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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Never forget: by the end of the 90's, Corel bet highly on Linux. They ported software, contributed to wine and even had their own distro. By early 2000's microsoft bought some corel shares[0]. Soon after that, corel stopped contributing to wine, stopped new versions of their office suite for Linux and abandoned their distro.

Linux still has many problems on the desktop, but the failure of it achieving a significant fraction of this market can also be assigned to active sabotage from some external players.

[0] https://slashdot.org/story/00/10/02/220238/microsoft-buys-in...

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Corel even made the NetWinder which was a small ARM based Linux computer.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3288

http://www.netwinder.org/about.html

Hi. Article author here.

I specifically mentioned the NetWinder in the blogpost and gave those 2 links to it.

I believe Microsoft had a hand in many such downfalls -- HP's WebOS tablet and Gateway's Amiga, for instance.

Ironically Microsoft also saved Apple b/c the Government was breathing down their neck with Antitrust litigation at the time.

Apple and Microsoft settled their GUI lawsuit of Mac vs. Windows with the investment of non-voting stock from Microsoft and the license of the Mac GUI by Microsoft.

The Amiga had bad management that tried to milk the same cow instead of innovate a new chipset to compete with everyone else. It seems like there is a curse on the Amiga for its companies.

Jay Miner dying in 94 didn't help.

True but they had the schematics of Jay Miner's chips. Apple Mac and Windows PC passed Amiga sound and video standards and a new chipset was needed to compete with them.

In fact they were working on a new chipset when Commodore went bankrupt. Had they started earlier on it, it might have saved the company, that and the Commodore 65.

Damn, early personal computer history always sounds so wild west-like and full of anticompetitive behaviour by microsoft. Crazy to think that apple were the good guys at some point.

SoftMaker Office is a good office suite that supports Linux, with HiDPI and all.

It also has a free version, FreeOffice. It does have some performance issues at times, but I find it better than LibreOffice overall.

Corel brought many quality software to Linux. Not only office software but also their graphics suite. And a Linux distro.

After the Microsoft deal, Corel continued publishing WordPerfect for other Unixes other than Linux. Corel never clarified why they started excluding Linux.

WordPerfect was really nice on Linux. I remember that time. Corel Linux was also often seen that time as a sponsor in a lot of sport events.

I bought some Corel stock back then, thinking that the company would somehow leverage its stewardship of WordPerfect to Linux dominance. This was back in the days when lawyers didn't trust Microsoft Word to count words reliably.

I eventually cut my losses, selling my $500-ish stake for $90 or so. So much for the year of Linux on the desktop. At least they didn't go the route of Caldera.

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