Alan Shutko wrote:
Kent West <westk@acu.edu> writes:What is _wrong_ with Corel?! Do they not see this gaping wide opportunity?They didn't exactly have good sales of WPO2k (probably because it was a buggy piece of junk) and decided it wasn't worth pursuing. And even before, they didn't have big sales of WP8. As it is, most people seem to be trying the free version, despite its bugs and limitations.
Yes, but that was the failure of Corel's management, not the failure of the market.
They said they were jumping into the Linux world with both feet, but they didn't. Instead, they made some tweaks to an existing distro (Debian) and sold it as theirs, and then made a few tweaks to WINE[1] to get WP02K to work, and thought this was a grand strategy.
What they should have done was forget about producing their own distro, and forget about WINE, and code a rock-solid version of WordPerfect that would run on any GNU/Linux distro and one that would run on Macintosh. At that time, they could have cornered the word processing market for Linux, and have been the only classy word processor that runs on the Big Three platforms. Now, OO.o has too much inertia on Linux, although Corel could still do this and make a killing as Linux grows marketshare.
And even their Windows-based and Mac-based markets have dwindled to near nothing, as MS-Word has eaten their lunch. Corel could have been the King of the Hill in the new OS that's taking over the world, but instead they dropped it after a half-hearted effort (and a little bit of investment from "Friends"), and have since watched their flagship product (WP on Windows) wither.
For whatever reason; imcompetence, blindness, fear of offending their bed partner Microsoft, whatever; Corel is missing this opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a groundswell of growth in the Linux market. As someone mentioned, law offices are tired of the problems with Windows, but can't make the switch to Linux because they need their WordPerfect. And with OS/X being unix-based, they could grab market dominance on two platforms for essentially the price of one.
I can't come to any conclusion except that Corel management is just blind.[1] Ranting aside, Corel made some significant improvements to WINE, for which I am thankful.
-- Kent