Vector to Buy Corel for $97.6 Mil ($1.05/share)

[gcutler]

http://earthlink.com.com/2100-1046_3-1014118.html?tag=newsfeed&subj=technews&part=earthlink&type=pt

Question is are they overpaying??? What can these guys do with Corel's WP Office to make it more popular/profitable???

Supposedly WP Office offers "Extensible Markup Language (XML) functions to documents" Will that be enough???

[RichW]

Nope. The corporate world is firmly entrenched now with MS-Word which displaced WP long ago simply on the basis of price. The $99 "competitive upgrade" killed WP when it was its own company. I was sorry to see Corel buy them. Corel still has the best graphics suite (CorelDraw) and MS has yet to be able to come up with a package that does anything close. But Corel's misstep into WP and LINUX have hurt their profitability.

[waydwolf]

Originally posted by RichW
Nope. The corporate world is firmly entrenched now with MS-Word which displaced WP long ago simply on the basis of price. The $99 "competitive upgrade" killed WP when it was its own company. I was sorry to see Corel buy them. Corel still has the best graphics suite (CorelDraw) and MS has yet to be able to come up with a package that does anything close. But Corel's misstep into WP and LINUX have hurt their profitability.

    MS has never really tried to come up with anything covering Graphics Suite, but Micrograpfx' package was always better in many ways for my needs and had infinite undos in Picture Publisher LONG before Adobe figured that trick out. But Adobe is still the top of the overall heap for widespread use.

    Linux did hurt Corel, no question. It takes a special kind of loony detachment from reality to stick it out as a corporate purveyor of Linux when the core movement of Linux is so virulently opposed to traditional business, corporations, and seemingly capitalism in general. Corel just didn't have the ability to take the losses longer and with a straight face.

[Steve Mehs]

IMO, Adobe has won when it comes to digital photo/graphic/video editing and creation. Their software is top notch and feature rich and I like the ease of integration from one program to the next. One thing I'd like to see MS do is make some engineering type products that integrate with Office to compete with Autodesk, and no Visio doesn't count :)

[gcutler]

Originally posted by Steve Mehs
IMO, Adobe has won when it comes to digital photo/graphic/video editing and creation. Their software is top notch and feature rich and I like the ease of integration from one program to the next. One thing I'd like to see MS do is make some engineering type products that integrate with Office to compete with Autodesk, and no Visio doesn't count :)

But Autodesk is a very niche product, how many licences would an average company have (unless an engineering/architechture firm) I worked for a manufacturing company that had 5 licsenses out of 4000 employees because there were only 5 designing engineers (Compared to 500 salespeople, 20 IT, 100 customer service types, 50 financial people, etc). MS would not bother for such a small market share (as expensive as those liscenses are), where Visio is used by just about every company out there that has an IT department or any who needs a workflow program (the same company had like 50 Visio liscenses for the IT department and even the sales department and several managers).

[Steve Mehs]

Maybe focusing on a niche market is something MS should do. Web design is turning into a huge market, but Front Page keeps going down hill compared to GoLive and Dreamweaver. Autodesk produces awesome software that no company can touch, but what I was thinking is if MS could target small local architecture engineering proprietorships or partnerships by offering CAD type software but at much lower costs and licensing fees.

BTW - I have Visio Pro XP, great program! It saved me a lot of time on some projects that would have taken me hours to do with Word/Excel and a whole bunch of autoshapes

[gcutler]

Originally posted by Steve Mehs
Maybe focusing on a niche market is something MS should do. Web design is turning into a huge market, but Front Page keeps going down hill compared to GoLive and Dreamweaver. Autodesk produces awesome software that no company can touch, but what I was thinking is if MS could target small local architecture engineering proprietorships or partnerships by offering CAD type software but at much lower costs and licensing fees.

BTW - I have Visio Pro XP, great program! It saved me a lot of time on some projects that would have taken me hours to do with Word/Excel and a whole bunch of autoshapes

I don't see Bill going for the niche markets. Now what could happen is that niche market grows thanks to some great SW companies. then when it shows up on MS radar they buy out the great company or start to compete with it and run it out of business before it gets too big.