? Is it dropping, is it falling? Is Corel gaining or losing? How is Sun doing? Etc.
I’ve searched but found it difficult to find anything.
the only reason people use wordperfect is for the format. get over yourselves