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Comment by paul_milovanov | Hacker News Reader

Corel still exists?! Good for them!

I was always surprised their model of selling their older versions at a reduced rate (e.g. latest version $199, next older $100, one before that $49) never took off.

They always seemed so scrappy back in the 90s with their giant boxes and included libraries of clip art.

One of the more novelty twitter accounts I found recently posts images from one of their 10,000 item collections: https://twitter.com/clipart1994bot

Ha they even included a clip art of L Ron Hubbard [1]?

I'm really curious who drew all of these pieces. 10k images is a ton of work...

[1] https://twitter.com/Clipart1994bot/status/107548368574555750...

I think these images were made by few artists, because the style is very distinct and recognizable. I still encounter these clipart pics on signs of crappy cafes and shops. Made of plotter-cut adhesive film, these pics look gorgeous.

The company I currently work for does something similar. Latest version costs money, previous version gets given away with hardware, and version before that is free.

However, we are going to transition to latest version costs money and two feature set reduced versions gets given with hardware and free.

Having 3 versions to support is too much overhead for a small company. And giving away old versions of our products with issues that we know we've solved gives a bad image of our software to new users we are trying to up-sell to the latest version.

What's the rationale behind the current model?

From a business perspective, the older versions are used by older or larger companies that couldn't or didn't want to upgrade, they have money to shell out and should be charged more.

We don't have many corporate customers, mainly sell to individuals.

The idea is to grow the user base as large as possible and then sell them the latest version or other products.

Give away a version with 3rd party hardware is to grow the user base to new markets. Let somebody else handle the marketing / distribution and get their users. Sure lots people throw away the CD of bundled software when they buy something, but a decent number still install it.

Give away free is same idea. People love free stuff and will download it. Then hopefully they enjoy it and upgrade to get more features.

The bigger surprise to me is that they not only exist, but have the money to buy Parallels.

Yeah, I would have expected this to go the other way around. “Parallels bought Corel? Corel still exists? Why would Parallels even want them?”

I don't much about private equity, but Corel is owned by Vector Capital, so maybe they're providing the money? https://www.vectorcapital.com/investments/case-study/corel

Do Vector Capital specialize on Vector Graphics software companies?

I'm kinda shocked they both exist. Both were good products back in the day, but in 2018? Come on.

What do you base this on? Is it that neither has released a front-end javascript framework or an in-house container orchestration tool as open-source (that I know of)? Or is there some other hipness criterium that they failed to meet?

Nah, I'm old or at least in tech years I'm old. I've worked with projects before containerization I have been a former user of both products. I didn't imagine Corel had the capital to move out of bargain-bins.

They sure do, and if you drove into Ottawa on the 417 in the past decade, you went right past their office:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.3788963,-75.7454491,3a,77.5y,...

They seem to have pulled the Corel logo down some time this year. That makes me a little sad, as it was always one of those little landmarks that reminded me I was almost home when I lived in downtown Ottawa.

When Corel was looking for a new CEO I applied :-)

These days it seems like basically acquire software companies. They own Winzip, Paintshop and Painter, for example.

It's been a long time since I've heard of an acquisition that was actually positive for the aquired/their users - can anyone working on any of these groups share such a story?

On the user side, Corel has been okay-ish with PaintShop Pro. I write Photoshop plugins and I still have lots of customers who are happy Paintshop Pro users, some 14 years after Corel acquired JASC.

That said, Corel added a kind of adware to PSP, where it will display promotions for upgrades to the new version of Paint Shop Pro even when you're not using the program. I really wish there was an easy way to disable it, but I'm sure their metrics show it is effective. Parallels are already doing a version of that (but only when you launch the program), and now even Apple itself is using notifications to advertise products & distribute discounts [1]. There's probably no avoiding it now.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/18/apple-push-notifications-comp...

I loved PSP under Jasc, after I think XII after the Corel buyout, I gave up on the product... Paint.Net or Gimp (painfully) give me the little utility I usually need. I really do miss PSP, but I think 9 was the last really good version, and I don't have a key or media for it anymore.

It sounds like it's gotten a little worse.

v9 was good, but I still prefer 7, the version just before JASC switched to .NET. v7 is lightning fast, and nearly 20 years later it's still the version I use first for Photoshop plugin development, because of its speed.

From memory, v9 isn't compatible with Windows 10 (the installer won't work properly), so don't feel you're missing anything.

Serif's Affinity Photo is giving PSP real competition, but Affinity is still quite buggy in some ways on Windows. I'd probably recommend Corel PSP 2018 / 2019 over Affinity for the moment. Paint.NET is great too.

I haven't really looked at anything since XII... I do mostly development, and my image work is mostly relegated to slight color shifting and/or cropping/scaling. I do wish Paint.Net were a better cross platform option... I've used Pinta, but it's been kind of buggy and isn't nearly as well flushed out.

It's a shame that so many tried to re-bundle Paint.net in sleazy ways... though the ads on their own site are horrible, and I don't fault the main dev(s). I just would love to see Pinta or anything else become as easy to use. I may try to dig up PSP7 and see if I can find a key for it.

They also own two competing video editing products. With very similar feature sets. One of which has forums with logins going over unencrypted connections. :/

They own Winzip

Some were shocked to learn Corel was still around, whereas I'm shocked to learn Winzip is still around. Especially since Windows finally got around to adding native zip64 support in what...XP SP3 I think it was?

For the most part, Corel seems to acquire software that are near their end of life and/or relevance.

IIRC, they kept Kai's Power Tools alive well past its usefulness.

Yeah, but Windows built-in ZIP support still blows a number of goats, which is why I use 7zip... and the latter is the real reason I'm gobsmacked that Winzip is still around. 7zip's not as pretty but it does support every archive format I've ever used or needed.

EDIT: Even more shocking: they own both WordPerfect and Quattro Pro both of which are, apparently, still around. Absolutely stunned.

I've seen WordPerfect on the shelf at a brick and mortar Fry's Electronics somewhat recently -- within the last year, I swear. I definitely did a double-take.

WordPerfect use to be favored my lawyers. This is a group that tends to stick to their tools. I dunno if their still using it but that's probably a pretty nice niche.

I recall reading that the reason it was (is) favored by lawyers was because WordPerfect did more accurate word counts in documents than Microsoft Word did. When lawyers submit briefs to some courts they have restrictions as to the maximum number of words contained in the document. Microsoft Word did things like count page numbers as words, thereby inflating the word count and reducing the number of actual words that could be in the document.

I installed WinZip on my PC a few years ago because it's the only archiver i'd found that let you view image thumbnails without extracting the whole ZIP, pretty cool feature.

A decade ago, one client at an old job required ZIPs be 256-bit AES WinZIP encrypted, which at the time meant WinZIP was the only option.

The employer was so cheap that they they didn't want to pay for WinZIP, so we'd wait n number of seconds before the file would zip. Then we'd wait n+1 seconds until it was an hour and a half wait.

My dads office (attorney) uses it because they’ve used it since it was popular in the 80s. There’s not much reason to have them switch as long as WP continues to get support... it does everything they need.

It's where programs go to die. Corel today is what Computer Associates was twenty years ago.

Took the words right out of my stdin. Had I not caught your comment out of the corner of my eye, I was about to post word-for-word the same.

It worked for CA for a while, and then...it didn't? I'd have to go look up what happened to them, because they one day just weren't on my radar anymore.

The renamed themselves to CA Technologies and were bought by Broadcom recently for $18B.

> Took the words right out of my stdin.

Don't you mean stdout?

Given that it is a play on “took the words right out of my mouth”, you’re probably right.

RIP VET Anti-Virus :( CA Anti-Virus was so bad.

One of the first Linux distributions I tried (after the venerable Slackware) was the short-lived Corel Linux way back in 1999 or thereabouts.

I remember using that. It’s was good then I got scared off when my machine didn’t boot one day and I didn’t understand the error.

The good old dot com days. I remember buying Corel stock at $6 and it popping to $32 in a few weeks (or was it a few months, I can't seem to find Corel listed as a public company now to check the price history) on the Linux hype, only to crash down soon after (got out at $8 :) ).

Vector Capital took them private in 2008 at $4.00 a share. Odd that nobody has historical charts, I can't find it either.

Used to be COSFF ticker. I worked for Corel in Ottawa long while ago.

Not sure how to dig charts now.

> stock at $6 and popping to $32 on the Linux hype

These words don't sound right.

Hard to believe, but true. Wish I had a chart of the Corel stock price but from Wikipedia[1]:

"Corel Linux, also called Corel LinuxOS, was a Debian-based operating system made by Corel that began beta testing on September 21, 1999[1] and was released to the public on November 15, 1999." ... "Corel later discontinued the distribution, but did not remove the former Corel Open Source Development website until March 2002."

So at least I did not just dream it. Did you live through that era? It was very similar to the blockchain hype but lasted a bit longer.

Edit: Confirming the Linux hype:

"Red Hat's initial public offering was on August 11, 1999. A total of 6,000,000 shares were priced at $14 ($7 post-split) per share."[2]

On January 10th, 2000, four months later the price peaked at $140, which would have netted you one of the fastest 10 baggers in history. By July of 2001 it was under $4

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corel_Linux [2]https://investors.redhat.com/ir-resources/investor-faqs/when...

I've heard about the distro, but not a reason why it existed or why anybody would buy it. Apparently, it was marketed for desktop use, which I guess wasn't yet universally seen as ridiculous in '99.

VA Linux is often forgotten too. Due to Linux in the name, and even a sexy ticker symbol, rose a crazy 700% for those in on the initial offer price. And there were a lot of those people because they added everyone who had their names on any software included in their Linux distribution. Myself thankfully included.

Well, this outfit sounds much more impressive than the vague prospects of Corel's Linux offering:

> Geeknet, Inc. owns the online retailer ThinkGeek and is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc.

> VA Research was one of the first vendors to build and sell personal computer systems installed with the Linux operating system, as an alternative to more expensive Unix workstations that were available at the time. It was the largest vendor of pre-installed Linux computers, with approximately 20% of the Linux hardware market.

> Intel and Sequoia, along with Silicon Graphics and other investors, added an additional $25 million investment in June 1999.

> In fiscal 1999, the company's sales grew to $17.7 million, up from $5.5 million in fiscal 1998. In fiscal 2000, the company's sales were $120.3 million.

> owned Slashdot from 2000 till 2012

I vaguely remember that the VA Linux computers were quite inexpensive but basically unusable due to software problems. Another nail in the Linux desktop coffin.

I installed Corel Linux on the family computer when I was 13. It was my first Linux distribution. Someone from school got the disc out of a magazine if I remember correctly.

I couldn't get the modem to work and the installer didn't add a boot option for the Windows 98 partition (LILO bootloader), so my family was understandably pretty pissed off. I ended up figuring out how to restore the Windows MBR, and eventually figured out how to dual boot.

To this day, when I mention Corel Linux was my first Linux distribution people tend to think I'm confused since "Corel makes graphics software, not Linux distributions!"

Ah getting my first modem under linux working - the autovtest was dialling 999999 - I got a call back as soon as I managed to hangup. Explained to the 999 operator I was just testing Linux....

Probably you had one of those ‘winmodem’ monstrosities that were prevalent at the time. I experienced similar problems.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a software modem. It's just a different way of implementing the hardware. Some software modems were effectively programmable DSPs, almost like a software defined radio for a wired connection.

I doubt they ever claimed Linux driver support so it's not their fault people weren't able to get them working.

About that time every company and its dog was trying to push in the commercial Linux distribution space, trying to get a piece of the sweet pie that Redhat was eating.

They were also bundling/selling Wordperfect Office for Linux at that time, since the only real competitor on Linux was StarOffice which later purchased by Sun and open sourced - and later because of the acquisition by Oracle, was forked into LibreOffice. Hard to believe that was all nearly 20 years ago now.

WordPerfect runs perfectly on modern Linux. For fresh Debian installs, I have a standard set of tweaks to apply, and then it's up and running. I love it because it's relatively compact, very fast, and really has all the word-processing features one needs.

Woah. Memory lane. I remember helping with a Corel Linux install fest way around that time at the University of Ottawa. It was pretty good for that time in that the installer was "friendly"...I think...this is going back many years here.

Corel still maintains WordPerfect too, last release was 7 months ago

And they've been plenty active in court; SCOTUS just turned down an appeal for the Microsoft case a few years ago

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/28/victory_for_microso...

WPS Office seems to have cornered the market for MS Office alternatives, i.e. WPS runs in Linux, Wordperfect doesn't.

citations?

Yes, WordPerfect has supported them for many years.

https://support.corel.com/hc/en-us/articles/215963808-How-to...

I think they're asking about the assertion that "WPS Office seems to have cornered the market for MS Office alternatives", which would be pretty surprising. Libreoffice, Google Docs, and iWork all exist, and all seem more popular.

That's not even slightly a credible citation for usage/popularity stats. :/

I think OpenOffice, Google Docs and Appple’s suite would beg to differ. I don’t think I’ve seen an install in two decades.

> WordPerfect lacks support for Unicode, which limits its usefulness in many markets outside North America and Western Europe.

Oh my.

I do know WP was popular in Law Offices long after Word had taken the market. Not sure if that is still the case.

The issue was (and probably still is) that MS Word paginates footnotes improperly. They can't change it because it will break backwards compatibility. This handed the legal market to WP. And because you can't reliably import/export the documents and get pagination to work, you often have legal firms using Word to do the initial preparation and then hand it over to a legal secretary to type the whole thing into WP -- which will be the document that is submitted to the court.

amazing

talk about efficiency

All billable hours.... what's not to like?

Amazing isn't it? I still prefer Corel Draw to the Inkscape or any of the Adobe products. I have their PowerDVD software on a laptop which is used as a portable DVD player for visiting nieces and nephews.

PowerDVD is CyberLink, you're probably thinking WinDVD (which apparently is still getting new updates).

I suppose Corel Draw is still popular, even though it's not the favourite of most graphical artists/designers.

Other than Photoshop, what are the favorites these days?

Sketch for UI/UX design.

Serif products (Affinity) have been on a roll, last I checked.

I switched to Affinity and never looked back at Photoshop/Illustrator. That being said, I used them at a hobbyist level, nothing very complex, so while it was an easy transition for me, it may not be for everyone. But I've seen quite a few people state they have moved off of Adobe products over to Serif. I've been very happy with Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer.

They now just released Affinity Publisher in Beta as a replacement for Adobe InDesign. Already using it and very pleased!

Affinity products are fine and fast and stable, but there are many things they don't do. Tracing for example: Corel Draw does tracing beautifully.

Corel Draw is similar to Adobe Illustrator, not Photoshop

Pixelmator still great, as is OmniGraffle (a better Visio) for vector diagrams and my vector-image pirposes.

https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/

https://www.omnigroup.com/

I used Corel Draw back when I worked at a T-shirt and jersey shop in college, and frequently used it to drive a vinyl cutter for jersey numbers and other decoration. From anecdotes I’ve read since then, it appears the software is still the preferred choice in custom apparel, signage, and vehicle livery shops because it interfaces well with the cutting machines those industries use.

yes, Corel Draw was the #1 choice among the sign shops I worked at. Almost every vinyl cutter or large-format digital printer supported Corel export formats really well. I spent years working with it daily - it was pretty solid, and had an amazing amount of features & flexibility.

It was also expensive and so pirated a LOT.

Corel Painter has its niche among digital artists - it's still one of the higher end digital painting programs that simulates real life mediums (acrylic, oil, watercolor) remarkably well.

There's really no iPad equivalent to Corel Painter, but Corel registered the procreate.com domain to redirect to their Painter product page (Procreate (procreate.art) by the Australian company Savage is one of the strongest digital art applications on the iPad).

Corel has also recently purchased Gravit Designer, which presumably will stand as their main digital design app that competes with Sketch and Adobe XD.

They really named it Procreate?! (Yes)

I just used my CompuServe internet account to look up this story.

CompuServe had internet?

(72167,3530 here!)

I loved CS. I had a tool that generated personal data for their trial accounts for most of my pre-flatrate dial-up internet time.

coreldraw is still the best vector program to interface with laser engravers.

Not only with them, but pretty much with everything related to CNC. And the reason is that it exports clean, optimized paths -- and in the DXF format. What comes out of Affinity Designer is unusable garbage.

It's been so long since I heard the name Corel that I recognized the name but not what they did?

The other day there was a post about Lotus Notes. Now this. I'm not sure I can handle all the nostalgia.

They are the Yahoo of software companies.

The first question that crossed my mind.

Yeah I was just going to ask this too! Crazy. And yeah good for them. All everyone talks about is photoshop these days. So for them to still be around means they have to be doing something right.

Parallels still exists? Good for them!

Came here to say this

me too. i still have corel draw from late 90s

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