KKR has acquired Corel, reportedly for $1B
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never got a hold of PS to this day.
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.
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
You might be over optimising your time.
This is more efficient then having to switch to the mouse.
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.
Sure you can use InDesign but that’s expensive overkill for a lot of desktop publishing.
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.
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 ️
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 have recently bought Affinity Photo and Designer simply because it doesn't have a subscription model, but I really miss Jasc PSP.
Seriously? It’s $10/month on the Photography Plan, and you get Lightroom and some online storage in the same bundle as well:
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html
I just don't use it nearly enough to justify paying a subscription. I might not even use it for months at a time.
Affinity cost me like $50, once. The mere comfort of just being able to use it whenever you need it is worth that money to me.
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
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.
Your $50 just isn't apples-to-apples.
What other software have such a great income stream, especially one that has entrenched government contracts?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
The 'reveal codes' feature of WP 5.2 was just awesome. Does any GUI application have it?
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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%
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.
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.)
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...
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.
I personally could never get used to the Illustrator way.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyo...
Of course they did, leveraged buyouts usually include huge payouts for those signing off on the deal.
I wonder what might have happened if they had pushed on that track.
I'm actually surprised to find out Corel still exists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
In the 90s, Xara was a revelation, particularly on budget hardware.
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.
I truly do not understand why having used both.
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.
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.