12 ms·

KKR has acquired Corel, reportedly for $1B

145 points by tech234a 7y ago

EnderMB 7y ago
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.
- alxlaz 7y ago
  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.
  - jeremyjh 7y ago
    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.
    - derefr 7y ago
      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.
  - granshaw 7y ago
    Great great point, especially with the current computing/internet-native generation. UX can be important in a crowded or competitive field, but otherwise, mehhh
  - derefr 7y ago
    > 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.
  - specialist 7y ago
    Pre-WYSIWYG & GUI, AutoCAD was basically a REPL for graphics. Great for early adopters. Bad for the general populace.
chrisparton1991 7y ago
When I skimmed over the title, I thought it said "KKK has acquired Corel". That was going to be one of the more interesting reads for the day!
Daub 7y ago
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.
atombender 7y ago
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. [1] http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html
- aduitsis 7y ago
  Came here to post that link! Amazingly, WP for DOS still receives love from various users! http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason 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.
  - gmfawcett 7y ago
    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.
Jerry2 7y ago
So, what will KKR have to do to Corel to flip it? How will they improve revenues?
- aswanson 7y ago
  They won't, unless they've identified a bigger sucker than they are. Private equity & software innovation don't mix.
  - anbop 7y ago
    Vista has done very well without flipping their companies.
  - whymauri 7y ago
    KKR salvaged GoDaddy from shuttering completely and turned it profitable for the first time in its history. Sometimes it works.
    - aswanson 7y ago
      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.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- cheez 7y ago
  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.
  - Fronzie 7y ago
    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.
mark-r 7y ago
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.
- notTyler 7y ago
  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?
ChuckMcM 7y ago
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.
- jonhendry18 7y ago
  If they don't plan on just loading it up with excessive debt to pay themselves a big dividend, then let it die and sell the patent portfolio.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > reads like good news 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.
jedberg 7y ago
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.
- kozak 7y ago
  I guess it's indeed a completely different Corel by now.
riffraff 7y ago
My first Linux distribution was Corel Linux, which few people know about. I wonder what might have happened if they had pushed on that track. I'm actually surprised to find out Corel still exists.
- Zardoz84 7y ago
  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
- starsinspace 7y ago
  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.
  - tombert 7y ago
    > 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.
person_of_color 7y ago
As an aside, anyone ever transitioned from IC SWE to private equity without an MBA?
- csa 7y ago
  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.
  - person_of_color 7y ago
    Are you in PE?
    - csa 7y ago
      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.
paxys 7y ago
I have used so much Corel software in my life. Crazy to think that it was once what Adobe and Microsoft are today.
Stratoscope 7y ago
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.
- alt_f4 7y ago
  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.
walterbell 7y ago
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.
- SyneRyder 7y ago
  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.
vkaku 7y ago
I was actually happy about Corel, until this happened. I predict massive management interference. I seriously hope they don't go the Adobe way.
vmurthy 7y ago
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. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyo...
- rtpg 7y ago
  > It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but clearly the management at Corel saw value in the deal. Of course they did, leveraged buyouts usually include huge payouts for those signing off on the deal.
meerita 7y ago
Here an old CorelDRAW! user since 0.8 version. Pioneer company but I lost them once I moved to Macintosh + Adobe.
preommr 7y ago
I am curious about what will happen to gravit designer which was recently bought by corel.
Razengan 7y ago
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...
- open-source-ux 7y ago
  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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wyoung2 7y ago
  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.
  - nasalgoat 7y ago
    For people who are used to the Corel method, Inkscape works almost exactly the same. I personally could never get used to the Illustrator way.
microwavecamera 7y ago
http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685 http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685
thrwy4obvsrzn 7y ago
> 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.
- kevin_b_er 7y ago
  Also loading it down with "debt" in the form of obligations to pay KKR lots of money, then selling that debt back to the public.
CriticalCathed 7y ago
People still use wordperfect. Legal profession really likes it. I truly do not understand why having used both.
- seem_2211 7y ago
  I've heard that the legal profession have to use Corel for certain documents.
johnvanommen 7y ago
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.
- johnvanommen 7y ago
  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.
- open-source-ux 7y ago
  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?
  - johnvanommen 7y ago
    Interesting, I did not know that! In the 90s, Xara was a revelation, particularly on budget hardware.

145 points by tech234a 7y ago

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.

alxlaz 7y ago
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.
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  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.
  - derefr 7y ago
    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.
- granshaw 7y ago
  Great great point, especially with the current computing/internet-native generation. UX can be important in a crowded or competitive field, but otherwise, mehhh
- derefr 7y ago
  > 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.
- specialist 7y ago
  Pre-WYSIWYG & GUI, AutoCAD was basically a REPL for graphics. Great for early adopters. Bad for the general populace.

chrisparton1991 7y ago

When I skimmed over the title, I thought it said "KKK has acquired Corel". That was going to be one of the more interesting reads for the day!

Daub 7y ago

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.

atombender 7y ago

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. [1] http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html

aduitsis 7y ago
Came here to post that link! Amazingly, WP for DOS still receives love from various users! http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/#reason 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.
- gmfawcett 7y ago
  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.

Jerry2 7y ago

So, what will KKR have to do to Corel to flip it? How will they improve revenues?

aswanson 7y ago
They won't, unless they've identified a bigger sucker than they are. Private equity & software innovation don't mix.
- anbop 7y ago
  Vista has done very well without flipping their companies.
- whymauri 7y ago
  KKR salvaged GoDaddy from shuttering completely and turned it profitable for the first time in its history. Sometimes it works.
  - aswanson 7y ago
    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.
    - deleted 7y ago
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cheez 7y ago
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.
- Fronzie 7y ago
  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.

mark-r 7y ago

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.

notTyler 7y ago
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?

ChuckMcM 7y ago

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.

jonhendry18 7y ago
If they don't plan on just loading it up with excessive debt to pay themselves a big dividend, then let it die and sell the patent portfolio.
jacobolus 7y ago
> reads like good news 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.

jedberg 7y ago

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.

kozak 7y ago
I guess it's indeed a completely different Corel by now.

riffraff 7y ago

My first Linux distribution was Corel Linux, which few people know about. I wonder what might have happened if they had pushed on that track. I'm actually surprised to find out Corel still exists.

Zardoz84 7y ago
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
starsinspace 7y ago
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.
- tombert 7y ago
  > 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.

person_of_color 7y ago

As an aside, anyone ever transitioned from IC SWE to private equity without an MBA?

csa 7y ago
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.
- person_of_color 7y ago
  Are you in PE?
  - csa 7y ago
    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.

paxys 7y ago

I have used so much Corel software in my life. Crazy to think that it was once what Adobe and Microsoft are today.

Stratoscope 7y ago

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.

alt_f4 7y ago
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.

walterbell 7y ago

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.

SyneRyder 7y ago
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.

vkaku 7y ago

I was actually happy about Corel, until this happened. I predict massive management interference. I seriously hope they don't go the Adobe way.

vmurthy 7y ago

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. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyo...

rtpg 7y ago
> It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but clearly the management at Corel saw value in the deal. Of course they did, leveraged buyouts usually include huge payouts for those signing off on the deal.

meerita 7y ago

Here an old CorelDRAW! user since 0.8 version. Pioneer company but I lost them once I moved to Macintosh + Adobe.

preommr 7y ago

I am curious about what will happen to gravit designer which was recently bought by corel.

Razengan 7y ago

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...

open-source-ux 7y ago
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.
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wyoung2 7y ago
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.
- nasalgoat 7y ago
  For people who are used to the Corel method, Inkscape works almost exactly the same. I personally could never get used to the Illustrator way.

microwavecamera 7y ago

http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685 http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685

thrwy4obvsrzn 7y ago

> 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.

kevin_b_er 7y ago
Also loading it down with "debt" in the form of obligations to pay KKR lots of money, then selling that debt back to the public.

CriticalCathed 7y ago

People still use wordperfect. Legal profession really likes it. I truly do not understand why having used both.

seem_2211 7y ago
I've heard that the legal profession have to use Corel for certain documents.

johnvanommen 7y ago

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.

johnvanommen 7y ago
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.
open-source-ux 7y ago
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?
- johnvanommen 7y ago
  Interesting, I did not know that! In the 90s, Xara was a revelation, particularly on budget hardware.