Joe Zimmerman, Tschüs!

Seems like a day for goodbyes! My old roommate, Joe Zimmerman, should be winging his way back to Germany by now. He's been living there for several years with his girlfriend, Lona, but makes irregular pilgrimages back to see family and friends. Yesterday, Leslie and I had a pleasant riverfront lunch with Joe as he prepared to return home from his latest visit. It was great to see each other but over too quickly. Joe, we we wish you a safe journey home. Lona, hope you enjoyed your trip to Barcelona, and we hope to see both of you next time!

Corel, Adieu.

Vector Capital Completes Corel Purchase.

Corel, hit it big about 10 years back with an innovative vector graphics program, CorelDraw, and then slowly killed itself branching out for the "next big hit" into an steady stream of unsuccessful ventures (thin client computing, education and entertainment software, office productivity suites, and, finally, its own Linux distribution). Pulled back from the brink several times -- the last by Microsoft (in what many believe was a two-pronged attempt to both kill Corel's user-friendly Linux distro and prop up someone they could point to as a "competitor") -- an independent Corel will finally disappear for good.

I saw CorelDraw being demoed at a small side booth at PC Expo in the early '90s and was blown away by it's ability to manipulate fonts (a pretty non-existent features in graphics packages in those days) and immediately bought a copy. I went on to review several Corel products for computer magazines over the next few years, and one year was a judge at their Academy Awards-style design contest in Ottawa (where the grand prize was a cool $1 million). Fun times...

Here's some more info from the CRN news piece...

"Corel, basically the only software company still fielding a Windows competitor to the Microsoft Office juggernaut, has been struggling. Last year it cut some high-profile bundling deals to put its WordPerfect Office on select Dell, Gateway, and Hewlett-Packard PCs selling through retail. But Microsoft Office remains the undisputed king of desktop productivity applications.

In October 2000, Microsoft took a $135 million stake in Corel, which thereafter de-emphasized and then spun off its Linux product plans into a Xandros a separate company. Pundits suspected a quid pro quo behind that deal. Microsoft has been fighting the upstart Linux open source crowd as a major threat to its Windows power base. San Francisco-based Vector bought out Microsoft's stake in Corel last spring."