ZDNet: Looking for Linux liaisons

"At a meeting with software development gurus in Microsoft's programming tools group, I asked if they were supposed to be a profit center-or if they were just supposed to cover their overhead while making it easy for ISVs to build distinctive Windows-only products. "Good question," they said."

"End of conversation. That chat occurred many years before Microsoft "extended" Java for enhanced Windows capability; it even took place before Visual C++ became a COM authoring tool kit, moving away from its early role as a very good environment for a cross-platform, midlevel language. But that long-ago meeting comes back to mind with this month's news of collapsed merger talks between Corel and Inprise."

"A Corel/Inprise pairing might have given desktop and personal Linux systems the same synergy that worked so well for Windows. We might have seen Corel's consumer-friendly platform (at least compared with many other Linux distributions) with the company's capable suite of mass-market applications, augmented by the robust Borland tools for writers of more exotic software: tools that could have been sold on a break-even basis, or even as loss leaders, instead of needing to pay their own way."

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Related Stories:

• CNET News.com: Can Inprise perform as a soloist?(May 23, 2000)
• Canada Computes: Still friends? Life after the Inprise-Corel split(May 19, 2000)
• LinuxPlanet: On the Failed Corel-Linux Merger - No Fat Lady Singing(May 18, 2000)
• Linux Journal: No Merger: Corel and Borland/Inprise call it off(May 18, 2000)
• The Register: Corel plus Borland plus Linux - is this the big one?(Feb 10, 2000)
• InfoWorld: The Corel-Inprise merger: a union of software chameleons(Feb 09, 2000)
• Upside: Corel-Inprise a 'Royal Flush'(Feb 08, 2000)