[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“The most recent, and egregious, example of this
bandwagon-hopping is Corel’s pending acquisition of Inprise,
formerly Borland. The press release for this deal tried to
convince us all that the new, larger Corel would somehow be the new
leader of the Linux community, or, to use their terms, a “Linux
powerhouse.” Many of us were not convinced….”
“But, as much as I love these companies separately, I don’t see
how they could possibly fit together. As Corel has suffered
beatings from Microsoft in the productivity market, they’ve moved
to aim more and more at home and small business users by slashing
the price of Wordperfect Office 2000 to a fraction of Microsoft
Office’s price, and releasing products like the beginner-oriented
Print House and Wordperfect Office Small Business Edition.
Meanwhile, Inprise has spent the past two years rapidly scaling up
to sell to the largest enterprises with their acquisition of
Visigenic and their focus on products like the Inprise Application
Server and the VisiBroker CORBA ORB. Where’s the synergy here
between the two companies? How many small businesses are really
going to need a $30,000 application server in the near future? How
many home users will appreciate Delphi’s support for remote
debugging?”
“Corel has made it very clear that they have no near-term plans
to make a move to server-side Linux, opting instead to leave this
fiercely competitive area to established players like Red Hat and
TurboLinux (who, by the way, just signed a major partnership with
Inprise). That seems like an inevitable decision, when one
considers the company’s terrible reputation for service and support
(not that Inprise is any better) and relative inexperience with
mission-critical software development.”