
KKR has acquired Corel, reportedly for $1B - tech234a
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/kkr-has-acquired-corel-including-its-recent-acquisition-parallels-reportedly-for-1b/
======
atombender
Corel seems like it's become a graveyard of old programs I used in the 1990s,
like WinZip, PaintShop Pro and, amazingly, WordPerfect. And, of course, Corel
Draw.

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.

[1]
[http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html](http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/chronology.html)

~~~
chao-
As an adamant aficionado of PSP over Photoshop, I never forgave Corel for
buying Jasc and turning PSP into just another CorelDRAW. If I had wanted
CorelDRAW, I would have purchased CorelDRAW. I did not. I wanted Paintshop
Pro, and I had it, for a time.

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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
PSP was one of the few products that made Windows productive. It loaded
quickly, worked smoothly, and the UI was elegant in a way that the PS UI still
isn't.

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.

~~~
GlennS
Another piece of software that I thought made Windows productive in the 90s
was Microsoft Publisher.

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.

~~~
WorldMaker
I thought Home Publishing was just a bundle of Publisher and Works? That seems
to be what searches turn up. They truly killed Works (which was crap), but
Publisher still exists in zombie form.

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.

------
walterbell
Corel was owned by PE (Vector) and had already been navigated around the
private-public-private circuit, evidenced by $300MM of dividends paid out
prior to this $1B sale.

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.

~~~
SyneRyder
The Parallels acquisition is part of what worries me. Having switched back to
Windows, I can't find any VM software that runs as well as Parallels did
(VMware is awful in comparison). I'd hoped that Corel's reason for purchasing
is that they'd seen potential growth in making a PC version of Parallels. But
if Corel has been sold, maybe the Parallels deal was just to juice their
numbers for the sale.

------
EnderMB
My dad was a D&T teacher (woodwork, electronics, that kind of stuff), but had
a background in carpentry and construction.

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.

~~~
alxlaz
A few years ago I asked my dad about this same phenomenon:

> 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.

~~~
jeremyjh
Tools like this can't be dumbed down, either. They need to expose hundreds of
features, not because everyone uses every feature, but because everyone uses a
different subset and finds them critical. Its really hard to make a tool like
that really user friendly, its simply expert level software.

~~~
derefr
I would note that Photoshop has had, for about a decade now, a set of
“configuration pre-sets” (I forget the exact term) under the Window menu.
These allow you to, in a single click, turn off all the menus and palettes
except those relevant to the subfield you’re working in.

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.

------
Stratoscope
I used to love PaintShop Pro. I even used it when I worked at Adobe back
around 2002. Of course my manager freaked out when he saw me using it: "But...
You work for Adobe!"

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%
    

Never heard back on this one or saw them in the product, so I kept re-entering
them every time I upgraded. Maybe I won't bother upgrading again, so I won't
have to mess with it. That seems like the easiest solution.

~~~
alt_f4
PSP was never really a Corel product, it was a Jasc Software product which
they acquired when they bought the company. Corel initially promised to
maintain the Jasc office in Minnesota, where all of the development was being
done. Eventually, just 3 years later, they closed down the office and fired
most people. That essentially gutted the culture and destroyed any chance that
PSP would ever be as successful as it was in the early 2000s.

~~~
Stratoscope
Ah yes, thank you for bringing back bad memories! ;-)

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.

------
Razengan
I still remember the joy of receiving my first app on CD – CorelDRAW 5 I think
– and discovering it required Windows 95, and then upgrading from 3.11 just to
use that app..

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...

~~~
wyoung2
I also found Bézier curve drawing more straightforward in CorelDRAW! than in
Illustrator. I made the shift so long ago that I can’t remember the specifics,
but the main difference was that Corel let you more easily switch among the
modes for a point: cusp vs. smooth, split handles vs. symmetric, move mode vs.
draw mode, etc.

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.

~~~
nasalgoat
For people who are used to the Corel method, Inkscape works almost exactly the
same.

I personally could never get used to the Illustrator way.

------
vmurthy
It's interesting to view acquisitions of _software_ companies by firms like
KKR. They're after all the guys who bought RJR Nabisco [1] My money is on them
ruthlessly cutting costs, laying off engineers and basically milking the cow
for all its worth. It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but
clearly the management at Corel saw value in the deal.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJR_Nabisco#After_the_KKR_buyout)

~~~
rtpg
> It's kind of sad from an innovation point of view but clearly the management
> at Corel saw value in the deal.

Of course they did, leveraged buyouts usually include huge payouts for those
signing off on the deal.

------
mark-r
I worked for a company that was bought out by Corel. They assured us at the
time that everything was great, but the first wave of layoffs came 3 months
later. History may never repeat itself, but it rhymes.

~~~
notTyler
I'm starting to think these huge valuations and buyout prices are basically
ensuring this will happen. Is Corel really gonna generate a billion dollars in
profit for this company when free cloud-based alternatives exist to almost all
of it's products?

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riffraff
My first Linux distribution was Corel Linux, which few people know about.

I wonder what might have happened if they had pushed on that track.

I'm actually surprised to find out Corel still exists.

~~~
starsinspace
I also bought and used Corel Linux when it first came out.

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.

~~~
tombert
> even today many people in the Linux world are opposed to the idea of GUIs
> and user-friendly software

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.

------
ChuckMcM
I'm oddly attracted to quirky software, I've been a Corel Draw Suite user
since version 3. My wife loves Wordperfect. So generally this reads like good
news, software diversity wise, but KKR is no doubt going to look at some sort
of 'pay us annually or it will stop working' scheme which would likely force
me to never upgrade again.

~~~
jacobolus
> _reads like good news_

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.

------
jedberg
When I first saw this I assumed this must be a different Corel than the one
who made some of my favorite programs of the 1980s. I was surprised they were
still around! I haven't seen a Corel product in the wild for years.

~~~
kozak
I guess it's indeed a completely different Corel by now.

------
Jerry2
So, what will KKR have to do to Corel to flip it? How will they improve
revenues?

~~~
aswanson
They won't, unless they've identified a bigger sucker than they are. Private
equity & software innovation don't mix.

~~~
whymauri
KKR salvaged GoDaddy from shuttering completely and turned it profitable for
the first time in its history. Sometimes it works.

~~~
aswanson
I dont think GoDaddy survived by KKR hiring a top notch engineering staff and
knowing what direction to take the technology in. They probably did some
spreadsheet magic with debt and tricked some fools into thinking that was a
value add.

------
johnvanommen
Back in the 90s, RAM was incredibly expensive. Corel introduced a product
called "Corel Xara", which operated a lot like "Corel Draw" but it was just
massively faster.

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.

~~~
open-source-ux
Xara (the vector illustration program) has its origins in RiscOS on the Acorn
computer platform. Xara (the company) then build a version for Windows where
it was much faster than both Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Corel licensed
Xara as you said, but after a few years Xara (the company) ended the licensing
agreement with Corel and started selling the software again themselves. Xara
is now part of the Magix portfolio of products.

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?

~~~
johnvanommen
Interesting, I did not know that!

In the 90s, Xara was a revelation, particularly on budget hardware.

------
Daub
Corel draw is still used a lot in India and through SE Asia. As it offers an
integrated vector/bitmap/desktop publishing package, it is seen as value for
money.

------
thrwy4obvsrzn
> There are no layoffs planned as part of the deal

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.

~~~
kevin_b_er
Also loading it down with "debt" in the form of obligations to pay KKR lots of
money, then selling that debt back to the public.

------
vkaku
I was actually happy about Corel, until this happened. I predict massive
management interference. I seriously hope they don't go the Adobe way.

------
microwavecamera
[http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685](http://thedoghousediaries.com/4685)

------
paxys
I have used so much Corel software in my life. Crazy to think that it was once
what Adobe and Microsoft are today.

------
meerita
Here an old CorelDRAW! user since 0.8 version. Pioneer company but I lost them
once I moved to Macintosh + Adobe.

------
CriticalCathed
People still use wordperfect. Legal profession really likes it.

I truly do not understand why having used both.

~~~
seem_2211
I've heard that the legal profession have to use Corel for certain documents.

------
preommr
I am curious about what will happen to gravit designer which was recently
bought by corel.

------
person_of_color
As an aside, anyone ever transitioned from IC SWE to private equity without an
MBA?

~~~
csa
Knowing people in the PE industry will help tremendously in that effort.

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.

~~~
person_of_color
Are you in PE?

~~~
csa
I am not in PE, but I have several friends and professional acquaintances who
are.

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.

------
chrisparton1991
When I skimmed over the title, I thought it said "KKK has acquired Corel".
That was going to be one of the more interesting reads for the day!

