“As a prelude to our interview with Dr. Michael Cowpland of
Corel Corporation (NASD: CORL), I thought I would take this issue
of Rants and Raves to quickly go over Corel’s Linux history in case
anyone needs a refresher. Corel has been besieged lately as its
merger with Inprise/Borland appears to be on the rocks and its
recent filings with the SEC indicate a potential cash shortage in
the near future if the merger is not consummated. Underlying
this, is a company with an excellent Linux distribution, the most
comprehensive office suite available on Linux, and plans to port
additional high-powered applications such as Corel DRAW to
Linux. “
“Corel made its name when it released Corel DRAW in the mid to
late 80’s. This application was (and many argue still is) the
premier graphics package for personal computers running Microsoft
DOS and then Windows into the 90’s. The company has continued to
develop and upgrade this product, has ported it to the Apple
Macintosh and to UNIX, and has the largest installed base among
graphics packages. The company is developing a port of CorelDRAW
for Linux that should be completed this summer.”
“In 1996, Corel made a fateful decision to purchase the
WordPerfect office suite from Novell (NASD: NOVL) and become the
primary competitor to Microsoft Office in the personal computer
office suite market. Unfortunately, WordPerfect has seen its market
share steadily eroded over the past five years as Microsoft has
tightly integrated Office with its operating system and become a
defacto standard (some, including the government, would say
monopoly). In a move to boost sales, Corel embraced Java and
release a WordPerfect for Java office suite that the company ended
up discontinuing. More recently, Corel has released its WordPerfect
office suite for Linux, the most comprehensive suite currently
available for Linux.”