“The resignation of Dr. Michael Cowpland as chairman, CEO, and
president is a watershed for Corel. Cowpland and Corel have been
virtually synonymous since he founded the company in 1985. Corel’s
successes and failures have largely stemmed from decisions Cowpland
made.”
“More recently, Cowpland and Corel placed a large bet on moving
its applications to Linux on the desktop. … This strategy may
have received its heaviest blow on 15 August 2000, when several
large vendors–e.g., Compaq Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun
Microsystems–announced support for the Gnome Foundation’s Linux
desktop project. Key parts of this open source desktop are
productivity applications that run on top of UNIX and Linux. The
Gnome Foundation likely has further reduced whatever revenue
opportunity Corel had in this area.”
“In Gartner’s opinion, these troubles and the exit of the
company’s dynamic leader, Cowpland, makes Corel a likely
acquisition target. It retains its large base of WordPerfect
users, which will prove attractive for any company looking to move
those users to the Web and perhaps transition them to its own
Web-based productivity services.”