Some Commonsense re: MS/Corel Alliance

Subject: Some Commonsense re: MS/Corel Alliance
From: priest -at- sfu -dot- ca
To: techwr-l
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 10:30:47

The amount of hyperbole and irrational thinking about the MS purchase of
stock is quite striking!

For some more sensible views, read
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/02/220238&mode=thread

Yes, there's some absurdity there, too. But there are also some good
points made.

One of which is that if MS wanted to snuff Corel, the most effective method
would have been to *leave it alone.* It was dying quite nicely on its
own!

Another of which is that MS is actively interested in keeping its (weak)
competitors alive, to avoid monopoly prosecutions. It has also invested in
its other competitors when the DoJ was breathing down its neck: it sunk
money into Apple and Borland, both of whom create competitive products.

Both Apple and Borland seem to have survived the Microsoft investments.
Perhaps Corel will, too. One should hope they do: Corel's got an
incredible suite of products:

Corel Ventura: the best long document publishing software.

CorelDraw: the best vector illustration application.

Photopaint: at least as powerful as Photoshop (though I, personally, find
it a lot more difficult to use!)

WordPerfect: as many features as Word, better at longer documents, better
at page layout.

Paradox: shows up Access for being the dog it is. [Shudder]

Quattro: it's a spreadsheet. Can't be much better or worse than Excel.
[shrug]

Corel InfoCentre: a massively powerful personal information manager, that
overwhelms me with its power (and the complexity of leveraging that power)
every time I try it out. Great idea; needs a dummied-down UI for me!

And a passle of various toys and tools that are pretty decent themselves.

The biggest shame of Corel is their marketing department. Too focused on
promoting Draw, to the detriment of the other apps.




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