Corel seems like it's become a graveyard of old programs I used in the 1990s, like WinZip, PaintShop Pro and, amazingly, WordPerfect. And, of course, Corel Draw.
Oh, and this September will be see 40-year anniversary of WordPerfect [1]. (Though WP for DOS only came out in 1982.)
I wonder what their strategy is with this acquisition, since there must be some money in there still.
As an adamant aficionado of PSP over Photoshop, I never forgave Corel for buying Jasc and turning PSP into just another CorelDRAW. If I had wanted CorelDRAW, I would have purchased CorelDRAW. I did not. I wanted Paintshop Pro, and I had it, for a time.
A decade and a half later, though, my feelings are mostly numb.
Edit: Why did I like PSP over PS? At the time, PSP had better support for my tablet, and had hotkeys that made more intuitive sense for me. I did use PS for a while, sparingly from 2010 to 2015. In the long run, I don't do art anymore, and mostly just web design, for which my company uses Figma anyway. Occasionally we might contact something from a UX designer who uses Sketch, but we just import it into Figma anyway. Photoshop might as well not exist as far as I am concerned.
PSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still isn't.
Many things about PS still irritate users in a "That's just wrong, stupid, and annoyingly poorly thought out, and why do you keep adding pointless new features instead of fixing this?" kind of a way. [1]
PSP didn't do as much, but a lot of what it did do was more transparent and effortless.
When Corel bought it, they turned it into PSP Pro X Plus Special Edition Platinum Millennium Marketing Bullshit Edition. All kinds of cruft appeared, some of it was entertaining, very little of it was useful, none of it was elegant or beautiful.
[1] PSP had a "Create new from clipboard" option which created a new image from the clipboard with a single click. Boom. Done. In PS you have to select a new placeholder from a list of all other possible sizes, possibly after some scrolling and selecting, and then manually paste the image into the document. And now you have an image layer and a background layer, which is often not what you want.
Another piece of software that I thought made Windows productive in the 90s was Microsoft Publisher.
We got this bundled with...something? Maybe a printer? And I used it a lot for schoolwork. It was clean, neat and powerful. You could use it to layout a page really easily.
At some point they stopped selling it to normal people and brought out Microsoft Home Publishing instead. And of course it was complete crap by comparison.
I have since discovered that Adobe Illustrator is better than both.
I thought Home Publishing was just a bundle of Publisher and Works? That seems to be what searches turn up. They truly killed Works (which was crap), but Publisher still exists in zombie form.
Office 365 includes Publisher as do most Office SKUs. Office 365 Home in the Windows Store will install Publisher by default today, but for a long time with Office you had to do a custom install to install it, which is partly why a lot of people thought Publisher was dead because it didn't install by default.
That said, Publisher does feel like a zombie compared to the excitement it had in the 90s. I've wondered if that's because we aren't printing as much today (and there's basically no competition in the "desktop publishing" space at all), or if it's just how much of its development resources merged (back) to Word since the 90s.
One of the consequences of the Microsoft Office hegemony was that it mostly destroyed the market for apps whose functions could be performed, however awkwardly, by Office programs like Word.
Sure you can use InDesign but that’s expensive overkill for a lot of desktop publishing.
Since forever (probably since PS 2.4 or so) choosing "New Document" in Photoshop defaults to the size of the document on the clipboard. My workflow is: Copy in one app > Switch to PS > CMD + N > Hit Enter > CMD + V
Interesting; I fully agree overall that PhotoShop interface is counter-intuitive and serves legacy rather than UI design.
But the specific example doesn't work the same way for me: I hit Ctrl-N, and the size of image in my clipboard is the default pre-populated, pre-selected size (verified now in PS 6 and whatever current PS CC is); then I click Ctrl-V. So it's not a "Single click", but it's two keyboard shortcuts, my pinkie never leaves Ctrl button, so it's preferred for me to a mouse click anyway ️
I used to use paintshop pro when it was basically just an image viewer / converter, it was interesting to see it turn into a paint program in its own right.
>PSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still isn't.
The days of computer with extremely slow HDD, PSP allow me to quickly finish some photo editing and offer more features than most users would ever need. All while PS would still be loading.
Another important point was PSP was way cheaper, and Shareware. I don't even remember any students using PS actually bought it themselves.
I used PSP early on in the 90s because it was cheap and fast. It was one of my favorite pieces of software for a long time in the Windows 9x days. For the longest time there were things I could do easily in PSP that I found difficult to accomplish in PS. Unfortunately, PSP never expanded across platforms and free or native solutions eventually took its place for me. I never used it after Jasc was bought, but have fond memories of bringing home PSP 5.
I miss psp too. Photoshop doesn’t click with and has (had?) unbearable load times. We had it back when I worked for a small typography around 20 years ago and it was real job-grade boring.
Recently I found an editor that resembles psp feel: https://pixlr.com/editor/ (flash). I’m not affiliated with it in any way, just using it to crop my weekly memes.
I get that $120/year is significant, but it doesn’t take much payback in terms of time saved to make it worthwhile. If you can’t squeeze $120/year of use value out of Photoshop and Lightroom, you probably don’t do enough image editing and photography to make any photo app worth buying.
$500 is still less than the one-time price of Photoshop back when it was sold in boxes. Photoshop is well worth $120/year if you're able to use a big enough fraction of its power.
One way to look at it, then, is that you don't use enough of what Photoshop can do to be worth it, so you can stick with whatever simpler tool you prefer and save the money. Another option, though, is to realize that there's a lot of power there to be had, and it's worth spending the time to learn to harness it.
I put it that way because I keep coming across people who talk about their favorite image editor as "just as good as Photoshop" for their purposes while they clearly have no idea what all Photoshop can do. Here's a tutorial I did for Photoshop once that probably can be done only in Photoshop:
https://photo.stackexchange.com/a/57233/4141
Now, I don't expect you to need to retexture pictures of couches, but I'll bet if you read through that tutorial, you'll be surprised that such things even could be done in off-the-shelf software. Then realize that I'm not even a full-time professional in graphical arts. If I can pull off such tricks, what can a real expert do with it?
By the way, Lightroom was another $120 or so for the initial license when it was last sold in boxes.
Then there's all the upgrades, which you also now get as part of the subscription.
WordPerfect for DOS, in the opinion of many knowledgeable users, is still the greatest program ever written. Some of its features have not been matched even by the latest Windows software, and its interface remains unequaled for efficiency and elegance. Its support for multiple font formats has not been equaled by any other program or operating system, and its support for multiple alphabets, languages, and symbol sets has only been equaled by twenty-first-century versions of Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS.
Around 2005 or so, I met a religious scholar who still organized all his research in WordPerfect for DOS. He maintained volumes of notes and papers, collected over a decade or two. He refused to upgrade to the "obviously inferior" GUI versions.
It was truly incredible to watch him navigate through his research. He moved like lightning through all that stuff! It was very much like watching an Emacs or Vim master. (At the time I thought: I should introduce this guy to Emacs and org-mode, he would feel right at home. But he had essentially built his own org-mode in WordPerfect already, so I doubt that he would have switched.)
Props to you, Bill, wherever you are -- I hope that the blue WP background is still shining on your face.
-----
This got me to thinking. Two things that my WP friend has in common with the Emacs/Vim crowd is that (a) his UI hasn't really changed in 20 years, and (b) the full feature set is discoverable and (macro) programmable. We tend to think that the latter point is more essential (it's the selling point of Emacs, the "programmable editor"), but we tend to overlook the value of the former point.
We incur a cost due to the modern tendency to change application UIs on a whim -- either because of product switches ("this year's chat app") or actual UI changes to existing products (e.g., the Ribbon UI in the Office suite). It's the cost of lost opportunities for mastery. You can hone your Emacs or WP-DOS skills over a lifetime, and what you learned will never become obsolete, as long as you stick with that tool. But forced obsolescence has become a trend in application delivery, and so new generations of application users may never enjoy that sense of mastery.
To me, this is very reminiscent of the "choose boring technology" article that was on HN just a couple days ago. You can spend your attention-credits on solving business problems, or you can spend them adapting to new tool interfaces every year or two.
I consider the version of WordPerfect for Dos that I was using in 1993 to be far superior to any other word processing system that I have ever used, bar none - and I have tried a lot of word processors over the years. WordPerfect was not my first text editing / word processing program - I had used others that I had liked for several years before I came across WordPerfect. I have been stuck using Microsoft Word at work for decades.
If I recall correctly: Corel had agreed to rewrite WordPerfect in VBA as a condition for Microsoft to invest in it when it was on the ropes in the late 1990s. Once they did that, the quality went down quite a bit in my opinion.
As I recall, WordPerfect once owned ~85% of the word processing market. WordPerfect was reasonably priced for students; I don't remember how much non-student licensing cost, but it did have a cost while Microsoft Word was free initially if I remember correctly.
My friend says that WinZip makes $70M per year due to government contracts and inertia. There is zero development or costs, it's just a pure money maker for them.
There was or is some tracking components for wordperfect that law firms use or used. According to quora and google searches, many law firms are switching to word because clients don't have wordperfect. It would have made sense in an age where everything was printed.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-lawyers-use-WordPerfect
I don't think it was actually that long ago for law offices. WordPerfect was still a player amongst the general population even at the end of the 1990s, law offices held on for much longer. Complex documents were handled much better in WordPerfect than in Word.
Okay, 15 years ago. I think it was Word 2000 which added whatever lawyer features were missing (something about word count iirc). Also the stickiness wasn't entirely the word processor but also document management systems implemented as WP extensions.
Footnotes are a big deal for lawyers, and WordPerfect handled (handles?) them very well. WordPerfect really got off on the wrong foot with Windows. I am a slow typist, and even to me the cursor seemed spongy on WP 6.0.
The reason was that legal briefs needed to be certain lengths with word count maximums. MS Word did not count words in footnotes for the overall word count, WP did.
Lawyers generally, especially older lawyers. The federal government spends a chunk on WP licenses. My wife is still forced to use it occasionally, her boss refuses to switch away.
There is still WordPerfect for Windows, which has it. I tried using it again in 2010 or so, but found he program to be a little clunky UI-wise. My impression after reading support forums was that they spend minimal money on maintenance and don’t really develop it any more.
Fun fact: WordPerfect was written in assembler for (I think) the Data General minicomputer. Every other version was cross-assembled to the given platform.
This was told to me by Alan Ashton, the CEO and founder of WordPerfect, in around 1986. I instantly thought that their days were numbered.
I was thinking the same - for years, there was no other like it. There are some others now, but none as mature as Painter. For classically trained artists, it is an amazing piece of work. However, I would be curious if the market of fine artists who want to work in digital format is large enough to make it a profitable product line.
Corel was owned by PE (Vector) and had already been navigated around the private-public-private circuit, evidenced by $300MM of dividends paid out prior to this $1B sale.
The wildcard here is virtualization vendor Parallels: Dell went private with the help of PE and returned to the public markets via reverse merger with VMware, which is now enabling Dell hardware+service subscriptions with a similar model to Microsoft 365.
PC desktop software has been neglected by Microsoft, Apple, Google and large ISVs, except as glorified cloud clients. KKR has a global war chest and access to roll up and integrate best-in-class desktop/edge software that runs on multiple physical platforms.
If they are successful on the software consolidation front, they could partner with hardware vendors, borrow a page from the Dell playbook and buy one, or kickstart an open hardware (Arm? RISC-V?) client ecosystem that is optimized for cross-device virtualized workflows.
The Parallels acquisition is part of what worries me. Having switched back to Windows, I can't find any VM software that runs as well as Parallels did (VMware is awful in comparison). I'd hoped that Corel's reason for purchasing is that they'd seen potential growth in making a PC version of Parallels. But if Corel has been sold, maybe the Parallels deal was just to juice their numbers for the sale.
My dad was a D&T teacher (woodwork, electronics, that kind of stuff), but had a background in carpentry and construction.
The Corel suite of design products were his tools of choice, both in industry and when he became a teacher. To him, CorelDRAW was a leading product, and even now we've got a few old CD's of Corel products lying around the house. It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right!
Despite being long retired, he'll occasionally work part-time when needed, and when he needed to cover for a few months I helped him get the latest Corel suite, and he really struggled to get on with it. I remember playing with it as a kid, and feeling the same way when I tried it out, so to get his work done I had to hunt down an old copy of CorelDRAW.
Corel seems to be a shadow of what it once was, and its software reflects that, so hopefully this acquisition results in better software for the future.
A few years ago I asked my dad about this same phenomenon:
> It was also amazing to me how someone with limited computer knowledge can use a software tool so well. He still double-clicks links on web pages, but he can create a full building plan with ease in CorelDRAW, so they must've been doing something right!
I was interested in what exactly made AutoCAD (in my dad's case) so easy to use, because if you've ever worked with it, man, it's anything but. I got to use it during my undergrad classes and the only thing I liked about it was AutoLISP :-). It's polished in every way but it's clearly a program that first hit the market in the 1980s.
Turns out my father didn't think it was easy to use at all, either, he thought it was awful. But he really needed it, so he really put in the effort to learn it. It wasn't some super-human feat, it took him about a week of practice on increasingly complicated drawings. He was already great at technical drawing so he just had to figure out how to do it with that weird program.
It's been a useful lesson ever since: given the right motivation, people will put up with any UI. Rationalizing the design choices that went into it is not always the best avenue.
> Given the right motivation, people will put up with any UI.
Another way to think about this is: without the right motivation, people will hate any UI, no matter how good it is, simply because it requires learning (even if the learning ramp is really smooth.)
The only way to judge how good a UX design really is (as compared to another UX for the same workflow), is to compare how quickly and well people learn that UX when truly motivated to do so. Otherwise you’re not comparing the UXes themselves, but rather just how much learning your user populations happen to have already been motivated to put into systems more similar to one or the other of your UXes in the past—a result that will be meaningless in anything but the most “targeted at 100% of consumers” of apps.
Tools like this can't be dumbed down, either. They need to expose hundreds of features, not because everyone uses every feature, but because everyone uses a different subset and finds them critical. Its really hard to make a tool like that really user friendly, its simply expert level software.
I would note that Photoshop has had, for about a decade now, a set of “configuration pre-sets” (I forget the exact term) under the Window menu. These allow you to, in a single click, turn off all the menus and palettes except those relevant to the subfield you’re working in.
And honestly, Photoshop isn’t even the best candidate for that approach, since some image-manipulation “jobs” can pull in every tool in the toolbox. It’d make perfect sense in a program like AutoCAD, or Excel, or an IDE.
I've always wondered about tools like this. AutoCAD was another tool we had around the house, and my dad always seemed happy enough to use that. In a similar vein, he's always been tied to his emails and teaching portals, but he's always struggled with those - maybe due to web UI's being wildly different wherever you go?
In the case of tools like CorelDRAW and AutoCAD I've always felt that they're complicated, but optimal. Once you know what you need to do, it's easy for power users to do what they want with minimal fuss. It reminds me a bit of git, which most would say has a complicated UI, but makes sense to those power users that have dedicated time to actually learn what is happening under the hood.
Great great point, especially with the current computing/internet-native generation. UX can be important in a crowded or competitive field, but otherwise, mehhh
I used to love PaintShop Pro. I even used it when I worked at Adobe back around 2002. Of course my manager freaked out when he saw me using it: "But... You work for Adobe!"
I explained that I would happily use Photoshop if it would just do the one thing I really wanted: load several photos that I shot in a burst and then let me cleanly flip back and forth between them to pick the best one (most in focus, best facial expression, whatever).
I could load a few photos into either Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and then flip between them with Ctrl+Tab, but Photoshop would draw the notorious gray and white block pattern and slowly trickle the new photo onto the screen replacing the blocks. PaintShop Pro simply flipped instantly from one photo to another, so I could easily compare them with no distraction.
I'm sure Photoshop has gotten better since then (I hope). But PaintShop Pro got worse. Besides selecting the best photo, the other main thing I did was cropping. This worked fine back in the day, but then a bug crept in where selecting the crop tool would reset your display zoom level! This was not good when I was trying to crop precisely.
I dutifully reported this to Corel, and the response was that if I wanted to file a bug report I needed to pay for a support incident.
I didn't need support! I just wanted to tell them about something that used to work perfectly and now failed in the new version, along with easy instructions to reproduce the bug.
Still, I paid for a version upgrade every year in the hope that they might have noticed this problem and fixed it. Eventually they did (I think).
Adding insult to injury, every time I upgraded it lost my custom keyboard shortcuts and I had to re-enter all of them. There were only a few of these and it only took a few minutes, but still it was a pain.
I sent in another suggestion that they should adopt standard browser zoom shortcuts with some extensions:
Ctrl+Plus: zoom in
Ctrl+Shift+Plus: zoom in more (5x)
Ctrl+Minus: zoom out
Ctrl+Shift+Minus: zoom out more (5x)
Ctrl+0: reset zoom to 100%
Never heard back on this one or saw them in the product, so I kept re-entering them every time I upgraded. Maybe I won't bother upgrading again, so I won't have to mess with it. That seems like the easiest solution.
PSP was never really a Corel product, it was a Jasc Software product which they acquired when they bought the company. Corel initially promised to maintain the Jasc office in Minnesota, where all of the development was being done. Eventually, just 3 years later, they closed down the office and fired most people. That essentially gutted the culture and destroyed any chance that PSP would ever be as successful as it was in the early 2000s.
Ah yes, thank you for bringing back bad memories! ;-)
Although I was only involved as a long-time paying Jasc customer, I remember the acquisition vividly. It was Jasc's PaintShop Pro that I used and enjoyed for several years before Corel bought them out. It really went downhill after that.
> load several photos that I shot in a burst and then let me cleanly flip back and forth between them to pick the best one
Yes, Photoshop does have that, though you do it through Bridge or Lightroom instead of in the same app. (Bridge is a companion app to Photoshop in all its versions, and Lightroom is bundled with it in most Creative Cloud plans.)
Lightroom is famous for not being super-fast in image import, so you might not find it fit for purpose. It has a bunch of compensating value that makes putting up with this worthwhile for many of us. I’ve tried a few of the alternatives that claim to be Lightroom killers, and they weren’t even close on several key measures.
The latest one I tried couldn’t do hierarchical keyword management and would reliably crash every hour or so, for example.
> they should adopt standard browser zoom shortcuts
Ah, irony; browsers got those shortcuts from Photoshop! Early browsers didn’t have those features at all. It was probably the Mac browsers that made this a standard, since Mac apps more reliably support those shortcuts, since Photoshop and MacOS have such a long and close shared history.
(Okay, the shifted variants aren’t in Photoshop, but the other three are.)
I still remember the joy of receiving my first app on CD – CorelDRAW 5 I think – and discovering it required Windows 95, and then upgrading from 3.11 just to use that app..
Until I switched to macOS, I had always preferred CorelDRAW and Corel Photo-Paint over Adobe's stuff, because Corel felt more at home in the Windows GUI, whereas Photoshop still seemed to lean towards Mac UI conventions. Corel's tools were also more intuitive in general (drawing vector curves with the mouse was especially easier in DRAW than Illustrator, thought I cannot specifically remember why.)
Now, on the Mac, I prefer Pixelmator and Affinity etc. over Adobe because they feel more at home in macOS...
I also found Bézier curve drawing more straightforward in CorelDRAW! than in Illustrator. I made the shift so long ago that I can’t remember the specifics, but the main difference was that Corel let you more easily switch among the modes for a point: cusp vs. smooth, split handles vs. symmetric, move mode vs. draw mode, etc.
There’s a learning curve you can get past that makes this difference go away, and it’s mainly down to grooving the modifier keys into finger memory. Once you stop consciously thinking “hold Command to switch from pen to white arrow mode” and such, you can work just as fast in Illustrator.
Illustrator helps teach you the modifier keys by changing the cursor as you hold down the modifiers. So, the next time you get stuck, just press them down one at a time until you get a cursor that looks like it should do what you want and see if it helps.
Corel also used to officially support and allow sales of earlier versions of CorelDRAW i.e. If you didn't need the latest version of the programme, you could buy the cheaper, discounted earlier version.
It's interesting to view acquisitions of software companies by firms like KKR. They're after all the guys who bought RJR Nabisco [1]
My money is on them ruthlessly cutting costs, laying off engineers and basically milking the cow for all its worth. It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but clearly the management at Corel saw value in the deal.
I worked for a company that was bought out by Corel. They assured us at the time that everything was great, but the first wave of layoffs came 3 months later. History may never repeat itself, but it rhymes.
I'm starting to think these huge valuations and buyout prices are basically ensuring this will happen. Is Corel really gonna generate a billion dollars in profit for this company when free cloud-based alternatives exist to almost all of it's products?
I also bought and used Corel Linux when it first came out.
It was great. To me it is still the closest thing Linux ever had to being a really user-friendly desktop OS. No other Linux distribution ever since quite got that right as they did. It was based on a heavily customized KDE, they even replaced the entire KDE file manager with a new one written in-house (heavily inspired by Explorer). It worked so well, especially the integration of network share access - both SMB and NFS - which was often a pain on Linux back then, but on the file manager in Corel Linux, it just worked. But what I remember most about it was the beautiful icon theme they had made for it. They had applied it to everything, every single application was themed to look nice and consistent. Included was the Linux version of WordPerfect, which was great in days long before OpenOffice became a credible alternative. They also had a Linux version of Corel Photo-Paint, although that was half-emulated via WINE, but still worked well.
Unfortunately, the hardcore Linux crowd seemed to despise it, I guess because it was too user-friendly (even today many people in the Linux world are opposed to the idea of GUIs and user-friendly software, back then it was much worse) and maybe due to their inclusion of proprietary software. And then Corel killed it off, and the year of the Linux desktop never happened.
The assets were then picked up by another company called Xandros, which continued it somewhat, but IMO it was never the same again.
> even today many people in the Linux world are opposed to the idea of GUIs and user-friendly software
I hear that a lot, but is that really true anymore? Linux Mint, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora are all in the top 10 most-watched distros on Distrowatch, and two of those have Gnome as their default GUI. Say what you want about Gnome after Gnome 3, but it certainly was intended as something to be a lot more user-friendly and embraced the idea of a GUI heavily. (Personally, after I gave it a chance, I grew to really like Gnome 3; I think a lot of people's visceral reaction to it had to do with the fact that it was no-longer trying to be like Mac or Windows).
I've been using Linux full-time (no dual boot) since 2010, and consider myself somewhat of a "hardcore" user, and even I still mostly use a Gnome setup.
I have a copy of it!.
if I remember correctly, was based on Debian with a strong UX changes to make more similar to Windows UX.
Sadly, M$ paid money to Corel, and Corel was forced you kill it and Kyrlix
I wanted to buy it because you got an inflatable penguin with the boxed set.
Later on I worked at Xandros, which was what became of Corel Linux after Microsoft infused cash into Corel. They had inflatable penguins and Netwinders (another Corel spinoff) everywhere in the office, because apparently nobody was willing to buy Linux. Eventually Xandros went under because nobody was willing to buy Linux. I went to work for Canonical on Ubuntu, but eventually they, too, got out of the desktop Linux business because you can't make money on something nobody is willing to buy.
I guess they should have sold inflatable penguins and included a free CD with Linux on instead.
I'm oddly attracted to quirky software, I've been a Corel Draw Suite user since version 3. My wife loves Wordperfect. So generally this reads like good news, software diversity wise, but KKR is no doubt going to look at some sort of 'pay us annually or it will stop working' scheme which would likely force me to never upgrade again.
When has a private equity firm buying a business ever been good news for its products / customers / employees / other investors?
Most of the examples I have heard about have resulted in all of the qualified people forced out, the company’s products getting driven into the dirt, huge debt taken on and quasi-fradulently pocketed by the private equity firm and its executives, with other stakeholders left holding the bag.
When I first saw this I assumed this must be a different Corel than the one who made some of my favorite programs of the 1980s. I was surprised they were still around! I haven't seen a Corel product in the wild for years.
Generally, when private equity takes over software, it's a matter of doing the bare minimum to keep revenues stable while reducing costs. So very little ongoing development will be happening.
Strip the company into pieces and sell those is another option, that's what KKR did with NXP.
NXP is now again healthy, but that's thanks to a CFO who pulled all sorts of tricks to reduce the huge debt that KKR put on NXP.
I dont think GoDaddy survived by KKR hiring a top notch engineering staff and knowing what direction to take the technology in. They probably did some spreadsheet magic with debt and tricked some fools into thinking that was a value add.
Private equity's playbook is very, very transparent. They will take massive loans and use the money to try to create fake growth, maybe by buying a high growth unicorn. Then they will turn around and IPO it and sell it to retail suckers like mutual funds, and make a ton of money. They will get out, and then the company will collapse in a few years, taking down all the retail suckers who bought into it.
Or they'll make the company they bought take on unmanageable amounts of debt. The funds thus made available to the acquired company will be kicked out the back door to KKR as dividends.
Back in the 90s, RAM was incredibly expensive. Corel introduced a product called "Corel Xara", which operated a lot like "Corel Draw" but it was just massively faster.
I still use it to this day.
I've tried all the competition, and there's just nothing that's better for 2D. It's interesting because I get the impression that there are barely any users.
For a moment it was open sourced on Linux, but the Linux version was buggy and limited. The Windows version is fantastic. For $200 it would be a great product, but you can easily find it for around $30-$50 on Amazon or eBay. If I'm not mistaken, Corel licensed Xara from another company, and the version that's been on sale for the last 20 years is sold by the original company.
Xara (the vector illustration program) has its origins in RiscOS on the Acorn computer platform. Xara (the company) then build a version for Windows where it was much faster than both Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Corel licensed Xara as you said, but after a few years Xara (the company) ended the licensing agreement with Corel and started selling the software again themselves. Xara is now part of the Magix portfolio of products.
It's fascinating just how many aquisitions and licensing agreements Corel has taken on. They bought video and photo editing apps from Ulead. They bought image and drawing apps from Micrografx too.
They used to sell Ventura Publisher, a heavyweight DTP program especially suited for technical publications.
As others have pointed out, Corel has had a large and eclectic portfolio of programs that few companies can match (anyone remember Corel Click and Create?)
The consumer app space seemed so much more varied and interesting in those days. Or maybe I'm just being nostalgic?
P.S. : if you're using 2D software to control a laser cutter, Corel Xara works great for that too. Everyone else uses Inkscape but I'm getting great results with Xara.
Corel draw is still used a lot in India and through SE Asia. As it offers an integrated vector/bitmap/desktop publishing package, it is seen as value for money.
> There are no layoffs planned as part of the deal
This was also the message when a previous employer became acquired by KKR. The layoffs came after each acquisition. Acquisitions followed by integration seemed to be a large part of the KKR strategy, at least from my limited perspective. And of course with acquisitions comes reevaluation of structure, processes, and roles among other things.
Knowing people in the PE industry will help tremendously in that effort.
Good MBA degrees are vastly overrated in terms of knowledge gained, but (when done well) often vastly underrated in terms of social contacts gained and/or able to gain.
I am not in PE, but I have several friends and professional acquaintances who are.
One topic we frequently discuss is how to improve PE efficiency/profitability. In a nutshell, the vector of personal contacts seems to trump pretty much everything else.
Oh, and this September will be see 40-year anniversary of WordPerfect [1]. (Though WP for DOS only came out in 1982.)
I wonder what their strategy is with this acquisition, since there must be some money in there still.
[1] http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html