Corel going south?

Much of the buzz behind last week's LinuxWorld tradeshow in San Joserevolved around two events. I'll detail one -- commercial Unix vendors rallying aroundthe GNOME desktop -- another time. The other event occurred onthe opposite side of the continent from the show, as Canadianmedia broke the news of the resignation of Michael Cowpland, theflamboyant head of Ottawa's Corel Corporation.

The ultimate bandwagon jump
Corel's slipping fortunes were no secret, yet Cowpland's stepping downseemed to take most people by surprise, and in a very unwelcome way. ForCorel had publicly banked its future on Linux unlike no other company. It was thefirst company that wasn't founded on Linux to create its own distribution.It has a healthy (if shrinking in popularity) suite of applications thatit was committing to port to Linux. And it was the first softwarepublisher to use mainstream marketing techniques to increase globalawareness of Linux. While bobsledding isn't exactly everyone's favoritespectator sport, seeing the Linux name plastered across a world championship sporting eventcertainly seemed like a watershed to me.

And now here lies Corel, without the icon who has guided the company fromthe start. (Corel, after all, stands for COwpland REsearchLabs.) I fear that the resignation will be accurately read as a failure byCorel to satisfy its customers and investors. And considering that the companyhas committed its future so heavily to Linux, it will be seen in somecircles as a failure of Linux.

It's one thing for Linux companies to have low share prices and littlerevenue early in their public lives, but it's quite another to see an establishedcompany go down after having looked to Linux to save it. Maybe Cowpland'sleaving, in itself, doesn't mean the company's a goner. But I guess Iequate Corel with Cowpland so much I just can't picture a stable andindependent Corel without him at the helm.

No doubt the FUD-mongers would argue that adrowning Corel reached out and grabbed onto Linux, hoping it would be alife preserver but finding it instead to be an anvil. But to do so wouldbe to ignore some of the mistakes Corel made with itsLinux endeavors, mistakes that other would-be entrants could learnfrom.

Marketing window
For one, Corel's heritage in Windows apps was thought of as a clearadvantage within Linuxland, but it proved to have a downside as well. TheCorel Linux distribution employs a 'leave everything to me' installationmechanism that, in true Windows style, doesn't tell you what it's doing.That's fine (for some) when it works, but if it doesn't work, you have noidea what has gone wrong. Many people I know who tried Corel's distro --even non-technical users, the company's main target audience -- eventuallytook it off their computers because, well, it was too much likeWindows.

Corel, it appears, assumed that their biggest potentialaudience was Windows users who would migrate to Linux -- especially theirLinux -- if it was a better Windows than Windows. And maybe that was thecompany's biggest mistake. When I first saw Corel's Linux Ithought it was impressive, but it appears the market doesn't need orwant a Linux that's merely a Windows clone that doesn't crash. Both theGNOME and KDE development efforts indicate higher aspirations.

In addition to failing novice users, Corel didn't do much to ingratiateitself to the hard core community either. The company left most technicalissues, such as software updates, to the Debian project -- it wasn't anactive player in either the LSB or LPI. Furthermore, Corel's KDE desktop forkedaway from the standard release, and it didn't appear to support the project with people or money the wayother distributions (notably SuSE and Caldera) did and still do.

Unfavorable circumstances
It's not helping that Corel's desktop applications aren't beingembraced by the Linux world. The company's decision to makeWordPerfect available as a free download -- for personal use only -- was one-upped when Sun released StarOffice for unrestricted downloads.And it was further upstaged when Sun recently announced it would beopensourcing StarOffice completely. Compare this effort to Corel'sWordPerfect Office, which opened to mixed reviews amidst complaints aboutspeed and stability. Again, Corel's attachment to the Windows environmenthurt it: unlike StarOffice, which has separate native versions for Windowsand Linux, WordPerfect sought to make a Windows application that would runadequately under Linux's Wineemulation.

Corel's strategy may have worked in a competition-free vacuum. In aLinux environment with completely free and native alternatives --AbiWord, KWord and StarOffice (when it's finally opened) --WordPerfect just isn't finding much of a user base. Add this to an increasingly hard fight on the Windows front against the likes of Microsoft and Adobe, and it's easy tosee why the company's fortunes haven't been better.

So here we are, with what might have been the unthinkable -- a Corelwithout Cowpland. At the news conference, Cowpland stated that his resignation was voluntary and had nothing to do with Corel's beleaguered state. I dunno, I just can't see the company sustained for verylong. This looks to me like Corel is making the conditionsright in anticipation of a sale.

Now the question is -- to whom?

Frankly, I would like to see one of Ray Noorda's Linux-related companies-- Lineo or Caldera -- buy Corel and opensourceWordPerfect Office in much the same way that Sunsays it will do for StarOffice. It would also be a hoot seeingWordPerfect return to its Utah roots.

Would it happen? Not likely. When I raised the question to Caldera peopleattending Forum here, the response was more laughing out loud than anythingelse. And given securities rules, even if there was something to tell,they couldn't tell me anyway.

So I'll just speculate about what could just be the most successful andappropriate next chapter in Corel's story. Without its captain, thecompany is rudderless and needs some direction. A traditional Linuxcompany could be the right fit for a company like Corel, with some goodideas but whose execution leaves something to be desired.

Should a Linux company buy Corel? Tell Evan in theTalkBack below or in the ZDNetLinux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.