Well, we could be back to the channel stuffing scenario as Assad suggested. Corel will incorrectly assume revenues are going to grow substantially which has never proven correct. They always falter badly. With superior StarOffice being given away for free, it's not looking good. That leads one to ask: why didn't Sun strike a deal with dirt-cheap Corel when they had the chance? I think it's because they didn't want 80's bloatware and they also didn't trust Cowpland as he tried to blame Sun for their own incompetent development of a Java product.
Cowpland commented last summer that the stock would go up in November. Those were not the words of a competent CEO in any company I know. Commenting on revenues is bad enough but to issue stock price movement predictions in a given four week period, eight weeks in advance? Does Mike drink? I remember he told everybody that the investigation into his trading practices was routine and nothing would come of it. Another example of inappropriate commentary from the CEO and it may have actually ensured that he got nailed.
Now what? Well, there are gillions of Linux distributions out there and Cowpland is talking like Corel is doing more than stripping it down and slapping it on a CD-ROM. Sorry, that's all they are doing and you can get more and better distributions for free. Furthermore, he made a very bad mistake in speaking about and even, seemingly, for Redhat.
Redhat is not focused solely on the server; they are aiming to dominate the desktop, too.
Cowpland was talking through his own hat about redhat. That's the sort of irresponsible chatter that causes CFOs to resign. Guess what folks? Redhat is pushing StarOffice and the CEO of RH publicly dis'd Corel's office products! Gee, it looks like Mike bungled that WP on Linux opportunity of a lifetime! Well, to be fair that warmed-over 80's bloatware isn't going anywhere, no matter who's championing it. |
