Some Commonsense re: MS/Corel Alliance

[priest -at- sfu -dot- ca]

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.