Well here is an article regarding someon ewho actually works there:
Friday 20 June 1997
Eid's up to new challenge
Daunting task nothing new for Corel
Computer president
Joanne Chianello
The Ottawa Citizen
Eid E. Eid is already a
well-known name in the
computer industry, but after
moving Corel Computer
Corp. into their new offices
this weekend, the general
public will become much
more familiar with it, too.
Initially people will be
confused. Most are when
they first encounter Eid Eid.
Over the years, banks have
changed his name to Eid
Reid, an IBM Corp.
executive thought his name
was a hoax, and on conference calls, he is asked to spell his first and last
names repeatedly.
A common enough Christian Lebanese name meaning "fiesta" or "holiday,"
Mr. Eid is named after his great-grandfather, although officially his name is
Maurice, but that's another story.
And no, he says patiently, his middle name is not Eid, but Elias, his father's
namesake.
Mr. Eid will be telling that story a lot from now on as media and investors
turn up the attention on the new computer firm and its president.
Corel Corp. president and chief executive Michael Cowpland recently
named the 40-year-old Mr. Eid head of the company's first spin-off, Corel
Computer. Tomorrow, about 70 employees will be moved out of the
golden tower on Carling Avenue to their new home at 150 Isabella Street.
They are charged with developing a network computer, which will
incorporate Corel's desktop video-conferencing technology and run on the
latest, greatest computer language, Java.
All this is scheduled to be accomplished by the fall, when the new product
should be available for $700 U.S.
After overseeing the engineering of Corel's numerous software products,
including major programs like WordPerfect and Draw, creating and selling
hardware products seemed like an easier, more focussed undertaking.
"At first, it was a bit of a relief," says Mr. Eid. "It looked like a smaller job.
But not anymore. Starting up a company is not a small or easy task. When
Corel bought WordPerfect, for months I couldn't sleep. How am I going to
manage now?"
But Mr. Eid has managed quite well his entire life, despite some rather
daunting obstacles.
As a child growing up in Lebanon, he showed an early interest in things
technical. Using French-language manuals and trade magazines, he made his
own remote-control car and built a simple walkie-talkie.
"That was my passion because we didn't have many toys," says Mr. Eid,
although his family wasn't poor. His father helped dig much-needed water
wells, some of the time in Saudi Arabia where the hard work was relatively
well-rewarded.
Naturally, Mr. Eid concentrated on math and science in high school. But
when civil war broke out between the Christians and Muslims in Beirut in
1976, it was impossible for him to go to university. Then 19, he wanted to
join his friends who were fighting and dying in the war, but his family
virtually forced him to go to France.
"One has the guilt of escaping, of saving one's own skin," he says.
In Bordeaux, he studied science for two years before entering the
engineering program at l'Ecole Superieur d'Informatique Electronique et
Automatique in Paris. Armed with a master's degree in electrical
engineering, he worked at a French telecommunications company that
inexpensively delivered information, like weather reports or train schedules,
via phone lines to homes through a terminal that displayed text.
His time there proved to Mr. Eid what a university professor had once told
him: no matter what the IBMs and the Hewlett-Packards of the world are
building, what is important is the network, not the raw power of the
machine.
More than 10 years later, Mr. Eid would be building computers that would
concentrate on the network more than any other computer before it.
In 1985, he joined his brother in prosperous Canada.
"I didn't speak English at all," remembers Mr. Eid. "I took a crash course of
100 hours in six months while I was waiting for my visa to arrive."
Although it wasn't easy, especially learning technical terms he needed to
obtain an engineering job here, Mr. Eid never really doubted his success.
"For me, nothing is unfeasible. When you want something, you can do it."
A few months after landing in Canada, Mr. Eid got a job with Denzil
Doyle's InstanTel, which built specialized devices for the mining industry. In
what is typical for Ottawa's tight technology circle, he was hired by Paul
Skillen, the man who would eventually replace Mr. Eid as head of
engineering at Corel.
In 1986, Mr. Eid and Mr. Skillen started their own company, Pixilar
Imaging Systems Corp. They helped design hardware and software for
Atomic Energy of Canada, but their claim to fame -- and their downfall --
was a project called Visi.
Visi was an advanced photo-editing system that hairdressers could use to
show clients what they would look like with certain haircuts.
The project was a bust. They sold one system to Japanese client. Coiffures
usually can't afford expensive high-tech equipment -- it cost $15,000 -- and
Pixilar couldn't get a cent of financing in town.
"I learned the first lesson of marketing: Don't expect the market to be there
when the product is," says Mr. Eid.
By 1989, Pixilar was wound down and Mr. Eid, who was already doing
some consulting for Corel, was able to get more contract work with the
software company. He helped develop mathematical equations needed for
the graphic software program, Draw 2.
Corel soon hired Mr. Eid full time, and he rose through the ranks. He
became the project leader for PhotoPaint, a photo-editing program with
some similarities to his own Visi, and by 1993 was the director of graphics
software for Corel. With the company's 1996 purchase of Orem,
Utah-based WordPerfect from Novell Inc., Mr. Eid became the
vice-president of technology.
Corel's Pat Beirne, engineering chief and guru, says that his ability to work
well with "old blue eyes" played a major role in his decision to work at
Corel Computer.
"He's like Cowpland in that he's touched hardware and software,"says Mr.
Beirne who has worked with Mr. Eid since the late 1980s. "Not many
people can straddle both. That's important if you're going to be given a
multimillion-dollar company to run."
Of course, it isn't a huge company yet, but the potential is there.
The network computer is a desktop device that looks like a traditional
personal computer but, in most cases, doesn't have a hard drive or a disk
drive. The NC, as it is quickly being known, accesses software applications
such as word-processing from the network server. Because few software
programs are actually stored on the individual machines, the NC is much
easier and cheaper for companies to manage that the PC system.
U.S research companies are forecasting 78 million NCs will be shipping
annually by the year 2000. And the Gartner Group expects that by 1999,
85 per cent of of all desktop computers will be able to handle
video-conferencing.
Corel Computer plans to be at the front of both those trends, despite being
up against major competitors IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Sun
Microsystems.
Mr. Eid will certainly have the energy necessary to make a go of the new
company. His longtime colleague, Mr. Skillen, describes the president as "a
highly technical, extremely bright engineer who is full of energy."
He's also known as a night owl. Mr. Skillen says that Corel engineers joke
that if they wanted to talk with Mr. Eid, they should eat dinner first. Indeed,
Mr. Eid schedules in-house meetings after 5 p.m. when the day's activities
die down. He rarely gets home before 9 p.m., let alone in time to have
dinner with his wife, Mary, or his two children.
"My wife and kids complain all the time, but they understand," he says. "If I
rush home, I can put the kids in bed and maybe read them a little story. I
don't do it on purpose. Every time I promise myself I'll be home by 7,
there's always something urgent. God bless the cell phone."
Mr. Eid does manage to squeeze in a game of tennis once or twice a week
at the Rideau Tennis and Squash Club, where Corel employees have
corporate-paid memberships. When asked what he does to relax, he gives
a common enough answer -- he reads. However, when pressed, he admits
that the last non-work-related book he read was on astrophysics. On
occasion, he flips through some mythology or philosophy.
But being energetic and technically astute aren't enough to head up an entire
company.
"He has an entrepreneurial background and he's good as a manager," says
Mr. Skillen. "He's been one of the front-line troops, he knows how
everyone feels and he uses that. He also has good people skills.
"He can be quite charming when he wants to be." |
